 I'm Salvatore Babonis and I'm lecturing today on pre-global or pre-modern world systems. The world today is composed of a single global social system, but of course that wasn't always the case. Previous worlds were smaller units that contained most of the interactions among people in a number of discrete units called world systems. In this pre-global world, social problems were mainly contained within a particular world system, though there were connections between world systems, particularly between the world systems that were located on the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Presumably there were also connections among the world systems of the pre-Columbian landmass, but very little historical evidence survived the Holocaust of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The conventional history of civilization in Eurasia focuses on the large empires of the northern temperate zone. Now of course I put civilization in big quotation marks because here I mean large-scale city-based societies. Many other kinds of societies had civilization in the sense of culture and society, but they didn't have large cities and highly concentrated populations. By the first century AD, there existed a belt of civilizations of organized polities running east-west across the middle of Eurasia, from the Chinese Empire in the east through to various Indian empires, the Parthian Empire, and across to the Roman Empire in the west. Other societies existed as well all over the world, but today's globalized world is overwhelmingly dominated by the heirs of these ancient Eurasian civilizations, who through colonization or conquest came to dominate most of the rest of the world. The geography of Eurasia naturally led to the creation of three semi-bounded zones of interaction that coalesced into world systems. World systems are more or less bounded social systems and one shares much more social interaction within the system than across system boundaries. These systems are called quote-unquote world systems because from the standpoint of the people inside them, they represent an entire world. They represent the entire world that has meaning for people inside the system. So for example, a typical Roman would understand the Roman world as her or his world and wouldn't really give much thought to India or China. The same might be said of an Indian or a Chinese person of the same period. The hyphen in the term world system indicates that each system covers a world, but not necessarily the world. That is, these are not necessarily systems that span the entire global world. Instead, they are systems that span a world, a world system. World systems are multifaceted social systems that are larger than a society or what we would now call a country. Most theorists follow the German sociologist Max Weber in identifying three major types of social systems that together make up society, cultural systems, economic systems, and political systems. All societies have systems like this, but societies may not be well-bounded. The cultural system that exists in one society may actually spread well beyond that society. For example, the American cultural system clearly extends into Canada, or the Chinese economic system clearly expands into the rest of East Asia. The cultural, economic, and political systems of a world system are geographically bounded. That is, for a world system, the cultural, economic, and political systems do not bleed out into the rest of the world beyond that world system. In ancient times, the Roman world system included a culture based on Latin and ultimately on Christianity, an economic system based on trade in the Mediterranean basin, and a political system of the Roman Empire. And today, the cultural, economic, and political system of the world are all bounded by a single global world system. Even though world systems are bounded, a low level of interaction does occur between them. For example, the famous Silk Road connecting China and the East with the Roman world in the West. The Silk Road reached its height in the first two centuries AD, when both the Han and the Roman Empires were powerful, and there was relative peace in the lands in between them. China's earliest major export was silk, thus the Silk Road. Silk is produced by silkworms, and China is still the world's major center of silk production, followed by India in a distant second place. The Roman and Chinese worlds and their world systems were aware of each other. Fascinatingly, in 166 AD, a Roman embassy arrived and visited the Han court in China. There are Han records of this visit, which is just truly incredible that 2,000 years ago, Roman visitors were visiting China. There are also records of private individuals visiting the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, coming from China over land. Roman and Chinese geographers were certainly aware of each other's existence. The Romans called the Chinese series as in the silk people. Syraculture is the culture of silk. Series is the Latin word for silk. And some Romans even complained that rich Romans were spending too much money on luxuries from the East. Similarly, China was aware of Rome. They called Rome the Tachin, the great country to the West. But they saw the Romans mainly as a place full of acrobats and conjurers. They didn't really want any of the products of the Roman Empire. Another amazing bit of ancient history is the survival of a village in Gansu province that at least some people claim was settled by Roman colonists to facilitate the silk trade. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the major bridge across Eurasia became the nomadic steppe kingdoms. These were on again, off again nomadic empires that sometimes connected China and the West and then at other times disappeared or disintegrated into individual tribes. These kingdoms included the Turkish Empire, various Arab empires, the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, the next later Mongol Empire under Timur Lane or Timur the Lame. The steppe kingdoms were important for facilitating trade, but they also taxed trade very heavily and wanted to control it themselves. Ming China in the 1400s attempted to develop a maritime route to the West on the maritime Silk Road and sent the famous admiral Zheng He on his voyages in the 1400s from China all the way to East Africa. But ultimately nothing came of these voyages and they ended with no permanent settlement by China of the lands in between China and the West. The overland Silk Road, the steppe nomads and the Chinese maritime Silk Road all failed to create a single Eurasian world system. The ancient world simply did not have sufficient levels of technology or sufficient organizational skills to unify the Eurasian land mass. Steppe nomads were great at destroying things, but not very good at governing or organizing. Genghis Khan's empire, which spanned an area from the Pacific Ocean to Central Europe, collapsed immediately after his death. Ming China had the capacity to integrate East and West, but not the interest to do so. The country was faced bigger threats at home from nomads on its northern border. The Zheng He voyages were extremely expensive and these expeditions, although they left many Chinese settlers around Southeast Asia, never yielded a profit. The problem from China's perspective was that even though the West wanted Chinese silk, China didn't particularly want anything from the West. It was Europe that finally integrated the global world system in the 1500s, not China. Key takeaways The three major social systems that characterize all societies are cultural, economic and political systems. Previous world systems before today were not global, but were smaller worlds that were relatively closed to outside influences. In the pre-global world, the most important integrative forces were the nomadic steppe kingdoms of Central Asia.