This volume explores the spatial and temporal boundaries of whole systemic interpolity systems (world-systems) since the Stone Age. By delineating boundaries of integration based on political/military interaction and on long-distance trade, it compares entire systems of human interaction to examine their similarities and differences, while also addressing the causes of long-term increases in the scale and complexity of human polities and interaction networks. The growing awareness of Eurocentrism suggests the need to systematically compare the world-system that emerged in Europe with interstate systems that existed in other regions and in the more distant past to test hypotheses about the general causes of structural changes - especially the emergence and development of sociocultural and organizational complexity and hierarchy. This book develops a systematic method for determining when and where regional interaction systems merged with one another to become the global system that we have today. Defining interstate systems as networks of polities that make war and form alliances with one another, the contributing authors formulate explicit decision-making rules for specifying the spatial and temporal extent of these important geopolitical and trade interaction networks, starting with those regions in which large cities first appeared. An improved, scientific grasp of interstate systems has important implications for explaining the evolution of human economic, geopolitical, and cultural institutions in the past and for better comprehending the possibilities and probabilities of further geopolitical evolution in the twenty-first century.

Christopher Chase-Dunn is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate Division and director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside, USA, and founding editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research. His research focuses on the causes of human socio-cultural evolution, global state formation and the democratization of global governance.

Hiroko Inoue is the Assistant Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at University of California-Riverside, USA. Her research interests are world-systems analysis, East Asian piracy and East Asian regional systems, evolutionary comparative analyses of firms, cities, nation-states and empires, formal simulation modeling, global inequality, and the application of quantitative and network analyses methods to these topics.