CHAPTER 3 PRIMARY STATE-BASED WORLD-ECONOMIES Let us turn now to early state-based world-economies. These will be defined as those primary states and their economic networks and cultural areas which existed before the emergence of conquest-based empires--empires which unified several such primary states. Archeologists refer to the formative and early florescent periods in which small states emerged and grew. Thus we are talking about Uruk and Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, Peru before the Incas, Egypt before the Old Empire, Yang Shao and Shang China, and Mexico before the empire of Teotihuacan. There may have been similarly primary state-based world-economies in other areas. There have certainly been many other instances of state-formation in regions where no state had before existed, but under the influence of empires or already existing states elsewhere. We shall have occasion to consider the topic of state formation in the peripheries of world-empires in the next section. Here we want to focus on the original or "pristine" states (Haas, 1982) and the intersocietal relations among them. Much of our focus will be on the Sumerian city-states of Southern Mesopotamia. This is because archeological evidence is supplemented by a developed writing system which produced a large corpus of surviving clay documents, and thus we are able to know much more about the institutional nature of Sumer than the other primary state areas. And also it is agreed that state formation occurred first in Southern Mesopotamia and so it could not have been influenced by other states. State-building and class formation Primary state formation was the emergence of the original partially autonomous organizations which could monopolize legitimate violence and effectively mobilize surplus product. In connection with this we must consider the development of the first class societies. We will examine the nature of exchange relations (political and economic) within and between these first states and their hinterlands. There are considerable methodological difficulties in doing this because, though the archeological evidence is greater than for less complex societies, use of ethnographic studies of contemporary analogous societies is even more hazardous. All contemporary simple states have long interacted with larger world-empires and the capitalist world-economy, and the effects of these interactions are impossible to distinguish from characteristics which might indicate the social nature of the original primary states and their world-economies. Though most of these primary states developed writing systems, the philological studies of their texts has not yet been well integrated with archeological data (Adams, 1984), and the great bulk of the surviving documents pertain to later systems in which empires had already arisen. Nevertheless we can report what archeologists, philologists and historians have inferred using the data they have available. In terms of our concern for regional and supra-regional economic patterns, the archeological area surveys which attempt to reconstruct both the urban and rural settlement patterns (Adams and Nissen, 1972; Blanton, et. al., 1981) are a definite methodological advance over the previous tendency to focus on the greatest monuments and cities. The emergence of the primary states occurred at different times in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus river valley, Mesoamerica, and Peru. Even though Southern Mesopotamia experienced this formative period earlier than other areas, diffusion has not been considered very important in explaining state formation in the other areas, especially the New World. Most archeologists believe that parallel processes of evolution caused the emergence of states in these primary areas, even though they disagree mightily about the causal structure of these processes. A number of important changes were roughly contemporaneous during the formative period in all areas. Population increased and the productivity of labor and land did also. In all areas monumental religious centers emerged, and in most areas this was accompanied by the growth of urban populations. A more complex division of labor emerged with specialized forms of agriculture, production of manfactures by specialists, and of course a hierarchical administrative structure composed of religious and military leaders. A permanent social division between rulers and ruled emerged in which aristocratic lineages composed a nobility born to rule and institutionally entitled to support by laboring masses. Cultural elaboration of artistic production, the invention of writing, law and other accoutements of civilization are observed. The formerly this-worldly religions of tribal societies in which gods, spirits and ancestors were residents of the natural world in which humans also lived, became divided into the supernatural heavenly realm of the gods, only accessible to priests, and the profane world of everyday life below. The consensual normative regulations of community behavior became overlaid by a structure of centrally codified laws. Friedman and Rowlands (1977) are the only theorists to explain the process of early state-formation using a specifically world-system approach. Their structuralist perspective emphasizes the economic significance of kinship and religious institutions to build an "epigenetic" model of evolution. This necessarily goes well beyond the available archeological and philological evidence, and yet they succeed in fitting what we do know about early Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica and Peru into variations of their model. State formation is understood as a continuation of the conical clan formation which existed within chiefdoms, but which could only proceed in the context of an increasingly productive economic base. The monopolization of religion was the key to class formation, and wealth symbolized nearness to the dieties. Surplus labor in the form of captive or purchased slaves was an important source of support for the emerging state. Relations with sub-lineages, formerly cemented by the chiefly lineage giving wives, became converted to wife-taking by the king. A prestige goods economy developed as a major form of exchange between the main center and regional centers, but this kind of economy was hard to regulate and encouraged regional centers to compete with and sometimes overtake former main centers. Thus a kind of uneven development based on competition resulted in the rise of competing centers. Long distance trade relations for both scarce raw materials used for the production of prestige goods and more fundamental goods necessary for economic survival were carried out primarily on the basis of equal exchange. As trade networks increased in density, certain prestige goods became a more generalized medium of exchange, i.e. began to function as money. Local markets emerged around the ceremonial centers, and a monetary/property system emerged alongside the conical clan reciprocity and the prestige goods economy. Differentiation occured within the governing class. Alongside the theocracy, a class of secular political leaders emerged and also a group of aristocrats who were private land holders. Eventually empire-formation led to the conversion of many long-distance trade relations to tribute-gathering by the empire center, but this development takes us on to our next world-system type, the primary empires. First let us discuss other theories of primary state and class formation. Many archeologists have argued that it was population pressure on the land, either due to natural increase or inmigration, which spurred the increase in agricultural productivity, and eventually the emergence of states. The various forms of this hypothesis have been disputed. Blanton, et. al. (1981: 222-225) point out that population growth and population pressure are not necessarily the same thing. They report that, though the population more than tripled in the valley of Oaxaca during the formative period, it was still markedly below the level of population that could have been supported in the region. Webb (1975) combines a version of the population pressure explanation with geographical circumscription and military competition. According to Webb the early theocracies were more akin to chiefdoms than to real states. He attributes the early building of religious monuments to the problematic nature of authority in the incipient states. It was simpler to get agreement among lineage heads to allocate resources to temple building because this was easily legitimated as an activity devoted to the welfare of everyone. Webb disputes the theories which contend that state-formation resulted from the awe-inspiring psychological aspects of early hierarchical religions. Webb contends that a true state does not exist until there is an organization with a resource base large enough and independent enough to overcome the resistance of segmental kin structures within the society and he points to the limitations on chiefs we have already noted above. He contends these kinds of external resources can come from two sources: 1) external trade and 2) the booty and tribute which results from conquest. He argues that external trade becomes important for secondary state formation, when local leaders can use their control of imported goods to overcome the resistance of segmental lineage heads. But for primary state formation it is not trade but conquest which provides the needed resources, according to Webb. Conquest by itself does not explain why the chiefdoms of the primary states were able to build states however. Webb points out that warfare was endemic among chiefdoms in many areas without producing states. It is the combination of the opportunity for conquest of relatively developed neighbors in a geographical context which limited population movement to new areas which, for Webb, is the set of conditions which allow for the original state formation. This is what accounts for the fact that the primary states all emerged in areas which were appropriate for productive agriculture, but which were bounded by unexploitable deserts and threatening nomads. This is the circumscription hypothesis originally proposed by Carniero (1970). Rising population pressure stimulates warfare among relatively developed chiefdoms in a situation where populations cannot escape to land which allows them to continue a level of living similar to that to which they have become accustomed. The conquered areas continue to be populated by the original people, who now must pay tribute to the conquerors, and this tribute is great enough to permit true state formation within the conquering society. Wittfogel's (1957) argument that the original states arose to administer large scale irrigation projects has fallen on bad times. For one thing, states emerged where irrigation was possible on a decentralized basis, as with pot wells in Oaxaca and also, where there were large scale systems, it seems to have been the state which preceded them, rather than vice versa (Webb, 1975; Service, 1975). Service (1975) employs a functionalist theory of stratification, arguing that the state emerged out of the orthogenetic characteristics of authority. According to him, states grew out of chiefdoms because the stabilization of order required a peaceful, institutionalized way for power to pass from one ruler to another. Primo-geniture created an aristocracy, and thus the transition to class society was due to the need of society to preserve authority and order. The benefits to commoners included protection from outsiders, peaceful conflict resolution at home, the operation of a redistributive system which could overcome temporary and local shortages, and the mobilizing institutions needed for the development of more productive agriculture. In addition, the mobilization of a surplus product allowed rulers to devote time and resources to the invention of the arts of civilization. Service critiques an argument he attributes to Engels, that the first states were created to defend the privileges and profits of a merchant class. Many contemporary scholars agree that merchants were absent or unimportant in the early states. It was generally the state itself which organized and controlled economic exchange. Service sees the state itself as the creator of class society and of large scale and long distance exchange, and he dismisses completely the notion that class struggle, struggle between rulers and ruled, was an important ingredient of state formation. In his interpretation the peasants of early states were silent, obedient, and pious believers in the hierarchical religions which legitimated the state. He claims that the political conflict and rebellion which did occur was primarily a matter of competition among aristocratic contenders. Other eminent scholars such as Adams (1966) and Fried (1967) have placed more emphasis on the contradictory interests of classes in the incipient chiefdoms and primary states. Fried (1967) contends that class society, or as he calls it, "stratified society," emerged first, and then brought forth the state. Stratified society is defined as "one in which members of the same sex and equivalent age status do not have equal access to the basic resources that sustain life" (Fried, 1967: 186). Fried sees stratified societies as developing with institutions of private property and elite control over the means of production. Communal forms of property and unrestricted access to means of production characterized unstratified societies. Unequal access to the means of basic production develops because of population pressures, shifts in customary postmarital residence patterns, contraction or sharp natural alteration of basic resources and shifts in subsistence patterns arising from such factors as technological change or the impingement of a market system, and the development of managerial roles as an aspect of maturation of a social and ceremonial system... (Fried, 1967: 196). Once unequal access to the basic means of production exists, a state organization becomes necessary. The maintenance of an order of stratification demands sanctions commanding power beyond the resources of a kinship system... By differentially distributing access to basic means of livelihood and by simultaneously making possible the exploitation of human labor in the conventional Marxist sense, stratified societies create pressure unknown in egalitarian or rank societies, and these pressures cannot be contained by internalized social controls or ideology alone (Fried, 1967: 186). Adams (1966) places less emphasis on private property and more on control over central institutions in his study of early class societies in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica. But, citing the work of Diakanoff (1974), Adams points to Mesopotamian land sale records from the Early Dynastic period. Though evidence is scarce, he suspects an early concentration of private landholdings by corporate kin groupings in addition to the lands held by the temple state. This indicates the breakdown of communal, egalitarian control of land holdings, and constitutes a case of Fried's unequal access to the basic means of production. Territorial residence seems to have increased as a basis for the control of land. Corporate land-holding groups in both Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica are thought to have been organized around lineages. In describing these units as combining features of both class and clan, Adams (1967: 88) quotes Eric Wolf (1959: 136) who describes "conical clans" as "kinship units which bind their members with common familial ties but which distribute wealth, social standing, and power most unequally among the members of the pseudo-family."7 Adams' study is focussed on the growth of the state as an autonomous institution and its addition of functions. He argues that class contradictions were important causes of the differentiation of theocracies into states with both temples and palaces, a sequence which can be seen in the development of both Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica. The earliest states were theocracies based on the donation of labor services to provision the gods. In Mesopotamia each city-state had a main god or goddess which, in theory, owned all the land within the jurisdiction of the city-state. Later separate military and administrative institutions emerged as signified by the erection of palaces apart from the temple complex. This sequence seems to support Service's contention that it was the need of authority to legitimate itself and to pacify the succession problem which led to early state-formation. And there seems to be a purely logical problem with the argument that class struggle created classes, and then the state. Perhaps Webb is right about the harmonious origins of early theocratic states, but that the growth of the state and its spreading and differentiated authority reflected class dynamics of the kind indicated by Fried and Adams. Haas (1982) presents archeological evidence in favor of the hypothesis that class struggle was an important element in the con- solidation of primary state power. Service's argument that peasants in early states were completely in awe of the priests and glad to provide labor services and surplus product flies in the face of all we know about historically studied peasants. His contention that rebellions were simply matters of conflict among royals is also suspect. Contending aristocrats must have had cadre and peasant support. It is the same as arguing that, because Mao was a school teacher, the Chinese revolution did not involve peasants. And class struggle is not only a question of rebellion. Resistance to taxation takes many forms: hiding of stores, banditry and flight. Service admits that state formation was enhanced when geography or external threats prevented flight. On the other hand we should not entirely dismiss Service's contention that state formation benefitted the commoners as well as the aristocrats. In addition to the benefits he lists, we can add one which is suggested by McNeill (1964) in his study of Europe's steppe frontier. For those who try to live in border areas between contending states, becoming incorporated into one or the other is an advantage because taxation is an easier (more predictable and less destructive) burden than repeated plunder and pillage. The nature of economic exchange Archeologists disagree about the existence and importance of true markets in the early world-economies. There has been a resurgence of the use of market models to account for long distance trade, and many have argued that growing market exchange figured in the emergence of the primary states. While Polanyi claimed that the most important type of exchange was redistribution organized by the state itself, and some contemporaries continue to hold this position, others have interpreted evidence as supporting the operation of markets within and between the early states. While the bulk of the available documents from Sumer describe the state- operated or temple economy, there are occasional references to merchants who some claim are middlemen between states, sometimes trading on their own account and operating on a profit basis. Lamberg-Karlovsky (1975: 349) claims that: In Mesopotamia, in the late third millennium, there is ample evidence from textual sources that merchants specialized in the materials they traded. Thus, during Ur III times (2113-2006 B.C.), the merchant Ea-nasir, a member of the "group of seafaring merchants" (alik Telmun), received garments from Ur and took them to Dilmun (modern-day Bahrein), where he purchased large quantities of copper.... Ea-nasir obtained capital under contractual agreements, managing the money of others as a mutual fund, while also investing his own capital in copper-trading ventures.... It would appear that by the end of the third millennium there were specialized merchants dealing with large-scale exchange of goods in a wholesaling-retailing system.... Others interpret the actions of special groups of merchants as if they were primarily agents of states carrying out administered exchange. Igor Diakonoff (1974) cites evidence about the size of the territory controlled by Lugash (one of the Sumerian city-states) which indicates that temple estates did not, as previously argued by Deimel and Falkenstein, occupy nearly the whole land area of the city state. He also reports documents which refer to the sale of land, not Temple land, which was in the hereditary possession of patriarchal families. This land was purchased by important administrators, kinsmen of the ruling princes, and etc. which became the land-holding nobility referred to by Ekholm and Friedman, and also Adams. The existence of a market for alienable land, which composed a substantial portion of all land, is itself a grand challenge to Polanyi's position. In a note Diakonoff (1974: 14) explains: The economy of Sumer being at this period still very primitive, cases of sale of land naturally happened but rarely. It should be noted that the prices of land are governed by the average ratio of profit which in the Ancient East can, for practical reasons, be conventionally equated to the average interest on loans. Thus, an average profit of 33% means that the average price of land will not exceed the price of three yearly crops. Therefore the price of land in Sumer was extremely low, not exceeding three or four yearly crops.... This was the reason why land was rarely sold unless the venders were in a critical economical or political situation. This discussion of the average rate of profit on loans suggests that wealth, as well as land, was commodified in Ancient Sumer. Struve's (1973) argument that Sumerian society was based on a slave mode of production documents the sale of slaves, after all a form of the commodification of labor, and Ekholm and Friedman even suggest the presence of some wage labor. But Diakonoff (1982), based on his analysis of documentary evidence, concludes that there was very little market exchange in ancient Sumer. The economy was based on the coexistence of a temple-state sector with a private sector composed of communal lineages. The class structure consisted of a ruling class composed of temple and state aristocrats and heads of communal lineages. The appropriation of surplus was accomplished by various kinds of labor dependency, of which slave labor (in the narrow sense of chattel slavery) played a rather small part. In the communal sector differentiation occurred such that lineage heads were able to benefit at the expense of their kinship brethren. Exchange was not motivated by accumulation of money profits, but rather by the need to obtain use values. Diakonoff contends that even "inter-national" trade was carried on by communal groups: ...this trade was maintained by "companies," essentially of a family-communal character, which tended to group together to form multi-branch associations having complex relations of mutual preferential crediting and clearing, this being due to insufficient money supply in general and to the overall essentially in-kind character of exchange even when it was carried out on an international scale (Diakonoff, 1982: 52). In the temple-state sector of the economy, dependent workers did not pay taxes, but rather their whole product was taken by the state. They were paid either rations or were given land to cultivate for their own use. At first temple lands were, in principle, under the control of community assemblies, but later they became autonomous of these. Diakonoff describes the original purpose of the temple economy to provide reserves, to ensure that certain necessities such as timber and metals were obtained from abroad, and to provide a reserve fund of working implements. The orientation of the temple economy towards the cult did by no means stand in the way of this above mentioned main economic objective of the temple estate. On the contrary, it was, by the requirements of the times, in complete accord with that objective, since the sense of the cult, too, was to ensure the well-being of, and above all the fertility in, the community. The inadequacy of the religious-magical approach to this goal, as compared with the technical-economic one, could by no means be felt or recognized. The two aspects--the religious magical and the technical economic--were closely interconnected. E.g., the sacrifices may appear to us as an utter waste of products (since we know that the hopes for achieving affluence by virtue of magical sacrifices were indeed vain). But in effect they were not only of ideological but also of immediate and major economic significance. The participation in the sacrificial feasts opened the only opportunity for the people at large to get high-caloricity meat food. Both the temple personnel and the entire community of believers who attended that particular temple were concerned (Diakonoff, 1982: 64). Friedman and Rowlands (1977) analyze the political significance of feast and of religious belief in the emergence of class society and the state. In their view wealth was understood as an indication of nearness to the godly ancestors, and those who provided feasts were thereby closer to the dieties. Sacrifice was not only an attempt to please the gods, but a symbolic recognition of authority. Thus burning of goods, sacrificing of children, and other completely "uneconomic" rites sustained social order. Adams (1984) has suggested that competition among the Sumerian cities for long distance trade goods led to the operation of the principle of protection rent. Frederic Lane (1979), on the basis of his studies of Venice, proposed that protection costs for trade are an important determinant of profits. The state that could provide effective protection at low cost would be favored by its own and other merchants, and the returns due to lower protection costs are termed protection rent. Adams claims that Sumerian city-states were under pressure to keep taxes on merchants low because, if they didn't, alternative trade routes would be employed to sell goods to cities in which taxes were lower. Administered trade, in which exchange is determined by political agreements among state authorities, may respond to supply and demand. Political authorities must at least roughly take into account the availability of resources as well as labor and transport costs when they make agreements. And the agreed upon rates of exchange must necessarily adjust to economic changes over long periods of time. A king cannot demand and receive tribute from a vassal which the vassal does not have or cannot obtain. So, just as with reciprocal gift-giving, administered trade rates of exchange will reflect real scarcities even in the absence of a price- setting market, at least in the long run. All scholars of the Bronzeage agree that sharing and reciprocity continued to be the most important forms of exchange within local lineages (Oppenheim, 1975), and that mobilization and redistribution by the temple-state and later, the militarized state, were very important. The disagreement seems to be about the relative importance of markets for urban/rural trade, inter-city-state trade and trade with distant locations. The contention that some markets existed does not prove that they operated in important ways to condition social development. It is agreed that the Sumerian city-states became enmeshed in a rather dense intra-regional and inter-regional exchange network and that this had important consequences for their economic welfare and political stability. The institutional nature of these networks is in dispute. Booty, tribute, balanced reciprocity (gifts) among elites and market exchange are all mentioned, but which was most important is a matter of contention. Instances of a particular form do not tell us about the extent or importance of that form. And, as we have seen above (and will see below) the same instance is often interpreted quite differently. Politics within the early states What was the political nature of these early states? We have already pointed to the importance of theocratic ideology. In the beginning a city's pantheon was composed of the gods of those villages and lineages incorporated into the state, with the city's main diety at their parental head (Falkenstein, 1974). Webb has attributed this to the weakness of the state, which could only get agreement for centralized mobilization of resources for religious purposes. In Sumer a circle of priests emerged to run the temple and to provide for the gods, as well as to guarantee the proper performance of ritual. At this stage there was also an assembly of lineage heads which had important powers and elected a secular leader to administrate those functions not carried out by the temple. Over time this secular leader took on more functions and became more autonomous, although for a long time military plans were supposed to be submitted to the assembly for approval. Some have described this system in its early phases as a democracy, although as with later ancient democracies, a large underclass of non-citizen slaves and temple servants had no say in the assembly. The leaders of the palace eventually became hereditary and the polity is then described as a monarchy (Diakonoff, 1973). Early interstate systems What was the nature of interstate relations, the interstate system, which existed in the Sumerian world-economy? During the late Uruk period in Southern Mesopotamia there were at least 120 settlements in the Uruk region whose average size was 1 to 2 hectares. By the Early Dynastic period the number was reduced to less than 50, with the average settlement occupying between 6 to 10 hectares. At the same time cities became fortified and grew, indicating that population concentration resulted from rising military conflicts in the "heroic" age (Rhee, 1981:7). Interstate rivalry among Sumerian cities was rife and warfare was frequent. This is thought to have been, along with salinization of the land, a contributing factor in the conquest of Sumer by the Akkadian Semites and thereby the incorporation of the Sumerian world-economy into a larger conquest-based world-empire. The Sumerian interstate system maintained a balance of power among eight or nine sovereign city-states during the early dynastic period from ca. 3000 to ca. 2375 B.C. This is an instance of an early non-capitalist world-economy and interstate system which refrained from turning into a world-empire for over 600 years. Descriptions of the interstate system of Sumer reveal that, though most of the time the separate cities were sovereign, occasionally one would conquer another, take booty and extract tribute. Some of the more powerful states acted as mediators for other conflicting states, indicating the institution of diplomacy. McNeill (1963: 44) reports that: Surviving records suggest that from about 2500 B.C., Lagash and Umma were the protagonists around which rival alliance systems formed. By degrees, the full autonomy of at least the weaker cities was reduced. Particularly strong rulers often created petty "empires" by uniting several communities under their rule; but such structures were highly unstable and broke apart whenever opportunity offered. Around 2375 B.C. the king Lugalzaggisi of Umma succeeded in temporarily uniting most of Sumer under his rule. This indicates an important difference between the Sumerian interstate system and the relations among states in the modern capitalist world- economy. In our interstate political system the most powerful states never attempt to take over the whole system. It is rather less powerful but upwardly mobile states which attempt this, and none of them have been even temporarily successful in converting the world-economy into a world-empire. A balance of power principle successfully operates to prevent centralization. Several causes are asserted for the long period of city-state autonomy in Sumer, the failure of a process of centralization by conquest. Rhee (1981) has pointed to the shared theocratic culture of Sumer, in which all the cities shared a language and a recognition of the same gods, although each had its own most important god. This theological culture is alleged to have been the basis of a fierce independence which undermined attempts at unification. Ekholm and Friedman, comparing Sumer with Egypt, where unification under a centralized theocracy came early, claim that in Egypt a central state was able to easily control long distance trade because of the natural geographical boundaries which limited long distance trade to the mouth of the Nile. In Southern Mesopotamia the region of Sumer is open to long distance trade by sea but also overland in several directions. Trade routes could not be controlled by a central polity, and this delayed the unification of the region. Also trade networks in Mesopotamia are thought to have been more dense and multicentric from the beginning, so that alternative routes could easily be found to the same destination, making central control more difficult. In a similar vein, Blanton, et. al., (1981) discussing Mesoamerica, have argued that the growth of interregional trade weakened states because it created exchanges and sources of resources outside of their control. Chang (1980) has argued that the development of states and civilization occurs only in the context of interstate rivalry among a group of competing states. He concludes his study of the Chinese Shang dynasty with the contention that the "Three Dynasties" (Hsia, Shang and Chou) were not sequential but rather composed an interactive interstate system. We know that these states fought with one another over a territory in the Yellow river valley which included a large number of sometimes sovereign, sometimes tributary states. The Hsia state in the center of this region was first hegemonic state, and this was followed by a period of hegemony by the Shang in the East, and then a longer period of hegemony by the Western Chou state in the West. Chang shows that most of the agricultural surplus was produced within each state, but that prestige goods were exchanged among the ruling classes of different states, and a long distance trade with areas in Southern China existed. Evidence about the institutional nature of these exchanges is scarce, but the centripetal and unrequited nature of the intrastate economy indicates taxation based on coercive military force. The interstate system which existed in Northern China during the Chou dynasty is decribed in detail by Richard Louis Walker (1953). Cultural integration in early world-economies We should comment on the fact that the Sumerian world-economy was not composed of multiple cultures, as the Wallersteinian definition of a world- system would require. Rather, as indicated above, the various city-states shared a language, a writing system, and a pantheon of gods. Renfrew (1975) has suggested that this condition of cultural integration is typical of what he terms Early State Modules and their links with one another. He cites several examples where intermarriage, gift-giving, trade and the exchange of information have created a larger civilizational culture within which the early states interacted. Blanton et. al. (1981: 245) point to a similar condition in the greater Mesoamerican world-system. They claim that this system was integrated primarily as a network of exchange of prestige goods among the elites of different states. Precious materials used in the making of rank-status apparel were imported from long distances, and the local state elites and their cadre valued these items because of area-wide cultural agreement (among elites) about the meaning of these items as "symbolic statements about the human versus the animal realm, and about the purity and degree of power of their wearers" (Blanton, et. al., 1981: 247). These imported goods allowed state elites and their regional cadre to display their ruling status to the local populace, and the monopolization of access to these goods by control of interstate exchange, as well as sumptuary laws, prevented commoners from copying the consumption styles of elites. The degree of cultural integration among early states is, of course, a variable, which Renfrew claims grows over time with information exchange. It may be that this larger civilizational culture is not so different from the degree of cultural consensus that exists in our modern global political economy. Here, as in Sumer, an important solidarity is the nation (the city in Sumer) with its local diety--the flag, but it exists in a world of other nations with their own flags, and a common culture which legitimates national sovereignty and other values. The sharing of a language and a writing system in Sumer is an important difference between modern and ancient world-economies, and we should not discount the possibility that a greater degree of civilizational consensus was characteristic of these early world-systems. Core/periphery relations What can we say about core/periphery relationships in the early world- economies? Lattimore (1940) describes the emergence of a social frontier between agriculturalists and nomads in the ecological area of transition between loess land and dryer steppe in Early China. Originally horticulture was combined with hunting and gathering across the area. Eventually specialization in agriculture drove the hunters out of the loess land, and there eventually emerged on the frontier a steppe nomadism utilizing horses to keep herds of domesticated pasture animals. An exchange of meat and animal products for grains emerged across this frontier, and along with military incursions by the nomads, this encouraged further differentiation. The Chinese, for their part, developed a military-based state and walled cities, and eventually began work on the Great Wall to prevent nomad incursions. Chinese attempts to neutralize the nomads by engaging some of their leaders in tributary exchanges, and thereby to divide and conquer, were frustrated by an opposite process, the coming together of nomad alliances under a charismatic leader which could form a powerful enough marcher state to overwhelm and conquer the Chinese core. But these conquests by nomads occurred much later, after the unification of a Chinese empire. Shang (1975) and Parsons (1966) have mentioned that the military elite of the early Chinese states not only protected peasants from nomad incursions but also utilized its coercive power against the peasants to suppress rebellions and to enforce taxation. Service (1975) suggests that the process of frontier-formation which Lattimore describes for China, also operated in Mesopotamia. Nomadic hill and desert tribes threatened the Sumerian cities, and the result was a militarily created depopulated no man's land between the settled plains and the upland sanctuaries of the hill tribes and desert nomads. But eventually, peripheral areas became specialized in stock-breeding and non-irrigated agriculture (Diakonoff, 1982: 22). The greatest practical limit on long distance overland exchange was the well-known exceedingly high cost of transport. This especially restricted the passage of bulk consumer goods. In Mesoamerica, without pack animals, a human long distance carrier would consume eighty percent of the corn he was carrying just to have enough energy to make the trip (Blanton, et. al., 1981; Brennan, 1984). This did not preclude long distance overland shipments of food because the costs were often borne by the producers, not the consumers. Even with the use of pack animals, transport costs were high. Lattimore (1940) reports that caravans traveling across the steppe, where open pasturage was available and free, could move goods economically across long distances, but as soon as they entered agricultural areas, where most of the land was planted and fodder had to be purchased, their economic range shortened greatly. Eckholm and Friedman have characterized Sumer as imperialist, and pointed to the exchange of manufactured goods such as cloth, produced in the city-states, for distant raw material imports. They note that the expansion of the Sumerian trade system incorporated the entire region from the Indus to the Mediterranean during the Early Dynastic period (Ekholm and Friedman, 1982: 97). Timber, stone, copper, other precious metals, rare minerals and textiles produced elsewhere are noted imports. Besides textiles, grains were exported, although in relatively small amounts and mostly to the Persian gulf (Diakonoff, 1982: 78). During the third millennium both the temple and the palace were involved in long distance trade, using a group of merchants, the dam-gar. One of the important gods, Enlil, was known as "trader of the wide world." At Lagash the Baba Temple had 125 sailors and pilots (Rhee, 1981). At Teotihuacan, the first urbanized central state in the valley of Mexico, a community of artisans produced obsidian tools for mass consumption using chunks of raw material imported from mining sites (Spencer, 1982). These artisans lived and worked in their own district of the city and archeological evidence indicates an important transition in the organization of their supplies. At first each workshop obtained its own supplies of obsidian, but later supplies were centralized, presumably by the state, and divided equally among workshops. Artisans supplied specialized products to the state by working part time in state workshops located nearer the temple complex. These better-worked prestige goods were used in state-administered exchanges with other states in Mesoamerica. The supply of raw materials to central cities and the long distance export of city products is well-supported by archeological and documentary evidence. In the Middle East and in Mesoamerica certain neutral territories were recognized by all parties as international trade enclaves. These "ports of trade" (Revere 1957; Chapman, 1957) allowed international exchange to go on even during periods of warfare between states. Scholars disagree about whether it was primarily administered trade or market trade which occurred in these enclaves. Early ports of trade were neutral locations, often in weaker states located in areas between larger states, in which trade of both the market and the state-administered kind took place. Ratnagar (1981: 226-227) finds indications that Dilmun (Bahrein) in the Persian Gulf performed this port of trade function in the exchanges between the Harrapan civilization of the Indus valley and Mesopotamia. He also cites evidence which indicates that the Dilmunites later took on the functions of middlemen/carriers operating between the great states, thus becoming early forebearers of the specialized trading city-states of the Phoenecians. The institutional nature of such long distance trade, and its status as a core/periphery hierarchy is in dispute however. Clearly there were situations in which one or another of the city-states established dependent suzerains in hinterland regions and extracted tribute. But some archeologists contend that important long distance exchanges were not tributary, but rather were market-mediated by middlemen operating on their own account. Lamberg-Karlovsky (1975) has made this argument about the Sumerian importation of manufactured chlorite (soapstone) bowls from the village of Tepe Yahya 800 miles from Sumer on the Iranian plateau. These bowls were manufactured near the site of the mining of the rare mineral, and the style of decoration was exclusively for export to Sumer. Renfrew (1985) claims that the carved figures and forms on the bowls are Sumerian, but Lamberg-Karlovsky says there is no evidence for this. Lamberg-Karlovsky contends that this mining and manufacturing industry emerged in response to economic demand. Local artisans are thought to have traded the bowls to merchants from Sumer, although what they received in exchange is not known. Because very little in the way of wealth was accumulated at Yahya, Lamberg-Karlovsky (1975: 360) describes the exchange as a case of economic imperialism. He contends that there is no evidence that Yahya was under the political domination of Sumer, nor evidence that it was a colony of Sumerian artisans. He claims that most of the profits of the trade must have gone to the merchant middlemen and the elites of Sumer, implying an early case of unequal exchange. He contends that a similar situation characterized the lapis lazuli trade between Sumer and other areas. One curious thing about this instance of core/periphery exchange is that a manufactured item, not a raw material, was sent by the alleged periphery to the core. Lamberg-Karlovsky's interpretation of the institu- tional nature of the relationship is disputed by Renfrew (1975), who claims that Yahya was a Sumerian artisan colony. Other scholars have claimed the existence of Sumerian colonial outposts in distant Cappadocia and Syria.8 The colony hypothesis might also explain the lack of accumulated wealth at the peripheral location. The problem here is the nature of archeological data in the absence of any assistance from historical documents. The same facts are interpreted quite differently by reputable scholars. Important efforts have been made by archeologists to develop criteria whereby archeological evidence can indicate the institutional nature of exchange. Renfrew (1977) and others have theorized that different fall-off patterns in the distribution of a product across space from its site of production indicate different forms of exchange. The problem is that very different mechanisms can produce the same fall-off pattern (Earle, 1982: 7). Attempts to use patterns of built storage facilities (Earle and D'Altroy, 1982) would appear to suffer from the same problem. Though efforts have been great, use of archeological data in the absence of documentary evidence has not yet, and may never, provide much certainty about the institutional nature of exchange. Nevertheless we can prove the existence of at least some instances of a hierarachical and stable core/periphery division of labor between Sumerian cities and peripheral hinterlands, based on the historical documents of tributary relationships. Diakonoff (1974) has argued that the Sumerian political economy was not very dependent on core/periphery exploitation. Most economic exchanges with hinterlands, according to Diakonoff, were based on an equivalent exchange of goods. He contends that later warrior empires such as the Assyrian empire, were more reliant on the forcible exchange of goods with underdeveloped regions. Modes of production What can be concluded about the mode of production of these early world-economies? Remember, by mode of production we mean the basic institutions which allow for the reproduction of the social system. Here there is great disagreement among scholars. Only Ekholm and Friedman (1982) and Friedman and Rowlands (1977) are explicitly looking at world-systems rather than single societies or states. They characterize Sumer as a world-economy which is "capital-imperialist" and argue that private wealth was an important basis for accumulation, but they do not claim that commodity production was the dominant mode of production. The more detailed specification in Friedman and Rowlands (1977) depicts a mode of production in which reciprocal kinship relations are articulated with a redistributive theocracy, a state administered prestige goods economy and an emerging monetary/property form of accumulation. Struve (1973) contends that the slave mode of production was dominant in Sumer, but not exclusive. This position is only partly supported by Diakonoff. He describes the ancient mode of production as characterized by the coexistence of state and communal sectors in which various forms of dependent labor, including some slaves, are the basis of surplus accumulation. Polanyi and the substantivists argue that the basic dynamics in Sumer were set by the redistributive temple economy, and later expanded into the mobilizational and tributary militarized states. Thus the "mode of integration" in these early world-economies is the redistributive state. No contemporary scholars use the "Asiatic mode of production" to describe these states. Wittfogel's "hydraulic oriental despotism," which is a cognate notion, has been dismissed by everyone as a cause of primary state formation, but some authors still employ it to characterize the nature of later states and empires, especially in China. The more we know about a particular social system the harder it becomes to fit it into a set of general categories. We saw that what distinguished Sumer and the other areas of primary state formation from earlier societies was the emergence of class society and a relatively autonomous state. A redistributive and mobilization political economy became firmly established over the top of continuing reciprocity among kin groups. Although market trade may have existed, it was probably not an important institutional basis in the early world-economies. Stable hierarchical core/periphery relations did exist, but their importance for the mode of production and its reproduction are in dispute. Ekholm and Friedman say they were important, while Diakonoff claims that most of the surplus came from internal class exploitation, and that most long distance exchange was not exploitative. How did these early world-systems differ from larger, more complex, world-empires and world-economies? This brings us to our next topic.