Civilizations as networks: trade, war, diplomacy, and command-control

C omplex physical systems exist simultaneously as an interacting combination of atomisms and as a coherent field, itself an atomism on another level of interaction [1, p 37–38]. “Complex systems have embedded interiors with many interacting parts, networks, and fields. From a mechanical point of view, emergent field processes often lead to ‘surprising’ results that are not reducible to a mechanical or deterministic account” [2, 8/8/2002, p xxiii). Indeed, “complexity” is informational: complex systems surprise and educate their observers by their unpredicted, and therefore informative, behavior. Complex systems are complex in spatial structure: they are wholes whose identity is more than the collection of their parts. They are also complex in temporal structure: the timescales of the whole are not those of the parts. “[A]ll complex physical systems display ‘long’ cycles....” [1, p 38]. Complex systems are objects of study for many disciplines, and similar principles and research strategies seem to apply across many scales, and across “social,” “biological,” and “physical” sciences. Of particular importance is the determination of their process timescales, their “spectroscopy” [1,3–5]. Being genuine wholes made up of genuine, interconnected parts, complex systems may often be usefully conceived and examined as networks. Harary and Batell [6] define a system as sets of relations among elements at different levels, where each level is a graph in which each node may contain another graph structure, i.e., embedded networks. This article recounts the background of two applications of network concepts to problems of human macrosocial systems, “civilizations” or “world systems,” reports some initial gains, and contemplates next steps. Civilizations are complex social systems with evident network characteristics. However, network approaches remain subdominant in civilizational and macrosystem studies. The civilizationist Arnold Toynbee (e.g., [7, pp 272, 282, 289]), like most of his successors down to Matthew Melko [8, pp 8, 20; 9, pp 32–33) and Samuel Huntington [10, pp 40 – 43) tended to treat civilizations as cultures or as human collectivities each possessing a culture shared by its members, with bounded locations in space and time [11]. The “culturalist” definition however proves impossible to implement consistently, as has been shown by critics from Sorokin to the present [12,15a–18]. An alternative concept propounded by Toynbee, though never systematically implemented, proposed to treat civilizations as networks of relations. In this concept, “[s]ociety is the total network of relations between human beings”; societies are “particular networks” that are not “components of any more comprehensive network”; a civilization is a Is the war-behavior of the 19th and early 20th century global civilization generalizable to other periods and other systems, or are the war-net “signatures” of various civilizations as different as their command-control architectures?