The Uruk World System

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The Uruk World System is written by Guillermo Algaze and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0226013812 (ISBN 10) and 9780226013817 (ISBN 13).

From this he concludes that economic exploitation of less developed peripheral areas was integral to the earliest development of civilization in the ancient Near East. However, the early Mesopotamian outposts did not endure long. They either collapsed or were withdrawn by the end of the fourth millennium B.C. According to Algaze, this is explained, in part, by the impact that the outposts had on the sociopolitical evolution of peripheral societies. He argues that the cross-cultural contacts initiated by the intrusions would have led to an initial strengthening of local chiefs, so that in some cases local communities soon became expansive in their own right. This unintended consequence would have required core polities either to arrive at more formal (political and military) modes of domination or, alternately, to abandon the periphery altogether, ceding control of trade routes to the newly emerging local powers