Teggart attributed the successive waves of Northern Asian (Hun, Mongol, Manchu) invasions of Europe and China to the unanticipated consequences of Roman and Han foreign policy. Essentially, he argued that the Romans and Han kept pushing tribes in Central Asia back and forth between them. To escape the Roman and Han military pressure the tribes pushed into the territory of tribes to the north, and in a cascading domino fashion tribal pushing went all the way to the German and Hungarian area frontiers precipitating the invasions of Roman and the fall of the Roman Empire.
In this interpretation, the fall of the Roman and the Chinese empires was not a consequence of a centrifugal force arising from Northern Asia, but on the contrary, the consequence of stress between these very faraway entities.
All world-systems exhibit cyclical processes of change. There are two major cyclical phenomena: the rise and fall of large polities, and pulsations in the spatial extent and intensity of trade networks. "Rise and fall" corresponds to changes in the centralization of political/military power in a set of polities. It is a question of the relative size of and distribution of power across a set of interacting polities. The term "cycling" has been used to describe this phenomenon as it operates among chiefdoms (Anderson 1994).
I think history has been too short and we do not have enough experience to test this cycling theory.
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The amazing thing is that even in antiquity the economies of the West and China were linked - Roman coins have been found in ancient Chinese tombs. Today we are even more linked. I am amazed to hear the xenophobia and anti-trade sentiment that comes from the mouth of Obama and the left and the anti-immigrant sentiment from the right in the US - they should know that no "Chinese Wall" has ever been effective and that such barriers can only backfire. The only reason that US consumers are not suffering even though wages have risen very slowly is that they have been able to buy inexpensive Chinese goods that stretch their dollars at Walmart. The only reason our universities remain effective is because of all the Asians (there is only a limited supply of pure blooded Jews).
Why should American universities depend on Asians? Have WASPs become dumber they used to be? They were never too smart, yet they managed to beat Hitler and Saddam Hussein, build the highest skyscrapers and they even landed on the moon.
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