Walters, 1970) and there may be more, but we will not know until the many clay tablets still awaiting transcription have become available.
Given the focus on top government levels and their elites, political change has often been conceptualized as a“rise and fall of . . .”(fill in the blank) with little, if any, attention to the fate of the various local communi- ties and associations. Perhaps they were in turmoil once the upper-local regime folded, but perhaps they were not. So complete is the focus upon the rise and fall of upper-local political regimes that the continuity provided by the local communities and associations is overlooked. Indeed, there is evidence throughout history that local communities and associations were vital to society. For instance, in ancient Sumer the governing body of a village (for instance, the abba asagǎ or field fathers) continued to function when the assembly of city rulers (unken) chaired by a“big man”
(lugal) responsible for adjudicating disputes between city-states and for deciding on peace and war, disintegrated because of some natural or man- made disaster (Westenholz, 2002, p. 27). There is no reason to assume that it was different elsewhere. Archaeological research has shown that the notion of a“dark age”8in Ancient Greece between the twelfth and eighth centuries BCE and in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the flash of the Carolingian empire is much overstated. Also, no matter how upsetting events during the French Revolution or the Third Reich were, there was much continuity not just in terms of elites continuing in office, but also at the local associational level. It is upon the latter’s continuity that upper-local political regimes could rise and fall. To be more precise, a local regime could grow its sphere of influence via conquest, amalgamation, or otherwise and become, temporarily, the center of an upper-local polity at regional (chiefdom) or a supraregional polity at an even higher level (state, empire).
the center through, for instance, redistributive policies and rituals. Logi- cally, upper-local regimes generally do not come out of the blue. In fact, very few upper-local political regimes started at the upper-local level (among the few exceptions: Scandinavia during the Viking Age, and early Anglo-Saxon England). Most political regimes, and the changes in them, started locally, whether as a territorial polity or as a political movement. For much of history, political regime change also involved the change of the territorial center and the political superstructure. It is only in the past 200 years or so that political regime change generally does not involve changes of the political super- structure, changes in the circumscription of the sovereignty, or changes in the location of the center of power. An exception to this rule can be made for political regimes whose institutional superstructure was imposed by outside forces (for instance, colonial government; Germany and Japan after the Second World War) or was changed by internal regime change (for instance, from dictatorship to democracy). No matter how vehemently executive and legislative elections are contested in democracies, in the light of history regime change today is relatively peaceful.9
Many singular explanations for the establishment of a sedentary lifestyle and for the emergence of the state have been suggested. The archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe argued that urban and technological development accounted for this (1942). The historian and sinologist Karl Wittfogel suggested that irrigation prompted the development of states (1957).
The demographer Esther Boserup believed demographic development (such as population size and density) to be a prime mover (1965). Others emphasized the domestication of agriculture and animals. Several scholars emphasized conflict and expansionist warfare (for instance, Carneiro, 1970) such as in the warring city-states of Mesopotamia, while others stressed the need for defense (Gat, 2002, pp. 127 and 131; pointing especially to pre-colonial Africa and early Mesopotamia). Yet others have suggested trade and even the integrative power of religion and art (Flan- nery, 1972, pp. 404–407).10
All these explanations suffer from incompleteness and single- mindedness, and as the stage models were left behind, scholars increasingly turned to the importance of multivariate explanations that could tackle the
9In a situation of colonization or of civil unrest (think of the Arab spring 2011–2013), regime change is obviously not regarded as peaceful by the indigenous population.
10Excavations at Göbekli Tepe, a temple complex dating back to 9500 BCE in south- eastern Turkey, have prompted the lead excavator, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, to suggest that the need for worship brought people together, and that religion is a cause rather than a product of culture (Newsweek,March 1, 2010).
variation in governance structures in relation to the local physical circum- stances (V. Ostrom in Toonen, 2010), that, thus, conceptualized social evolution as multilevel, configural, and interactive (Corning, 1983, p. 13;
Corning and Hines, 1988, p. 147; Elias, 1987), recognizing that cultural diversity is a function of distinctive social environments and subsistence patterns (Yoffee, 1979, p. 8). Instead of simplifying social reality through stage models and singular explanations, emphasis shifted since the 1980s to capturing the institutional diversity that has characterized humankind’s government and governance since the beginning of history.
This is a daunting task for several reasons. First, Weber was one of the earliest scholars to point to the impossibility of singular explanations:“how can causal explanation of an individual fact be possible . . . the number and nature of causes that contributed to an individual event is always infinite.”
(Weber, 1985a, p. 177; author translation) Almost a century later Fritz Scharpf pondered the same:“the potential number of different constella- tions of situational and institutional factors will be extremely large—so large, in fact, that it is rather unlikely that exactly the same factor combina- tion will appear in many empirical cases.”(as quoted in E. Ostrom, 2005, p. 10) Second, to complicate matters further, the variation is not just between different societies and/or political regimes but also within. The use of orderlyflowcharts and formal organizational structures implies that society is a well-integrated, adaptive, and not so complex system. Instead it is
“a continually shifting patchwork of internally differentiated communities bound together by interacting contradictions and mediations.”(Brumfiel, 1992, p. 558) And this institutional diversity can only be explained by combinations of variables (Wright, 1977; Claessen and Skalnik, 1978, p. 625). Third, research into the emergence and development of the state suffers from having both too many as well as too few sources of information.
We have an enormous amount of information about the past eight to 10 centuries in Europe, thanks to the meticulous conservation of printed matter in archives. There is much less information about the millennia before. At the same time, the potential for information about the ancient past is large. Henry Wright and others noted that about 16,000 economic texts from Ur III had been published, but that many more are stored in museums around the world (1969, p. 99). John Brinkman reported in 1972 that about 900 Kassite tables had been published, but that more than 11,000 still waited transcription (p. 271). Several years later Robert Wenke wrote that decades of intensive research would be required to tackle the“physical scale of the archaeological record.” (1981, p. 118) In fact, archaeologists continue to complain about the lack of time for assessing and coding
available sources (Wright, 2006, p. 1). Nevertheless, enough has been translated and discovered that examples can be provided to substantiate the claims made previously.