Trade and Civilisation

Abstract

In this chapter, I demonstrate that patterns of international trade, whether prehistoric or historic, can only be understood at multiple scales, running from the local to the global (cf. Parkinson and Galaty 2009 ). I apply the term "glocal" to those decision-making processes that operated microregionally and over the short term but were linked to, and therefore aff ected and were aff ected by, pan-regional systems of geopolitical and economic interaction. My primary assertion is that, while all politics are indeed local (Schon 2009 ), the degree to which individual and state agents acknowledged and sought to balance local and global strategic concerns varied in response to systems of political economy. Political economies likewise varied from state to state; they were structured and functioned diff erently and were products of diff erent regional historical trajectories.Considering local, agentive needs and wants is thus vitally important when addressing world-systemic processes, like international trade, as has been generally recognized in recent years by world-systems analysts (see review in Galaty 2011 ; see also Hall et al. 2011 ). At the same time and as a result, notions of dependency that were central to world-systems theory as originally formulated have been rethought, transcending the core-periphery dichotomy and opening up ample space for much more complicated world-systemic relationships (see, e.g., Hall's [2001] models of complex incorporation). Kardulias ( 2007 ) has suggested, for instance, using the North American and Cypriot frontiers as examples, that peripheral societies often set the conditions for their own incorporation into