East Asian World Revolutions?

Chris Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside
Manjing Gao, University of California, Riverside

The idea of “world revolutions” comes from studies of the Europe-centered (“modern”) world-system, referring to periods in which protests, rebellions and revolutions broke out in the same decades in different parts of the system. We propose to evaluate the world revolution hypothesis as it may have operated in the East Asian world-system since the Bronze Age. We will examine the timing of protest and rebellion events to see if they cluster in time and across space. We consider economic and political contexts, synchronies of rebellions, and connections among those that rebelled and among those that sought to repress or ameliorate the rebellions. And we will eventually quantitatively test hypotheses about the interactions among within-state and between state conflicts, the role of rebellions in dynastic cycles and the relationships between rebellions and changes in the scale of polities and cities in the East Asian world-system

See paper

 Presented in Session 181. New Perspectives on Revolutionary Processes and Outcomes