state-formation – both ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ (where societies felt they had to
try emulate the pacemakers in their region if they were to survive).
Time and again, larger territorial concentrations of physical power have emerged
from ‘elimination contests’ between survival power units. Realism and process
sociology largely agree about the reasons for the dominance of what Elias called the
‘monopoly mechanism’.^24 Both perspectives maintain that states are usually
motivated less by the desire to expand their military power and political influence
to the absolute limit than by the modest goal of controlling strategically significant
areas – or ensuring that adversaries do not dominate them. The long-term result of
the monopoly mechanism is that societies have become entangled in ever-widening
theatres of war, binding more and more people by their ‘hands and feet’ in the
strategic interconnections that are one of the main indices of the globalisation of
human society.^25
Such points about the impact of state-building, widening strategic relations and
rising levels of interconnectedness raise questions about the relative influence of
economic and political forces on that overall trend. From a theoretical standpoint,
it is important to heed the Marxists’ warning against rigidly separating the two
domains. They have argued that production had little autonomy from the political
domain in pre-modern social systems where states employed force for the purpose
of ‘primitive accumulation’ and/or were centrally involved in promoting trade
networks in order to acquire the material resources that would enable them to
extend and consolidate their power.^26 Moreover, merchants would have been
unable to conduct business across frontiers unless coercive institutions had been able
to protect trade routes from pirates and predators. Only with the emergence of
industrial capitalism did ‘economics’ acquire significant autonomy from ‘politics’
and come to exercise a (seemingly) relatively independent influence on the material
realities of increasing interconnectedness and on its moral and cultural counterparts.^27
From the earliest periods, closer material ties between social systems developed
alongside and frequently stimulated cultural breakthroughs that made inter-group
communication and understanding possible. Merchants, for example, were often
key ‘cross-cultural brokers’, just as trade settlements were critical in fashioning a
‘bare bones morality’ that made it possible for people to become bound together in
longer webs of interconnectedness.^28
If Braudel is right about the early history of Islamic civilisation, there have been
periods when economic ties ran along track lines that religious groups had previ-
ously created, thereby enlarging circles of mutual understanding and trust around
which new trade networks could develop.^29 Again, it is important to ask how far
the economic sources of interconnectedness ultimately depended on the role of
states and other actors in pacifying the routes along which ideas and commodities
dispersed. In the Ancient Near East, separate states seem to have pacified
‘Mesopotamia’ to the point where economic and cultural integration could develop.
Political unification came later.^30 In Mann’s felicitous phrase, closer economic and
cultural ties in the ‘interstices’ that states were powerless to control led to major
transformations of religious consciousness. Crucial was the quest for new social
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