Second age of nations

Three features and each marks a departure from the first age. Hierarchy replaces autonomy, so societies answer upward rather than governing themselves. Trade becomes the organizing principle rather than something that happens occasionally between complete societies. And a merchant class arises that is extranational, meaning outside the national structures it moves between and therefore not answerable to any of them. The third is the one Marsh treats as decisive, since a class not bound to any of the societies it operates among can arbitrage them and avoid the obligations each imposes on its own people, and being outside is what makes it powerful rather than marginal. A trade empire in her glossary is one including such a class and wealthy in large part because of trade, which makes the merchant class definitional rather than incidental. The religious shift accompanies the economic one. Animism, gynotheism and shamanism are the root first age beliefs that gave way to ancestor worship and androtheism during the second age, so the arrangement that reorganized production also reorganized what was worshipped. The third age extends the same line into a supranational empire where trade has fully abstracted the relationship between oligarchs and the people they exploit, which is the second age with the remaining distance removed.

World-systems theory after Wallerstein describes long-distance trade producing core and periphery relations, and the historiography of merchant diasporas, from Philip Curtin's cross-cultural trade to work on Armenian, Jewish and Hanseatic networks, documents exactly the extranational class Marsh names. Karl Polanyi argued that markets were embedded in societies before being disembedded. Archaeology of early states connects trade, hierarchy and record-keeping. Marsh's periodization is broader and less dated than any of these, treating the whole span from the first hierarchical empires to the modern era as one age, which sacrifices historical precision for a claim about structure.