The modern system of global governance is comprised of a hegemonic cycle, a network of state-IGO affiliations, and the interstate system that derives its continuity from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. To empirically capture multiple dimensions of each of these three elements of global governance, this research examines the emergence and development of three separate networks, these being networks of international trade, foreign aid, and IGO membership since the establishment of the League of Nations. Network analysis was performed on matrices for the period where data are available, rendering the densities, centralities, and hierarchical structures of these networks and their respective hegemons. These values were subsequently incorporated into an attribute dataset of established, non-network measures of global governance—among them, a hegemon’s military budget, and the ratio of world imports to world GDP—in an effort to assess measures of autocorrelation, cross-correlation, and conduct other time-series analysis, including Prais-Winsten regressions. Several relationships were identified using bivariate and partial cross-correlation coefficients, though there is little uniformity in them from which to draw a singular narrative.

Abstract: World-systems are human interaction networks that display oscillations of expansion and contraction, with occasional large expansions that bring formerly separate regional systems into systemic intercourse with one another. These waves of expansion, now called globalization, have, in the last two centuries, created a single integrated intercontinental political economy in which all national societies are strongly linked. This paper investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This paper formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being. To be presented at the conference on “Nature, Raw Materials and Political Economy” held in honor of Stephen Bunker’s contribution to political ecology, Madison, November 2, 2002. Thanks to Tom Hall for helpful comments. V. 10-30-02, (7707 words) This paper is available on the web at http://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows11/irows11.htm

Abstract: This paper contains an overview of earlier research on city and empire growth/decline phases and new evidence on the relationship between urban growth and the rise and fall of empires in six world regions. We find that empires and cities grow and decline together in some regions but not others. We also examine the temporal correlations between growth/decline phases of largest and second largest cities and empires within regions. Do large empires grow at the expense of other large states within a region or are there periods of regional growth in which states (and cities) are growing together?

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