They did not lead to rising wages, as we might expect from our market-based frame of reference. In fact, Agrarian states leaned heavily on symbolism in place of real functionality. Law decrees were often meant to encourage people to settle their own disputes; public works symboli- cally displayed the power and authority of the ruler.
Thus, Agrarian states were forced to rely on the operation of social organiza- tions that continued to exist beneath the state, including families, religious associa- tions, guilds, and so forth. And ulti- mately, all Agrarian states had both inadequate policing and legal systems and very high levels of daily violence by modern standards. Because the balance between state power and the power of other forms of social organization was delicate, and because elites aimed above all at keeping themselves in power, Agrarian Era state- level hierarchies were built to resist change.
As social animals who see the world in terms of symbolism and metaphor, humans inevitably live in com- munities that generate collective understandings of the world. Aggregate or com- munal cultures become powerful, indeed central, elements in the cultural identity of the individuals in the community. We must be careful not to think of these cul- tures as static or as having an existence independent of the people whose individual perceptions add up to the collective.
Cultures are always under construction and reconstruction as the individuals in a community interpret—and contest the inter- pretations of—new events, discoveries, and so forth. Furthermore, there are always divisions, or subcultures, within cultures and further subdivisions of subcultures. Nor are cultures exclusive. Individuals can think of themselves as belonging to dif- ferent groups depending on the context. No such imagined group is any more real than any other, and many may overlap.
Thus, as long as we bear in mind the collective, contested, and constantly reconstructed nature of cultures, and as long as we pick Morillo-V2-FM. Every society, no matter what its size or com- plexity, makes claims about the meaning of the universe and about its own identity.
These are the images projected onto a cultural screen. The obvious one is the cultural screen itself. This is where contested issues—debates between different schools of thought, competing reli- gious faiths, or political philosophies and factions—all show up. The multiplicity of issues and the emphasis on debates here are the reminders that no culture is monolithic.
The less obvious but more important element is the cultural frame. This frame shapes not only the debates within it, but also ideas that might come from the outside world onto the screen. The same will tend to happen to the ideas of members of the community who fail to accept the boundaries of the cultural frame. Depending on the culture, those with such ideas may face unpleas- ant consequences. We will see many examples of these sorts of cultural dynamics throughout this book, but an immediate example of the difference between the screen and the frame can be drawn from modern US politics.
Democrats and Re- publicans argue about many issues, such as environmental policy or how to run a solvent retirement scheme. Those issues show up on the US screen. But they happen within a frame that assumes that elections and constitutional rules are the proper way to run politics. Two developments differentiate the structures of culture in state-level societies from those up through chiefdoms.
First, the realm of input into the cultural screen is even more restricted than in chiefdoms. Above the line of the Divide, the elites of a society tended to speak and, crucially, write a single language that acted as a marker of elite status. This was often therefore an archaic language imbued with the prestige of antiquity and prior achievement. Input into the cultural frame and the screen reflect the emergence of the Great Cultural Divide, itself a reflection of the fundamental division of such societies into elites and non-elites.
And given slow communi- cations, oral cultures inevitably were also localistic, with dialects constantly diverg- ing, making non-elite culture multicultural to at least some extent. Rising Population, Growing Complexity The presentation so far of the elements of our model has emphasized elements that stayed the same across time.
But a steady trend is embedded in the different parts of the model. As population rose rapidly in the High Hunter-Gatherer Era and the Early Agrarian, more slowly at other times , the complexity of each element of the model tended to increase as well.
The different models of hierarchy show this explicitly. States developed last, but once on the his- torical stage they began slowly to spread at the expense of all other forms of hierarchy. Networks, too, became more complex. Cities arose, dense local networks devel- oped. Finally, the complexity and sophistication of cultural frame values and screen images increased over time as well. Axial Age inquiries into the nature of the cosmos, the foundations of social order, and individual ethical action are a clear in- stance of this.
We noted earlier that both Axial Age developments and the rise of the salvation religions provided rulers with better technologies of social control, another way of measuring the growing complexity of cultural frames and screens.
Hierarchies and Other Hierarchies Aside from rising complexity, we can discern several other patterns and trends in the interactions of hierarchies with other hierarchies. Grabbing new agricultural territory was virtually the only option. Warfare that crossed cultural boundaries could be especially dangerous. Intracultural warfare, war that pitted foes who shared a common cultural understanding of war, was more predictable and thus often more limited. Wars that crossed cultural bound- aries came in two types.
Intercultural warfare happened when two cultures met with no previous understanding of the other. No rules created largely pragmatic re- sponses on both sides; these could be unpredictable and less limited than intracul- tural warfare. But intercultural enemies tended to come to know each other and to acculturate, leading back to intracultural war or to subcultural warfare.
Subcultural warfare happened when two subcultures of a larger culture fought. The Nomad-Sedentary Cycle One of the most important cultural divides in the Agrarian Era was between settled, agriculturally based sedentary societies on the one hand and nomadic, pastoralist soci- eties which depended on domesticated animals but not plants on the other.
The pas- toralists of the central Asian steppes, who domesticated horses and therefore were able to deploy armies of skilled horse archers, were the most important pastoralists in the world. Their interactions with their sedentary neighbors followed a cyclical pattern.
Nomadic tribes who lived nearest to sedentary societies usually established regular trade contacts. But their potential military advantage over sedentary armies, combined with their disadvantageous trade position—nomads needed sedentary products more Morillo-V2-FM. Regular trade, raid, and tribute had two effects on nomadic society. First, the nomads absorbed some of the cultural values of their sedentary neighbors, often in terms of political ideology.
Second, since the tribal leader of a successful raiding tribe could use the goods he col- lected to build up his following by giving it away the same rules applied on the steppes as in settled hierarchies, in this case , he could build a larger, more dangerous coalition and raise himself to the level of a major chief. At this point, the powerful nomadic chief could be tempted to solidify his access to the goods produced by the sedentary society by conquering it.
The conqueror, now with the resources of both nomadic and sedentary worlds at his disposal, could reinvigorate and expand the society he had conquered. But the fundamental incompatibility of the pastoralist and agricultural economies and the continuing cultural mistrust that incompatibility generated meant that, usually within a generation, the united worlds would split again, and the cycle would restart.
The cycle is illustrated in Figure S. This cycle never exactly repeated itself and the model is an idealization of his- torical relations that were always complicated in detail because each iteration of the cycle created new cultural combinations and innovations. Syncretism, the mixing of beliefs and cultures, was in fact one major result of the operation of the cycle. The other was that over the long term, the area under the control of the sedentary soci- eties gradually expanded, mostly because of the demographic advantage that seden- tary societies accumulated over pastoralists, since agriculture could support far more people than herding.
The Intersection of Networks and Hierarchies The most important theme of this book is generated by the interaction of the sepa- rate elements of our model. That theme is that the intersection of networks and hierarchies was a tense and creative meeting place that generated many of the most important developments in world history. Networks and hierarchies coexisted: every human community had both its own internal organization as well as connections to other communities.
In other words, networks and hierarchies inevitably intersected. A brief comparison of the fundamental characteristics of each type of structure reveals this tension. Networks were horizontal structures. That is, they connected separate commu- nities or societies without necessarily placing one over the other.
This is because they were also cooperative. It is clearest in the case of the economic aspect of network Morillo-V2-FM. The cycle of nomadic-sedentary interaction. Rise of a nomadic coalition. The full cycle summarized. They were extensive, connecting communities that could be widely separated geographically and politically.
Finally, they were focused on urban centers. The tentacles of trade and cultural exchange of course reached into the countryside of farming villages and pastoral lands, but the great centers of exchange tended to be cities. Hierarchies, on the other hand, were vertical structures, as the name implies. The essence of a hierarchy was the ranking of social groups above and below each other. This is because they were coercive structures especially complex hierarchies , which is another way of saying that they were political rather than economic.
That is, it made cooperation work in an unequal environment. Hierarchies were intensive. Finally, hierarchies were based in rural production. They might have urban centers, and indeed cities were central to most though not all state-level societies.
But the role of cities as centers of exchange in networks differed from the role of cities as centers of the concentration of power and of people who wielded power. There were synergies between networks and hierarchies. Network wealth could be tapped by hierarchy builders. But as a result of their fundamental differences, networks and hierarchies coexisted uneasily. The tense intersection of networks and hierarchies was mediated by cultural mecha- nisms, that is, by the manipulation of cultural screen images by people in both net- works and hierarchies.
Three types of people operated across the intersections of networks and hierarchies and created such images. Wise practitioners were the mer- chants and other sorts of people who made a living from operating within networks. Worldly travelers crossed between networks and hierarchies and made a living telling stories about each. The Merchant Dilemma The most important symptom of the tense intersection of networks and hierarchies was the merchant dilemma.
The movement not just of goods but of people and ideas accounts for many of the tensions created by the intersection of networks and hierarchies.
Hierarchies in the Agrarian Era, again, were built for stability. And yet the goods and even ideas that merchants could bring into a hierarchy, especially if they were rare and exotic, offered a way for elites with exclusive access to them to further Morillo-V2-FM. This contradiction most often expressed itself in elite attitudes toward merchants. The goods that merchants carried might be highly valued. But merchants themselves domestic as well as for- eign were widely mistrusted by Agrarian elites.
Management took three common forms. Merchants often found themselves restricted to certain quarters of major cities, both in their own hierarchies and especially when they traveled to major foreign trade cities. The second was regulation. Third and most common was co-opting.
Elite-dominated cultural frames channeled or neutralized the potential threat posed by merchant activity by causing merchants to buy into those same elite values. We can model three main spheres of maritime activity as a set of overlapping circles representing the types of people who worked on the water or made use of the expertise of sailors and navigators: navies, pirates, and merchants see Figure S.
The circles overlap because boundaries were not hard and fast between these types. Merchants and pirates, traders and raiders, although apparently and often in reality at odds, were often the same people, whose quest for wealth took different forms depending on opportunities. We can also view these three spheres in terms of three different dichotomies or oppositions that set one maritime type against the other two.
States and their navies were expressions of hierarchy, whereas merchants and pirates were essentially network phenomena. Among merchants, networks of trust took formal shape in partnerships and other ways of raising capital, sharing and spreading risk, and connecting markets.
That sort of activity, especially between about and , tended to coalesce around two very different models of organization: navies of imperial defense; and the activity of predatory sea peoples. Taxes on trade often funded such navies. Ships and experienced sailors moved from the subsistence and mercantile spheres of maritime activity to the military sphere via government direc- tion or appropriation. Such navies were often technologically advanced and well adapted to the particular marine geographies where they operated.
Finally, such navies tried, generally, to sink enemy ships, a task for which their technology was also well developed. But this was not a common model because such navies were expen- sive and because not many large empires faced naval threats or cared much about policing the seas. Indeed, naval warfare was essentially amphibious down through Sort order. Munkhtulga Ganbat rated it it was amazing Jul 23, Apr 18, Erin rated it did not like it.
At this point, aren't we all aware that the words "globally organized" means "we threw these chapters in a blender and gave you what it spat out"? Wanda Ortiz cancel rated it it was amazing Dec 22, Orion rated it really liked it Dec 04, Amanda Ivany rated it liked it Jun 29, Whatefgver rated it it was amazing Jan 25, Donald Broussard rated it liked it Jun 05, Sarah rated it liked it May 16, Larissa rated it it was ok Dec 08, Caelesis rated it liked it Sep 19, Sarah rated it it was amazing Jul 07, Brandon Harper marked it as to-read May 20, Daniela marked it as to-read Jan 25, Crystal Johnson marked it as to-read Feb 02, Ethan marked it as to-read May 16, Michael Ruiz marked it as to-read Aug 26, Aminadab Feliz marked it as to-read Sep 28, With the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, European cities entered into a long period of waning and deterioration.
But elsewhere, great cities-among them, Constantinople, Baghdad, Chang'an, and Tenochtitlan-thrived. This urban growth also accelerated in parts of the world that came under European control, such as Philadelphia in the nascent United States. As the Industrial Revolution swept through in the nineteenth century, cities grew rapidly. Their expansion resulted in a slew of social problems and political disruptions, but it was accompanied by impressive measures designed to improve urban life.
Meanwhile, colonial cities bore the imprint of European imperialism. Finally, the book turns to the years since , guided by a few themes: the impact of war and revolution; urban reconstruction after ; migration out of many cities in the United States into growing suburbs; and the explosive growth of "megacities" in the developing world.
Skip to content. Patterns of World History. Author : Peter von Sivers,Charles A. Desnoyers,George B. Patterns of World History Book Review:. Patterns of World History with Sources. Sources in Patterns of World History Since Author : Candace R. Mapping Patterns of World History. World History. Author : Burton F. World History Book Review:. Sources in Patterns of World History To The Frameworks model of networks, hierarchies, and cultural frames and screens is one such model, and the text makes the model explicit so that you can examine it, determine whether you agree with it, and use it to interpret the evidence in this book.
You can also invert the use of the evidence and the model by using the evidence to test and refine the Frameworks model. First, what is a primary source? Second, how do you go about interpreting a primary source? Historians generally talk about two kinds of sources, primary sources and secondary sources. In the most basic terms, primary sources are sources from the time, place, and people under investigation. We can even consider him a primary source for aspects of the First Crusade, even though he did not witness it personally, xi Morillo-FM-V1.
This definition of a primary source is idealized, of course. Things are not always simple or straightforward. Sometimes we accept certain accounts as primary sources because they are as close to the time period as we can get.
Our sources for the life of Alexander the Great include only a handful of truly primary sources: a brief inscription that mentions him in passing, a handful of coins he issued, and the archaeological remains of his activities, including cities and, in one spectacular case, a coastline that he altered.
He built a causeway out into the Mediterranean during his siege of the island city of Tyre in BCE. It remained after the siege, silted up, and the island is now a peninsula. Anything from the time and place we are studying can be a pri- mary source: works of art, archaeological finds, scientific data about the natural world the natural world being, after all, an aspect of a time and place , and so forth. Even written evi- dence comes in many forms beyond self-conscious narratives. Government documents, fic- tional writing, daily newspapers, and mundane bits of writing such as grocery lists or restau- rant menus—all of these can be primary sources.
However, this would not a primary source in terms of types of historical sources nor would using primarily that source be a very good idea. What then is a secondary source, if so many things can count as primary sources? Secondary sources are sources that discuss the topic, the time, place, and people under study, but on the basis of primary sources or of other second-hand accounts. And of course, like primary sources, not all secondary sources are created equal.
Not so much. In that case you gain the possibility of oral interviews, news footage, and so forth, as primary sources. Primary sources are sources whose information about a topic comes, as closely as possible, from the time, place, and participants in the topic. For most purposes, that will work for you. But this definition says nothing about the quality of the in- formation a source offers.
To evaluate that, we need to say a few things about how to read and evaluate a primary source. The interpretation of some primary sources, such as the archaeological remnants of buildings and, even more, an- cient bones and other natural substances, requires at least some specialized knowledge.
We will focus here on the most common kinds of sources selected for inclusion in this book, written documents.
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