Nature–Culture Relations: Early Globalization, Climate Changes, and System Crisis

Abstract

Globalization has been on everyone's lips in light of the contemporary conditions. It has been viewed mostly as a stage reached as a result of long-term societal changes over the course of world history. For us, globalization has been an ongoing process for at least the last 5000 years. Little attention has been paid to the socioeconomic and natural processes that led to the current transformation. With the exception of historical sociologists, there is less interest in examining the long-term past as it is often assumed that the past has nothing to teach us, and it is the future that we have to turn our intellectual gaze. This paper will argue the opposite. We believe a long-term tracing of the socioeconomic and political processes of the making of the modern world will allow us to have a more incisive understanding of the current trajectory of world development and transformations. To plead our case, we outline the emergence of the first Eurasian World Economy linking seven regions (Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia, Ceylon, Southeast Asia, and China) of the world, with the exception of the Americas, starting as early as 200 BC, and the sequence of structural crises and transformations (trading networks and commodities) that has circumscribed the structures and trends of the current global system. Such consideration in our view is limited if we do not also include the relations between social systems and Nature, and the rhythms of the climate. For the latter, an awareness of the natural rhythms of the climate as well as human induced changes or climate forcing have triggered system-wide level collapses during certain early historical periods.

The economic and institutional determinants of trade expansion in Bronze Age Greater Mesopotamia

“…Yet, the determinants of trade expansion remain relatively ill-understood in the archaeological literature, to the extent that narratives that oversimplify, or misinterpret, causal mechanics have spread out (e.g. Algaze, 2008: 93;Chew and Sarabia, 2016). To help tackle this issue, we have developed an economics theory-driven empirical approach emphasizing the impact of each polity's trade potential, consumption risksharing needs and access to merchant institutions on the expansion of its trading activities.…”

Ideal-Type Narratives for Engineering a Human Niche

“…The history of engineering an anthropocentric biogeosphere exhibits complex social and cultural processes, as illustrated for the Americas by Denevan [132,133], for the US by Purdy [59], for France by Fressoz [63], and by Chew and Sarabia [97] or Kowarsch [51] for a long historical period or philosophical context, respectively. Nowadays, as anthropogenic global change is intentional and massive, narratives shall capture social and cultural features, such as the preferences of people, their world-views, and shall reflect general purpose (e.g., [4,35,46,49,58,95,134]).…”

“…4 Forth feature, 'culture-and-nature versus culture-or-nature': This generic aspect regards people's understanding of the concepts of 'nature' and 'culture' and the mutual relation between both concepts [92][93][94][95][96][97][98]. When applied to engineering a human niche, then a forth bipolar feature can be discriminated, namely whether people understand the concepts of 'nature' and 'culture' to prescribe two well disconnected realms of structures, processes, and categories, or as one interconnected realm.…”

Last-Millennium Settlement on Yadua Island, Fiji: Insights into Conflict and Climate Change

“…INTEREST IN THE WAY THAT CLIMATE AND SEA-LEVEL CHANGES have impacted the environment and human societies in different parts of the world has been growing steadily over the last two decades. It has become clear from a number of case studies that rapid climate change has often dislodged particular societies from their evolutionary trajectories (Büntgen et al 2016;Cannon 2015;Chew and Sarabia 2016;Liu and Feng 2012). Given their inherent geographical vulnerability, as apparent today as in the pre-globalization era, oceanic islands have been a subject of considerable interest to archaeologists and others interested in the historical interactions between climate change and humans (Kirch et al 2004;Nunn 2007b;Rick et al 2013).…”