Introduction he Prospect of Global History
James Belich, John Darwin, and Chris Wickham
APPROACHES
Global history may be boundless, but global historians are not. Global history cannot usefully mean the history of everything, everywhere, all the time. here are various ways of usefully focussing the global approach, and the eminent contributors assembled in this volume innovatively deploy some of them. Here, the editors focus on three approaches that seem to us to have real promise. One is global history as the pursuit of signiicant historical problems across time, space, and specialism. his can sometimes be characterized as ‘comparative’ history, but it can be seen diferently as well; it seeks answers to the same question in multiple sites. It is, of course, no easy art, and is discussed in the second section of this Introduction. Another is connectedness, including transnational relationships; these will be discussed in the third section. he third approach is the study of globalization, with which we begin. Globalization is a term that needs to be rescued from the present, and salvaged for the past. To deine it as always encompassing the whole planet is to mistake the current outcome for a very ancient process.
GLOBALIZATION
Globalizing can be seen as the formation of trans-regional entities, extending beyond any single culture or polity, a process that began many millennia ago. Some simple typologies measuring the space, intensity, and vectors of globalization, may be useful. Globalization connected three categories of space: sub-global, semiglobal, and pan-global. here have been only two cases of the last: the original spread of homo sapiens to all six habitable continents, and modern globalization, even if current scholarship unhelpfully dates this to 1492, 1800, the 1940s, and the 1970s. he ‘semi-global’ category stretches across a whole hemisphere. One remarkable example is the spread of Austronesian or ‘Malayo-Polynesian’ cultures, which in and around the irst millennium ad spanned the whole Paciic and Indian Oceans, reaching East Africa and very probably the Americas. Another is the Arctic ‘world system’, circling the north of the planet, with specialized bio-technologies,
James Belich, John Darwin, and Chris Wickham
ranging from domesticated reindeer and sled dogs to ice houses, toggle harpoons, and whale-hunting umiak boats. In the early centuries of the second millennium ad, a suite of these technologies enabled the hule Inuit to migrate from Siberia to Greenland, via Canada, displacing the Paleo-Eskimo, Amerindian, and European (Viking) cultures that stood in their way. A third example, on which we concentrate below, is the semi-global system that stretched across Afro-Eurasia, the ‘Old World’, from the fourth millennium bc.
he sub-global category has sneaked into common usage in the form of subglobal ‘worlds’ as in ‘Atlantic World’, or ‘Arab World’. Such worlds can emerge through the meshing of smaller systems, or can spin of a single mega-empire, but stretch beyond it in time and space. Japan and Ireland were part of Chinese and Roman worlds, but not empires. Hellenic and Mongol worlds survived the fragmentation of the relevant empires.
Europe was not a sub-global world in itself, but part of one. Its world also included the Middle East and North Africa. his macro-region’s natural unity stemmed not from similar climate or terrain, but from shared boundaries of ocean, steppe, and desert, and a shared internal mix of land and water. It featured an unusual number of inland seas, enclosed or semi-closed by land. Historians have brilliantly demonstrated how the great Mediterranean linked its littorals and their histories.1 But we have neglected the possibility that other seas did likewise, and that a whole constellation of seas could be connected. he Mediterranean was the lagship of a leet that also included the Red, Black, Caspian, North and Baltic Seas, the Persian Gulf, and the Bay of Biscay. Straits connected the Baltic and North Seas, and also connected the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea. Rivers link, or almost link, the other seas. Interestingly, this ‘world’ has no accepted name— West Eurasia, though unfair to North Africa, is the best of a bad job. Whatever its name, it means that Europe is the wrong space in which to understand its own history.
he advent of sea-going boats, about ten thousand years ago, and the domestication of horses and camels, four or ive thousand years ago, activated West Eurasia’s connective potential, and while great diferences persisted, some common history emerged. he whole region shared the Neolithic Levantine package of domesticated biota, the spread of Indo-European and Semitic languages, and the inluence of the ancient Fertile Crescent civilizations. From 500 bc it also shared the inluence of a series of tri-continental empires, each of which claimed the legacies of its predecessors: Persian, Hellenic, Roman, Arab, and Turkish. One can almost imagine a Chinese-style situation in which these were seen as successive dynasties of the same empire. A propensity to monotheism was a West Eurasian peculiarity: the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to which one could
1 Fernand Braudel, he Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 3 vols. trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, he Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); David Abulaia, he Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Cyprian Broodbank, he Making of the Middle Sea (London: hames and Hudson, 2013).
he Prospect of Global History 5 arguably add Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. Finally, the ‘One-God’ world shared two great plague pandemics, further proof of its cohesion.2
his West Eurasian world was Europe’s sub-global context; its semi-global context also included the Chinese, Indian Ocean, and steppe nomad ‘worlds’— together the four ‘Old Worlds’. To measure the intensity of connection within and between these worlds, we need our second typology. Mere contact is occasional and indirect, though it can be important in transferring biota and techniques. he second category, interaction, involves regular and on-going contact, exempliied by luxury trade. he next step up is circulation, exempliied by bulk trade. Finally, integration makes at least sections of a global system mutually dependent parts of a single economic or cultural whole.
he four old worlds, and the system linking them, were created by several vectors of connectivity. Here we deploy the last of our overarching typologies. Vector One is difusion, where indirect long-range links are achieved by a series of transfers from neighbour to neighbour. Vector Two is outreach, a catch-all category including trade, religious evangelism, and long-range hunting or extraction, an important but neglected sub-type. Vector hree is dispersal, long-range migrations that reproduce the source society but do not necessarily remain connected to it. Austronesian and hule migrations were of this kind, as were Bulgar and Viking conquest migrations in the late irst millennium ad. Both of the latter pair formed several powerful but far-lung and largely unconnected polities. With Vector Four, expansion, the expanding entity remains connected to its point of origin. Great empires are the classic case, but not the only one. he empires of Alexander, Mahomet, and Chingis Khan quickly fell apart, but the parts remained expansive and connected for some centuries. Classical Greek, Phoenician, and modern European expansions were never uniied into a single empire, but remained connected to their metropolis. Dispersal and expansion are the two forms of spread, in which the spreading culture dominates local folk, if any. hey can be likened to a stretched rubber band, which either breaks into fragments (dispersal) or remains intact (expansion).
A ifth globalizing technique is to globalize through attraction, bringing things and thoughts to you via intermediaries rather than going to get them yourself. Finally, nodal places, regions, cultures, or networks linked two or more expansions or outreaches. An interesting form of nodality is the neutral resource region, unpopulated but used by multiple tribes or nations who have to negotiate shared access. An ancient example is the obsidian island, from Melos in the Eastern Mediterranean to Tuhua in the New Zealand archipelago. Both names mean ‘obsidian’, and were places where tribes met and mixed. A more modern example is the Newfoundland Bank, which from the sixteenth century hosted the cod ishing leets of several European nations. Nodes are the lynchpins of globalization, and in turn depend on it (see section, ‘Connectedness’).
In this context, the question of divergence becomes something more than an international beauty contest in which the winner always looks rather like the judge.
2 See ch. 6.
James Belich, John Darwin, and ChrisWickham
If one part of a global system hits upon some development considered advantageous by the rest, they will seek to adopt it, or raid or trade for it. If the advantage facilitates dispersal or expansion, they may have little choice. Eventually the divergent advantage will disseminate to at least the urban clusters within the global system. hus divergence will lead to some convergence until another divergence arises. Convergence is not intended to imply homogenization. What converged was a growing menu of bio-technological and cultural (e.g. religious) options, mixed and matched in locally very diferent ways. Divergences could also create or expand globalized zones. Europe’s ‘great divergence’ was in fact the last of at least four stemming from the Old Worlds. One could easily add a ifth: the massive spread, through peaceful outreach, of Buddhism from India, mediated by the Kushan Empire from the irst century bc, and stretching from Japan to Samarkand, but that will not be discussed here.3
* * *
Ivory from an Asian elephant has recently been found in a Neolithic workshop in Spain, dated to 4,500 years ago,4 and cloves from Southeast Asia were reaching the Euphrates less than a thousand years later.5 hese valuables were probably transferred by difusion involving a sequence of land and sea transport. he irst clearcut divergence connecting and so creating the Old Worlds system did not come from towns or trades but from the domestication of the horse by the nomads of the Eurasian steppes. At irst, from about 4,000 years ago, horses were used in twos and threes to pull chariots: from 3,000 years ago men rode them singly using compound bows. In the second millennium bc, horse nomads conquered and migrated their way deep into West Eurasia, Northern India, and Northern China, and their technology migrated even further to enable others to stop them, so linking and converging the four old worlds. Pulses of dispersal from the steppes, such as that of the Huns in the fourth century ad continued to alict all three urbanized old worlds until the eighteenth century.
It is easy to underestimate the full historic importance of the horse-human alliance. Horses tripled human power, speed, and mobility. Equipped with Chinese horse collars, they helped revolutionize agriculture on heavy Northern European soils around 1000 ad. As late as 1850, horses supplied over half of all work energy in the United States.6 Simply as transport, they provided a huge military advantage. hey made possible long-range raiding, which reduced the risk of retaliation. hey delivered fresh troops to the battleield to face exhausted foot soldiers. When warriors learned to ight from chariots and horseback, the equestrian advantage
3 Liu Xinru, he Silk Road in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 4; Liu Xinru, ‘Silks and Religions in Eurasia, c.AD 600–1200’, Journal of World History 6, 1 (1995), pp. 25–48.
4 F. Nocete et al., ‘he Ivory Workshop of Valencina de la Concepcion (Seville, Spain) and the Identiication of Ivory from Asian Elephant on the Iberian Peninsula in the First Half of the 3rd Millennium BC’, Journal of Archaeological Science 40, 3 (2013), pp. 1579–92.
5 Richard L. Smith, Premodern Trade in World History (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 85.
6 Joel A. Tarr, ‘A Note on the Horse as an Urban Power Source’, Journal of Urban History 25, 3 (1999), pp. 434–48, pp. 435 and 445 (note 4).
multiplied. Chariots were quite a complex technology, a basket on metal-rimmed wheels weighing as little as 35 kilograms, whose horse team and charioteers required complex training. With compound bows and mass-produced cast metal arrowheads, trained archers could ire ten arrows a minute from horseback, even when retreating—the Parthian shot.
Both chariot and mounted archer bio-technologies were state-of-the-art, and sedentary states were forced to emulate them if they could. his was an enduring problem for China and India, whose ecologies did not suit the breeding of large horses. Here, sedentary states were compelled to acquire horses regularly from nomads through trade or alliance. Unlike most Sino-Indian imports, fresh horses were a necessity, not a disposable luxury. he advent of guns around 1300, in China then Europe, did not eliminate the horse archer advantage. Horse nomads would not wait around to be shot by cannon, and hand-held irearms were too short-range and cumbersome to be much of a threat to them until the later nineteenth century. Qing China crushed the last Mongol empire, that of the Zhungars in Central Asia, a century earlier, but only by a sustained, massive, and hugely expensive overland projection of force. Europeans in the Americas had to wait until the advent of repeating irearms in the 1870s to overcome the horse nomad empires of the Sioux, Comanche, and the Araucanians of the Argentine Pampas. Until then, European expansion had transferred its own antidote—horses. he horse nomads connected the old worlds, at irst through contact and dispersal, and then, with various Turkic and Mongol empires from the third century bc, through expansion and interaction. A second great divergence was anchored in China and India and based on the export of ine coloured textiles of silk and cotton. Beginning with difusion and sporadic contact before 1000 bc, it moved into regular and substantial interaction in the last centuries bc, via the Silk Road, with nomad assistance, or via a monsoon-driven maritime route centred on the Indian Ocean.7 By the early centuries ad, Chinese silk and Indian cotton had reached the Atlantic coast of West Eurasia.
Immanuel Wallerstein might deny the label ‘world system’ to this vast interaction on the grounds that it lacked an axial division of labour.8 Manuel Castells might contest the label ‘globalization’ because a shared and self-perpetuating body of information was absent.9 Yet there was a fundamental and resonant division of labour. China and India did the manufacturing, and the rest of the world paid in non-manufactures, such as spices, dyestufs, horses, furs, and, especially, bullion. And there was a complementary set of semi-globally shared and self-perpetuating information and valuations. All cultures within the system agreed that bright silks and cottons, later joined by Chinese porcelain, were the most desirable of manufactures. ‘For over a thousand years, Chinese porcelain was the most universally
7 David Christian, ‘Silk Roads or Steppe Roads? he Silk Roads in World History’, Journal ofWorld History 11, 1 (2000), pp. 1–26.
8 Immanuel Wallerstein, he Modern World-System, 3 vols (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2011).
9 Manuel Castells, he Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 3 vols, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–8).
James Belich, John Darwin, and ChrisWickham
admired and most widely imitated product in the world.’10 It was also internationally agreed that silver and gold, intrinsically the most useless of metals, were similarly valuable. From Pliny the Elder in the irst century ad, through Armenian and Ottoman commentators in the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the governors of the British East India Company in the early nineteenth century, we hear the same complaints about the one-way low of bullion from West Eurasia to China and India.11
In the debate on ‘the’ Great Divergence—of Europe from the rest of the planet— those who argue that China and India had an economic edge as late as 1800 have been accused of over-correcting the Eurocentric pendulum, even of ‘Euro-envy’, in Eric Jones’ pungent term.12 Yet the evidence of bullion lows, like the reverse low of Chinese techniques, seems impartial, and it survived 1,500 years of West Eurasian eforts at emulation. his Sino-Indian Great Divergence was not a matter of some intrinsic Asian dexterity. Rice, a highly productive super-crop, permitted dense populations and regional specialization in growing and weaving silk and cotton. Social complexity attuned textile producers to multiple and changing markets. Caste, clan, and lineage encouraged hereditary occupations in which children learned knack as well as skill. he Sino-Indian manufacturing divergence was also part of the answer to the question of why China and India did not expand overseas, though there were times when they could clearly have done so. he world came to them, bearing its valuables. hey had no need to go to it, and globalized more by attraction than expansion.
From about 500 bc, West Eurasians could regularly buy Sino-Indian luxury textiles. Within a few centuries they could weave silks and cottons themselves from imported yarn. From about 500 ad, they could farm cotton bushes, mulberry trees, and silkworms and create the whole product themselves, though not, until about 1800, to quite the Sino-Indian benchmarks in quality and price. Tiny volumes of bright luxury cloth may seem unimportant, but this is deceptive. It could be used to express anything from individuality to uniformity, as well as status. he trade itself was light, but not small. hirty square metres of ine cotton itted within a coconut shell.13 What economists would call its linkage efects was considerable—ten tons a year of silk or cotton ibre employed a thousand weavers in Genoa or Cologne. Above all, it drove emulation. he Lancashire cotton industry is widely agreed to have been crucial to English industrialization, and its main game was matching Bengal.
10 Robert Finlay, ‘he Pilgrim Art: he Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History 9, 2 (1998), pp. 141–87.
11 Richard L. Smith, Premodern Trade in World History (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 97–8; Robert Bedrosian, ‘China and the Chinese According to 5th–13th Century Classical Armenian Sources’, Armenian Review 34, 1–133 (1981), pp. 17–24; Amita Satyal, ‘he Mughal Empire, Overland Trade, and Merchants of Northern India, 1526–1707’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University of California, Berkeley, 2008).
12 Eric Jones, he European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 3rd edn (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 247.
13 Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 33.
West Eurasia probably achieved the shift from interaction to circulation around 100 bc, thanks largely to Roman expansion. he archetypal circulation was the grain trade, in which Egypt, Tunisia, and parts of the Black Sea coast fed Rome itself, its army, and eventually the second capital of Constantinople. here were other bulk trades: timber, marble, salt, wine, olive oil, and stranger trades too, notably the commerce in wild beasts, destined to be killed in arenas for the entertainment of Roman crowds. his last trade pushed out the edges of the Roman world, as Roman hunters or their agents searched for big beasts along the shores of the Baltic and deeper and deeper into Africa.14 We can document at least two postRoman periods of West Eurasian circulation corresponding to the two plague pandemics, 540s–760s and 1346–c.1800. A third, modern, pandemic, 1890s–1920s, covered much more space but killed fewer people. All three pandemics required bulk trade or circulation to spread and re-spread. Pandemics and intensifying globalization are good proxies for each other.
In the early seventh century, the third old world ‘Great Divergence’ took place: Islamic expansion. he astonishing initial conquests of the Arabs, uniied by Islam, stretching from Spain to Sind in less than a century, were matched and extended by Islam’s own equally astonishing outreach, through trade and conversion. he former reached India and China by sea in the eighth century ad; the latter voluntarily converted steppe nomads, including two Mongol khanates, and many trading partners. Muslim merchants in China were suiciently numerous and rich to provoke massacres in 760 and 878.15 But they kept coming. he famous Ming admiral Zheng He, whose great leets reached East Africa and the Red Sea in the early ifteenth century, was Muslim. Where documents are lacking, Islam’s penetration of South East Asia is mapped by the sudden disappearance of pork bones from middens.16
hough the Mongol legacy can be underestimated, Islamic expansion was more durable. he same is true of the fourth old world ‘Great Divergence’, that of Christian Europe, from 1400. As various historians have observed, Islam forced Christian expansion east and west, away from the more favoured south—the ‘Great Diversion’ of Europe. It is intriguing to note that the terrible twins of West Eurasia came from the same sub-global world and shared essentially the same god. A global approach makes it hard to see how their histories can continue to avoid each other.
14 Michael MacKinnon, ‘Supplying Exotic Animals for the Roman Amphitheatre Games: New Reconstructions Combining Archaeological, Ancient Textual and Ethnographic Data’, Mouseion III, 6 (2006), pp. 137–61; Christopher Epplett, ‘he Capture of Animals by the Roman Military’, Greece & Rome 48, 2 (2001), pp. 210–22; Fik Meijer, he Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport (London: Souvenir Press, 2004 [2003]); George Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005 [1937]).
15 Hugh R. Clark, ‘Frontier Discourse and China’s Maritime Frontier: China’s Frontiers and the Encounter with the Sea through Early Imperial History’, Journal of World History 20, 1 (2009), pp. 1–33.
16 Peter Vanderford Lape, ‘Contact and Conlict in the Banda Islands, Eastern Indonesia 11th–17th Centuries’ (unpublished PhD thesis: Brown University, 2000). See Francis Robinson, ch. 7, this volume, for further development of these points.
James Belich, John Darwin, and ChrisWickham
COMPARISONS
Kenneth Pomeranz may be right or wrong in dating ‘the’ Great Divergence, the fourth by our count, between (north-west) Europe and (central-southern) China to as late as 180017—our authors themselves disagree about that—but the message of the foregoing is a diferent one. he range of these varied divergences, as already stressed, decentres the standard ‘we-are-best’ international grand narrative which concentrates on pan-global globalization, and on the fourth divergence listed above. he teleologies of power relationships, when they are posed as always having to lead to the Western conquest of most of the known world in the century and a half after 1750, or to the Western-dominated world economy of 1870–1970, are false. Global history must extend beyond them, and beyond the issue of divergence, to such issues as the globally focussed analysis of diference which underlies comparative history, and the globally focussed analysis of connectedness which underlies transnational history. Global history-writing also does not have to be restricted to the modern or modernizing world; there have always been globally directed developments of diferent types. We will come to connectedness in a moment, but let us look here at how to analyse what distinguished the various regions of the globe which did (eventually) connect with, or diverge from, each other, at how such diferences can be compared, and at what such comparison is for. Comparison can of course be done using any number of axes; what is essential is that it is done rigorously. And we would add reciprocally, using Pomeranz’s terminology, that one side of the comparison should not be considered the ‘norm’ and the other the ‘deviation’. his point is indeed widely accepted; it underlies the several discussions of comparison in the book which most closely parallels this one, Writing the History of the Global, edited by Maxine Berg.18 It also underpins Max Weber’s still-essential discussions of ideal types, which are invented constructs developed speciically for the purpose of neutral comparison, in that diferent real societies can be usefully analysed and compared according to how they it, or fail to it, the diferent elements in an ideal type, as long as it is set up properly.19
Comparison can, however, be developed at various levels. Victor Lieberman’s massive comparative volume sets whole political systems against each other, from hailand to France, across a millennium of history up to 1800, and links state structures, economics, and culture in each as he does so. He also argues that much structural change in each of his case studies had a (very) broadly similar chronological phasing. He develops a precise argument from that similarity: that Eurasia as a whole tended to react in parallel ways to common stimuli, such as climatic shifts, and also, later, came together more and more in its development as a result
17 Kenneth Pomeranz, he Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
18 Maxine Berg (ed.), Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially the contributions by M. Berg, P. Parthasarathi, R. B. Wong, K. Sugihara, and C. Clunas.
19 Max Weber, ‘Die Objektivität sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’ (1904), in Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 2nd edn (Tübingen, 1951), pp. 146–214, esp. pp. 190–200.
of the early globalization trends discussed above.20 Alternatively, comparison can be more speciic, as in Pomeranz’s comparison, not of the whole of China, but of the lower Yangzi, with England in a single century, 1750–1850.
Similarly, at a more abstract level, Garry Runciman’s major work of historical sociology, even though it looks to the whole world and to every historical period for its typologies, focusses on separable modes of power (production, coercion, and persuasion) when he makes his comparisons, and above all on ‘the competitive selection of practices’, such as patron–client relations as opposed to mass political parties, which led individual polities in history in one socio-political direction or another.21 It must be added, and stressed, that comparison can be more focussed still: it can be restricted to individual features, which appear, in diferent contexts in each case, in a wide range of diferent societies, with the diferences between the contexts then used to unpick and explain wider diferences in development. In principle, almost anything could be used here as a way into such comparative analysis: the political role of fortiications, the training of oicials, the extent of wage labour, the elements which go together to deine political élites, the economic autonomy of religious organizations, the social role of literacy, the level of violence considered to be necessary to protect honour, the perceived immediacy of divine intervention, are all axes along which comparison could usefully be pursued in any period and across any geographical space.
Each of these levels of comparison can be defended for its usefulness; we certainly do not advocate one over another. But each contains risks. Lieberman’s style of large-scale holistic comparison runs the risk of mixing incompatible elements together, or else, by focussing on whole political systems (China rather than the lower Yangzi), of implicitly privileging the political over the economic or cultural. But non-holistic comparison carries a risk too, of failing to understand properly the exact way in which the axis of comparison chosen might allow us to understand wider economic, social, political, cultural structures in each chosen region, without which the exercise is efectively useless. hese risks need to be recognized explicitly, and constantly corrected for, in any global (or, indeed, non-global) comparison. here are other risks too: for example, failure to understand diferences in our evidence-base—in both what it makes clear or ignores, and in the constraints of its genres—from place to place. hat in itself tends to be a spin-of of the most substantial risk of all when undertaking comparative work: too great a reliance on prior work in the secondary literature. Such work will seldom have been done with a comparative eye, so will often fall into the traps which characteristically appear in non-comparative work, such as considering one’s own ield of study as normative, or else failing to confront (or even notice) the dominant grand narratives in
20 Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: South-East Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830, vol. 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); for a detailed reaction, see Alan Strathern’s review in Journal of Global History 7 (2012), pp. 129–42.
21 Walter G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social heory, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–97); for a detailed reaction, see Chris Wickham, ‘Systactic Structures’, Past and Present 132 (1991), pp. 188–203.
