The Geopolitical and Economic World-Systems of Kinship-Based and Agrarian-Coercive Societies
Author(s)
Collins, Randall
Abstract
Some patterns of geopolitical and market dynamics are suggested which hold across all types of political and economic organization. Stateless societies do not exist in a vacuum, but are organized both by military relations with their neighbors and by kinship exchange systems which have many of the dynamics of market structures. Kinship markets exchange sexual property and thereby establish trade links and military alliances among culturally distinct groups. Insofar as domestic legitimacy follows geopolitical power-prestige, kinship rules and their supporting mythologies are ideologies arising in response to geopolitical conditions. The dynamics of social change follows a combination of the geopolitical processes of alliance, conquest, and migration; plus the tendency of the marriage market toward increasing inequality between alliance-rich and alliance-poor kinship groups, culminating in the destruction of this form of market in a kinship revolution. The result is the rise of state-organized societies which coercively extract surplus from agrarian production. These agrarian-coercive societies are driven onwards in turn by their geopolitical relations and market dynamics with external groups.
