Jones on Hornborg and Crumley, eds., _The World System and the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability since the Neolithic_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (February 2007)

Alf Hornborg and Carole L. Crumley, editors, _The World System and 
the Earth System: Global Socioenvironmental Change and Sustainability 
since the Neolithic_. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006. xii + 
395 pp. $35 (paperback), ISBN: 1-59874-101-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Eric Jones, Melbourne Business School and 
University of Exeter.


An editor once told me to take a metaphor about the grinding of 
tectonic plates out of a piece on environmental history, on the 
grounds that historians would not understand it. I am therefore not 
unsympathetic to the aim of the editors of this volume to bring human 
history together with natural science. They go further, however. They 
start out by assuming, as do their many contributors (mutatis 
mutandis), that social processes move in waves or cycles, including 
some very long ones indeed. The purpose of the volume is to advance 
to yet another stage, describing the entire course of human history 
and prehistory in this vein, incorporating the effects of natural 
phenomena, and looking hard for appearances of synchrony. And as if 
that were not enough, they want to save the planet.

Three concepts stand out among the considerable number used by one or 
other contributor. First is the "earth system," defined as the suite 
of interacting physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles 
("often called biogeochemical cycles") and energy fluxes which 
provide the conditions necessary for life on the planet. Second is 
the "world system," defined as a multi-state system of capitalist 
countries bounded in space and time, with a division of labor and 
trade relations that favored a core of one or several nations over a 
periphery of other nations -- the whole extended to additional 
relationships according to the taste of individual authors. The 
breadth of these "systems" permits virtually unconstrained 
interpretation. It is thus almost a relief that "sustainability" does 
not seem to be defined, though this leaves it unclear which of the 
possible meanings is intended.

Of the volume's three sections, the first presents various takes on 
grand theory. The second section consists of case studies and 
summarizing them is a real challenge. Spatially they deal with 
Northwest Europe, the Middle East, Eurasia, Africa and Amazonia. 
Chronologically they often reach far back into prehistoric times. 
Thematically they are even more diverse, dealing for example with 
urbanization and social institutions in relation to and as affected 
by ecological and climatic changes.

Oddly, the most promising, or at any rate most familiar, topics from 
the economic historian's point of view do not fall in this section. 
One, on the lessons from population ecology for long-distance 
synchrony, is placed in the first section. It uses in part data from 
pre-industrial England and states that the forces explaining an 
acceleration in population growth around 1800 are "not controversial 
and have to do with the English Industrial Revolution." Among other 
variables introduced to explain population fluctuations is an index 
of internal warfare, created by merging lists of revolutions, civil 
wars and major rebellions, and concluding that a probable cause of 
the fluctuations was interaction between population and instability.

Likewise placed outside the case study section, but instead in the 
third section on the sustainability of the modern world, is a happily 
straightforward chapter by Alfred W. Crosby on the 1918-1919 
influenza pandemic, and the chapter that concludes the whole book: 
this last is by Andre Gunder Frank on the nineteenth-century world 
system and is hard to comment on fairly since Frank died before he 
could complete a demonstration of the role of entropy in world system 
history. Otherwise the third section includes complaints about how 
humanity is consuming too much and bemoaning the lack of 
international co-ordination in managing the earth system, without 
which "our days on this planet are numbered." Also included are 
suggestive bar diagrams of the publication of ecological articles, 
1945-2005, though seemingly not deflated by the changing numbers of 
academics or academic journals.

I have the sense of people wrestling with vast interactions, their 
minds made up about the negative course of human history, and armed 
with unhelpfully cloudy concepts. Assertions of interactions among 
the giant processes discussed -- climatic change prominent among them 
-- are unlikely to persuade economists, whose discipline does not 
begin to approach the level of abstraction or indeed verbosity 
typical here. The graphs and diagrams with their unlabelled axes are 
especially baffling, though I enjoyed the one with arrows saying "all 
these blobs are societies." The volume reminds me of the story of a 
sociologist friend who followed two tutees out of his room, only to 
hear one saying to the other, "words, words, words!"


Eric Jones is Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Business School, and 
Visiting Professor, University of Exeter. He is author of _The 
European Miracle_ (Cambridge University Press, third edition, 2003) 
and _Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture_ 
(Princeton University Press, 2006)

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