"Most archaeologists and historians of the ancient Near East have focused on the internal transformations that led to the emergence of early cities and states in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers, in what is currently southern Iraq, during the fourth millennium B.C. In The Uruk World System Guillermo Algaze concentrates instead on a coterminous phenomenon: the wide-ranging expansion of southern Mesopotamian (Uruk) cultural influences and emplacements into portions of northern Iraq, northern Syria, and southeastern Turkey. In this extensive study, he contends that the emergence of Mesopotamian civilization cannot be understood without also taking into account developments in outlying areas surrounding the southern Iraqi alluvium. This edition includes a substantial new chapter that explores new data for the nature of Uruk settlement across Syro-Mesopotamia and discusses current interpretations of that phenomenon, which Algaze contends can be understood as the world's first colonial experiment."--Jacket.