出版社：American Sociological Association Section on Political Economy of the World System
摘要：Jared Diamond (1997) hypothesized that if environment is important in limiting the spread of cultures, cultural units would also tend to extend more broadly along lines of latitude than along lines of longit ude . We test this hypothesis by studying the range shapes of (a) historical empires and (b) modern st ates. Our analysis of the 62 large st e mpires in his-tory supports this conjecture: there is a sta-tist ically significant tendency to expand more east-west than north-south. Modern states also show this trend, although the results are not statistically significant.
