If you’re feeling happy and optimistic, Theophilus Chilton has a bucket of cold water to douse you with:

Migrations, invasions and destructions during the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200 BC), based on public domain information from DEMIS Mapserver.
Map by Alexikoua via Wikimedia Commons.

Regular readers know that I’ve talked about collapse (as well as the implied regeneration that follows it) on here a lot. In nearly all cases, though, I’ve discussed it within a specifically American context – the collapse of the present American system and the potential for one or more post-American successor states arising in place of the present globohomo order. However, we should recognise that collapse is a general phenomenon that affects any and all large nations eventually. Just as America is not a special snowflake who is exempt from the laws of demographic-structural theory, so also is she not the only one subject to them.

Further in this vein, we should recognise that no major nation is isolated from its neighbours. No matter how self-sufficient, sooner or later everybody gets hooked up into trade networks. As trade networks expand, you develop world systems that display increased international interconnectedness and interdependency. From a demographic-structural perspective, the interconnectedness of these global systems acts to “synch up” the secular cycles of the nations involved as “information flows” increase. The upside to this is that when one part of the system prospers, everyone does. The downside, of course, is that when one part collapses, everyone does as well.

There are several historical examples of this kind of interconnected system synching up and then collapsing. Probably one of the most well-known examples would be the Bronze Age collapse which occurred in the Mediterranean world system roughly between 1225-1150 BC. Likely due to several shocks to the system working in tandem (drought, volcanic eruptions, migrations into the Balkans from the north, etc.), a series of invasions of the Sea Peoples spread out across the entire eastern end of the Mediterranean, toppling Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite Empire, and nearly did the same to Egypt. From there, the shocks moved outward throughout the rest of Anatolia and Syro-Palestine and eastward into Mesopotamia, disrupting the entire interconnected trade network. The system was apparently already primed to be toppled by these jolts, however, due to the top-heavy political structures (elite overproduction) and overspecialisation in these empires that contributed to their fragility in the face of system shocks. When the first one fell, the effects spread out like dominoes falling in a row.

There is evidence that this collapse extended beyond the Mediterranean basin and disrupted the civilisation existing in the Nordic Bronze Age around the Baltic Sea. Right around the same time that Bronze Age Mediterranean society was collapsing, serious changes to society in the Baltic basin were also taking place, primarily due to the disruption of trade routes that connected the two regions, with amber flowing south and metals and prestige goods returning north. During this period, the population in the area transitioned from a society organised primarily around scattered villages and farms into one that became more heavily militarised and centred around fortified towns, indicating that there was a change in the region’s elite organisation, or at least a strong modification of it (remember that collapse phases are characterised by struggles between competing elite groups). A large battle that dates to this era has been archaeologically uncovered in the Tollense Valley of northeastern Germany which is thought to have involved over 5000 combatants — a huge number for this area at this time, indicating more centralised state-like organisational capacities than were previously thought to have existed in the region. All in all, the evidence seems to suggest that this culture underwent some type of collapse phase at this time, likely in tandem with that occurring further south.

Other times and places have also seen such world system collapses take place. for instance, when the western Roman Empire was falling in the 3rd-5th centuries AD, the entire Mediterranean basis (again) underwent a systemwide socioeconomic collapse and decentralisation. More recently, the entire Eurasian trade system, from England to China, underwent a synchronised collapse phase in the early 17th century AD that saw revolutions, elite conflict, decentralisation, and social simplification take place across the length of the continent.

The great irony of interconnectedness is that too much of it actually works to reduce resilience within a system. Because an intensively globalised world system entails a lot of specialisation as different parts begin to focus on the production of different commodities needed within the network, this makes each part of the system more dependent upon the others. This works to reduce the resiliency of each of these individual parts, and the greater interconnectedness allows failure in one part to be communicated more widely and rapidly to other parts than might otherwise be the case in less interconnected systems.