Part Of: Politics sequence
Followup To: The Evolution of Social Structure
Content Summary: 2400 words, 12 min read

A Quick Overview

Last time, we introduced phase models of social structure. We started with five phases:

• Bands (~20 people) with egalitarian relationships and ad-hoc ritual
• Tribes (~200 people) which live in villages, sometimes led by Big Men, and calendric ritual. 
• Simple chiefdoms (~2k people) with a hereditary chief leading a two-tier settlement hierarchy amidst social inequality.
• Complex chiefdoms (20k people) with a hereditary chief leading a three-tier settlement hierarchy.
• States (~200k people) with a monarch leading a four-tier settlement hierarchy, with power delegated to full-time specialist bureaucrats.

Polities also vary along the network vs corporate dimension. Corporate-oriented polities tend to be run by oligarchies, and emphasize cult; network-oriented polities tend to emphasize individual aggrandizement, and elaborate symbols of wealth and power.

Phase change can involve complexification or simplification (structural movement towards larger group sizes, or vice versa). Today we will explore cycling, with a particular society undergoing phase changes in both directions.  

Gradualists view phase change as a slow process driven by the accretion of sociocultural variables. The cycling data reviewed here provides indirect support for the punctuationist perspective. We will also explore more direct confirmation of this model with polity upsweeps driven by technological shocks. 

Polity ratcheting is linked to the five channels which underlie intergroup competition. One of the most hotly-debated examples of complexification is pristine state formation. The functionalist vs coercive debate can be interpreted in terms of which channels played the dominant role:

Let’s dive in.

The Creation of Inequality

As of 2024, the top 1 percent own 43 percent of all global financial assets. As measured by the Gini coefficient, income inequality is getting worse:

Differences in intergenerational wealth transmission is an important driver of inequality. Foragers and horticulturalists show less intergenerational wealth transmission than polities with other modes of subsistence (Mulder et al 2009). What causes polities to make the jump from achievement-based societies with no inequality to rank-based societies with substantial inequality?

Insight comes from achievement-rank cycling, with a single ethnic group exhibiting different phases in different villages.  Kachin villages in highland Burma transition between gumla and gumso (achievement- and rank-based) forms, with the appearance and disappearance of “thigh-eating chiefs”. This same cycling has been observed in the Manambu and Konyak Naga peoples (Flannery & Marcus 2012, Ch10). 

In the early Paleolithic, all villages had Big Men. But something was eating away at the egalitarian ethos of most villages. Hundreds of thousands of villages likely underwent achievement-rank cycling, back and forth, before eventually stabilizing in the ranked equilibrium. We are fortunate to have these three modern-day examples of cycling. These social archaeopteryx help us shed light on why hereditary inequality was born. 

Aspiring Big Men will often go into debt trying to subsidize a ritual. For those who fail to achieve renown can often result in debt slavery. Perhaps this process writ large drives the creation of an underclass. But for the establishment of an elite “overclass”, lineage competition seems to lie at the root of hereditary inequality. When Kachin societies revert back to gumla, it is often because the subordinate lineages fight back. 

For the Kachin, different facets of their cosmology were invoked to legitimize egalitarian and hierarchical ethos. There are also hints of ideological takeover (high-status clans rewriting cosmology to legitimize their of ritual) which we also see in the Avatip clan, and also in the lineage competition of Bears vs Spiders:

The Spiders argued that they were equal to the Bears in ritual authority but were never allowed to provide Oraibi with its headman. The Bears sought justification for their ritual preeminence in the legend of Matcito. The Kokop clan of Phratry VI sided with the Spiders. More and more clans began to choose sides in the dispute, and eventually half of Oraibis population picked up and moved to nearby Hotevilla.

Lineage competition predates the Neolithic. So why did it produce rank societies only in the past 10,000 years? Perhaps fission may have become less viable, as global population density reached a certain level (social circumscription). Or perhaps resource variance changed enough to incentivize more direct competition. 

The Emergence of Pristine States

Cycling is not confined to the achievement-rank boundary. Intrachiefdom cycling, transitions between simple and complex chiefdoms, are common in the archaeological record (Anderson 1994). 

When chiefdoms come into contact with states, they often quickly transform into states themselves. When Gaul encountered Rome, it became a state within three centuries. But the very first pristine states had no examples to emulate. There are perhaps no more than six examples in human history (Spencer 2010). These occurred exclusively in agricultural societies, but millenia after the domestication of plants.

Two pristine states show evidence of chiefdom predecessors. In Mesoamerica, strong evidence suggests that the first state emerged after an extended period of chiefly cycling. The Moche have a four-tiered settlement hierarchy, and many other archeological signatures of statehood. In Upper Egypt 5400 years ago, just before the first kingdom, we see three competing rank societies. 

But evidence for chiefly predecessors for the other pristine states is less clear. Consider Mesopotamia. In the Ubaid period, polities in Southern Mesopotamia, Northern Mesopotamia, and Susiana were competing for influence. The astonishingly abrupt arrival of Uruk, likely caused by an emigration from Susiana, heralded the very first state in human history. Yet precious few indicators of inequality or chiefdoms have been unearthed from this period in Southern Mesopotamia. Later written documents attest to the existence of an oligarchy in the Early Dynastic period. Perhaps their society was a corporate-emphasis chiefdom in the Ubaid Period. 

Much ink has been spilled on the formation of pristine states. But a full theory of chiefdom-state cycling predicts the first states to be unstable, and prone to regress back to regional chiefdoms (chiefdom-state cycling). Since writing was invented in several states, this process is extremely visible in human history. It goes by the name of civilizational collapse, which is more accurately understood as a reversion towards chiefdom. 

But what causes these four-tiered settlement hierarchy, bureaucratic, temple-worshipping, literate societies to emerge in the first place?

Functionalist Theories of State Formation

Many functionalist theories tend to emphasize the benefits states provide. Economists distinguish between different types of goods: public goods (and public bads) are associated with positive externalities (and negative externalities). Consider air pollution. When a manufacturing plant emits large amounts of carbon, everyone suffers; yet the toll is not located on that firm’s balance sheet: a negative externality. In the Pigouvian theory, these situations produce market failures. In this view, the role of the state is to incentivize and generate public goods (in this case, by penalizing actions that pollute).

Specific theories emphasize particular goods. The hydraulic theory (Wittfogel 1957) argued that states evolved to build the irrigation projects required for intensive agriculture. Others emphasize risk management with palace granaries, or international trade with centralized coordination. Unfortunately, many of these theories are not empirically well-supported. For example, irrigation systems were built before the first states had emerged, and were local in scope.

Some economists deny that only states can generate public goods. The Coase Theorem holds that externalities can be internalized through Coasian bargaining, provided that transaction costs are sufficiently low. Some interpret this result to mean that state is unnecessary; others see a role for government in the reduction of transaction costs. This research tradition tends to interpret current outcomes as optimal (bad policies lose because competitors avoid deadweight loss). But once you expand your gaze beyond voluntary exchange, it becomes easier to explain cases of apparent suboptimal policies (Boix 2015).

Coercive Theories of State Formation

A wide variety of coercive theories emphasize the role that violence has played in the formation of the state. Here is Turchin (2015):

War is the reason why big states emerged. No other explanation really makes sense. I don’t deny that large-scale social integration can also bring economic and information benefits, but the returns to scale in these aspects of social function are primarily relevant for modern societies in which war is less pervasive. Economic and informational challenges simply did not loom as large in prehistory as the existential challenge of battle. Besides, we have seen that war was the chief preoccupation, to the point of tedium, of archaic kings like Tiglath Pileser. We don’t find boastful inscriptions from Ashurnasirpal about trading networks or well-maintained irrigation systems. In their own official statements, the first kings were all about war. Shouldn’t we pay attention to what they tell us?

While elite-organized warfare is not frequently attested for foraging bands, it does occur frequently amongst chiefdoms. Chiefly warfare extracts tribute. But pristine states engage in territorial conquest.

Nearly all examples of pristine state formation occurred in regions with no escape. 

• Fleeing Egypt is challenging because of the surrounding desert
• Fleeing southern Mesopotamia is difficult because of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
• Fleeing Peru is difficult because of the Andes Mountains. 

Social circumscription plays a significant role in polity evolution; geographical circumscription also seems to accelerate state formation (Carneiro 1970). 

New Guinea farmers domesticated yams, whose caloric productivity rivals cereals. As an island, it is also subject to geographical circumscription. Why didn’t a state form there? Mayshar et al (2021) show how appropriability is a more accurate predictor of state formation than agriculture per se. Cereal preservation is possible in granaries, its harvest is temporally constrained, and they have a high calorie-per-gram ratio (Scott 2017). Yams enjoy none of these properties, and are thus less appropriable.

Warfare is particularly pernicious in meta-ethnic frontiers, with groups with different languages or subsistence modes. Before centralized leadership, matriliny fosters ingroup cooperation to maximize outgroup competition (Jones 2011). The total warfare of such frontiers has an imperiogenic effect (Turchin 2015).

Nearly all the capitals of ancient empires are located not at the center of the polity, but near these meta-ethnic frontiers. Consider Egypt. Most Egyptian capitals emerging in Upper Egypt, near the Nubian frontier. When climate change removed the competition with Nubia, Egyptian polities never quite recovered. 

Throughout the Neolithic Revolution, the steppe has been an extremely important frontier between agriculturalists and pastoralists. Pastoralist “barbarians” extract tribute from farming communities, and these states militarily resist by becoming empires. Distance to the steppe is an excellent proxy for warfare intensity, and along with agricultural duration explains most of the variance:

It seems clear that states provide public goods, and also use coercion to extract rents from its citizenry. Functionalist theories struggle to explain the latter, but stationary bandit theory (Olson 2010) can explain both. 

Upsweeps and Technological Shocks

Everyone accepts the basic fact of policy ratcheting. But does polity size increase smoothly, or have there been brief periods of dramatic complexification (upsweeps)? The political science debate between gradualism and punctuationism mirrors Gould’s biological theory of punctuated equilibrium. 

Many upsweeps are linked to technological shocks. Economic technology can increase the productivity or appropriability of a particular region, with social consequences. Here are a few case studies to illustrate economic shocks:

• In Alaska at 500 CE, the drag float apparatus allowed for the safe hunting of whales (Sheehan 1985). These expeditions ultimately could only be conducted on four coastal ice-leads of northwestern Alaska.  Only these places, at this particular moment, evolved into complex, unequal polities with intense warfare (Boix 2015). 
• In the northwest coast of North America at 500 CE, there was a switch from herring to salmon fishing. Before this time period, house sizes were very similar. Afterwards, a bimodal distribution of housing sizes revealed the emergence of an elite. Villages were moved to less convenient, more defensible locations.
• In Ukraine in 3000 BCE, the wagon was introduced to the steppe unlocking a new form of nomadic pastoralism. This likely occurred in conjunction with horse domestication. The resulting migration was so explosive that the Yamnaya language (proto-Indo-European) is today used by 3.5 billion people (Anthony 2007)

Weapons technology can also dramatically increase a state’s ability to coerce its neighbors. Many upsweeps are linked to military shocks:

• When it arrived from the Bering Strait 1300 kya, the Asian War Complex expanded down the Californian coast, leading to a major expansion of warfare (Lambert & Walker 1991). This shock also led to an increase in social inequality, as indexed by variance in residential housing.
• The Akkadian and Old Kingdom upsweeps (2300 BCE) occur soon after the mass production of bronze weapons (Boix 2015)
• The Achaemenid upsweep (500 BCE) occurred in response to the Scythian advances in cavalry warfighting (Turchin et al 2021)
• The Napoleonic Empire upsweep occurred soon after the advent of gunpowder weapons.
• Heavy cavalry (large breeds, stirrup, saddle, knight-based tactics) arrived in the 1340s in West Africa. This led to the formation of several states in the West African savanna, all of them governed by horse-owning dynasties (Law 1976; Levtzion 1977; Goody 1971).

Many military shocks promote complexification. Tin-bronze weapons did, because it required elite-controlled trade (tin importation).  So did cavalry warfare, since horse ownership often required access to the steppe and a good deal of money. 

But some military shocks promote simplification!  By virtue of its ubiquity, iron weapons brought power back to the commoners, and helped facilitate the “barbarian resistance” (McNeill 1982; Keegan 2004). In the Middle Ages, heavy cavalry was a complexifying force, and pikemen were a simplifying one.

Until next time.

References

• Anderson (1994). The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the late prehistoric southeast
• Anthony (2007). The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
• Boix (2015). Political Order and Inequality: their foundations and their consequences for human welfare. 
• Carneiro (1970). A theory of the origin of the state. 
• Currie et al (2020). Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia
• Flannery & Marcus (2012). The Creation of Inequality: How our Prehistoric Ancestors set the stage for monarchy, slavery, and empire
• Goody (1971). Technology, tradition, and state in Africa. 
• Inoue et al (2015). Polity scale shifts in world-systems since the Bronze Age: A comparative inventory of upsweeps and collapses. 
• Jones (2011). The matrilocal tribe: an organization of demic expansion
• Keegan (2004). A history of warfare.  
• Lambert & Walker (1991). Physical anthropological evidence for the evolution of social complexity in coastal southern California
• Law (1976). Horses, firearms, and political power in pre-colonial West Africa. 
• Levtzion (1977). The Western Maghrib and Sudan
• Maschner & Mason (2013). The Bow and Arrow in Northern North America
• Mayshar et al (2022). The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?
• McNeill (1982). The pursuit of power.
• Mulder et al (2009). Intergenerational wealth transmission and the dynamics of inequality in small-scale societies
• Olson (2010). Power and Prosperity
• Scott (2017). Against the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states
• Sheehan (1985). Whaling as an organizing focus in Northwestern Alaskan Eskimo society
• Spencer (2010). Territorial expansion and primary state formation
• Turchin (2015). Ultrasociety: how 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth
• Turchin et al (2021). Rise of the War Machines: Charting the Evolution of Military Technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution
• Turchin et al (2022) Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses
• Wittfogel (1957). Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power