The three hegemonies of the modern world-system have been the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the British in the nineteenth century and the hegemony of the United States in the twentieth century. Sociologists and political scientists have carefully studied the process of hegemonic rise and decline.Recent research by Rennstich (2001) retools Arrighi’s (1994) formulation of the organizational evolutions that have accompanied the emergence of larger and larger hegemons over the last six centuries. Modelski and Thompson (1996) argued that the British successfully managed to enjoy two “power cycles,” one in the eighteenth and another in the nineteenth centuries. With this precedent in mind Rennstich considers the possibility that the US might succeed itself in the twenty-first century. Rennstich’s analysis of the organizational, cultural and political requisites of the contemporary new lead industries – information technology and biotechnology – imply that the United States has a large comparative advantage that will most probably lead to another round of U.S. pre-eminence in the world-system. But important resistance to genetically engineered products has arisen as consumers and environmentalists worry about the unintended consequences of introducing radically new organisms into the biosphere. This paper will examine the agricultural biotechnology industry as a new lead industry and will consider its possible future impact on the distribution of power in the world-system. This will entail an examination of the loci and timing of private and publicly funded research and development, biotechnology firms that are developing and selling products, and the emergence of national and global policies that are intended to regulate and test genetically engineered products. The recent history of environmental impacts of genetically engineered products will be reviewed, as well as the contentious literature about the supposed risks of agricultural biotechnology. Several scenarios regarding the timing of the onset of biotech profitability and their potential impact on US economic centrality will be developed, and data on both the business history and the emergence of resistance will be employed to examine the likelihood of these possible scenarios.

This is a study of the growth of cities in four regions over the past 4000 years. We discuss changes in the relationship between political/military power, economic power andcity systems with special attention to the rise of European hegemony and the subsequent rise of East Asian world cities.We compare East Asian urban growth with the original heartland of cities in West Asia and North Africa, as well as Europe and the subcontinent of South Asia. This reveals the trajectories of city growth and decline and the relative importance of the different regions over time.And we reexamine the hypothesis of synchronicities of city growth and decline across distant regions as the Afro-eurasian world-system became more and more integrated.

Abstract: The world(-)systems* perspective provides a useful framework for discerning the continuities and discontinuities (emergent properties) of long historical waves of global integration (globalization) and social resistance to (capitalist) globalization.. The capitalist world(-)system has experienced long cycles of economic and political integration for centuries and these have been interspersed by periods of social resistance to capitalist globalization, in which disadvantaged, exploited and dominated groups contest the hierarchies that global capitalism and hegemonic states have constructed. In the contemporary period the intensification of capitalist globalization has been accompanied by a strengthening of social resistance and the emergence of new social movements that resist neoliberal globalization and attempt to build alternatives. Careful study of these long waves of globalization and resistance can provide us with important insights that are relevant to the task of building a more humane and democratic global commonwealth in the 21st century. Research and teaching on the role of the new social movements and the historical dialectic between globalization, resistance, and democratization should be a central aspect of the new critical Global(ization) Studies.

Abstract: World-systems are human interaction networks that display oscillations of expansion and contraction, with occasional large expansions that bring formerly separate regional systems into systemic intercourse with one another. These waves of expansion, now called globalization, have, in the last two centuries, created a single integrated intercontinental political economy in which all national societies are strongly linked. This paper investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This paper formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being. To be presented at the conference on “Nature, Raw Materials and Political Economy” held in honor of Stephen Bunker’s contribution to political ecology, Madison, November 2, 2002. Thanks to Tom Hall for helpful comments. V. 10-30-02, (7707 words) This paper is available on the web at http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows11/irows11.htm

Abstract: This paper contains an overview of earlier research on city and empire growth/decline phases and new evidence on the relationship between urban growth and the rise and fall of empires in six world regions. We find that empires and cities grow and decline together in some regions but not others. We also examine the temporal correlations between growth/decline phases of largest and second largest cities and empires within regions. Do large empires grow at the expense of other large states within a region or are there periods of regional growth in which states (and cities) are growing together?

The density and contours of networks of transnational and international economic integration are hypothesized by many theorists to be causally related to the patterns of cooperation and conflict. [1] The usual notion is that trade creates ties of symmetrical interdependence, which are likely to inhibit conflict. We seek to test this hypothesis in the 19th and early 20th century run-up to World War I. We examine the relationship between the structure of conflict and the contours of trade ties during the 19th century wave of globalization and deglobalization. How were the international trade ties related to the patterns of conflict and alliance that emerged during World War I? Germany was linked by trade, immigration and elite family connections with both Britain and the United States, and yet both World Wars I and II pitted the Germans against Britain and the U.S. But were the trade ties of Germany with its enemies large and significant relative to the total international trade, or were they insignificant elements that had little bearing on the proclivities of nation-states to fight one another? We replicate and improve upon earlier studies that used correlational analysis of nation-state dyads (e.g. Barbieri 2002) and wel also employ formal network analysis to test the earlier finding of a positive relationship between trade ties and enmity.

Abstract: Revised estimates of world GDP, population and GDP per capita published by Angus Maddison (2001) make possible a quantitative reexamination of the trajectory of the United States in world historical perspective and comparisons between the U.S. economic hegemony of the twentieth century with the Dutch hegemony of the seventeenth century and the British hegemony of the nineteenth century. We also track the trajectories of challengers to reflect on the future of hegemonic rivalry.

This paper discusses research that is designed to examine the historical trajectory of structural globalization as an attribute of the whole world-system. Did the globalized world economy arrive all at once in a rapid and recent transition from national to global economic networks? Or is the process of international integration a long-term trend that has been going up for centuries only to be noticed recently because it has reached such a high peak? Or, alternatively, is globalization a cyclical phenomenon in which the world-system alternates between periods of national autarchy followed by periods of international economic and political integration?