出版社：American Sociological Association Section on Political Economy of the World System
摘要：Following up on an earlier paper demon-strating statistically significant relationships be tween me asure s of recurring polit ical-eco-nomic crises (hinterland incursions, trade collapses, economic contractions, and regime transit ions) and a measure of climate det e-rioration (the interaction of falling Tigris-Euphrates river levels and ye ars of warming/drying), the inter-re lationships among these variables are e xamined more closely for the 3400–1000 bce pe riod. T heoretically focused on a test of Tainte r's diminishing marginal return theory of societal collapse, additional indicators are introduced encompassing pop-ulation (urban populat ion size, urban popula-tion growt h rate) as a proxy for diminishing marginal ret urns, t wo measures of ce ntraliza-tion/ fragmentation (including imperial size), and the indicators used for the climate inter-action term in the earlier paper. The multi-variate logit outcome for inte ractions among and bet ween the 11 variables reinforces the earlier findings linking climate deterioration to political-economic crises, extends the cli-mate dete riorat ion linkage to fragmentation and population decline, and finds relatively strong support for the Tainter de rive d expec-tation that diminishing marginal returns and fragme ntat ion are closely linked but t hat both are le ss closely linke d to rec urring political-economic crises than might otherwise have been anticipated
