"Civilizations" and "world systems" are alternative labels for the largest macropolitical entities that have existed in human history. These historical civilizations/world systems may be seen as having two polar types of power structure, the "states system" and the "universal empire." Each form has certain characteristic accompaniments, which may promote it, be promoted by it, or both. For stat...

This paper will examine the cultural paradox of modern Japan, focusing on the views of civilization and Otherness during the period of the Great Japanese Empire (1868-1945). I will look at modern Japanese views of civilization and how these views reflected modern Japan’s perceptions of its major Others: the West, China and the South Seas.2 The reason I write in terms of the “paradox” of modern ...

A contrast between the Roman and Chinese empires is that the military was empowered in Rome and disempowered in China. To explain the difference, this paper considers a principal-agent model where the military may revolt, the civilians may shirk, and the social planner chooses a degree of military empowerment, which affects the military’s capability to defend, and that to usurp, the empire. It ...

The ancient Greek world was much troubled and influenced by politics. While other peoples settled to a single form of government, the Greeks were strungling between monarchy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny; and while other peoples were forming empires, the Greek cities usually preferred independence, in the form of a polis, a city-state, and other times preferred to (or were forced to) join s...

Multilevel selection is a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how complex hierarchical systems evolve by iteratively adding control levels. Here I apply this framework to a major transition in human social evolution, from small-scale egalitarian groups to large-scale hierarchical societies such as states and empires. A major mathematical result in multilevel selection, the Price eq...