Spirals of Sociocultural Evolution within Polities and in Interpolity Systems

This paper summarizes the findings of comparative world-systems research regarding the causes of upsweeps in polity and settlement sizes and proposes a new multilevel model of the causality of increases in the scale of human sociocultural organization to better account for the empirical findings. The iteration model of world-systems processes is combined with the “secular cycle” model of demographic cycles, state formation and state collapse. The panarchy framework of multilevel oscillations is adapted to the problem of human sociocultural evolution.