World-System Theory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
Marilyn Grell-Brisk
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World System ◽  
World Market ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein

The world-system perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 when social scientists contemplated the meaning of Latin American dependency theory for Africa. Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi developed slightly different versions of the world-system perspective in interaction with each other. The big idea was that the global system had a stratified structure on inequality based on institutionalized exploitation. This implied that the whole system was the proper unit of analysis, not national societies, and that development and underdevelopment had been structured by global power relations for centuries. The modern world-system is a self-contained entity based on a geographically differentiated division of labor and bound together by a world market. In Wallerstein’s version capitalism had become predominant in Europe and its peripheries in the long 16th century and had expanded and deepened in waves. The core states were able to concentrate the most profitable economic activities and they exploited the semi-peripheral and peripheral regions by means of colonialism and the emergent international division of labor, which relies on unequal exchange. The world-system analysts all focused on global inequalities, but their terminologies were somewhat different. Amin and Frank talked about center and periphery. Wallerstein proposed a three-tiered structure with an intermediate semiperiphery between the core and the periphery, and he used the term core to suggest a multicentric region containing a group of states rather than the term center, which implies a hierarchy with a single peak. When the world-system perspective emerged, the focus on the non-core (periphery and semiperiphery) was called Third Worldism. Current terminology refers to the Global North (the core) and the Global South (periphery and semiperiphery).

Devolution processes and the theory of historical development by S. Sanderson

2021 ◽  
pp. 72-77
Author(s):  
A.V. Verkhoturov ◽  
◽  
A.A. Obukhov
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
World System ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Evolutionary Trend ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
Main Ideas

Analyzed is one of the most comprehensive modern approaches to the problem of the existence of evolution of human society as such and of specific human communities, i.e. “General Theory of Historical Development” by American historian and sociologist Stephen Sanderson. While agreeing, in general, with its main ideas, we believe that it is important to note that the issue of existence of individual communities demonstrating devolution (regression to an earlier historical state), stagnation or degeneration at certain historical stages is practically ignored in the framework of the theory under consideration. This creates its vulnerability in the face of specific empirical data, indicating a deviation from the evolutionary trend. We believe that overcoming this theoretical difficulty is possible in the process of comprehending the theory of S. Sanderson in the context of ideas of the world-system approach of Immanuel Wallerstein. We want to show that examples of devolution, stagnation and degeneration of societies do not deny general progressive evolutionary tendencies, characteristic for the world-system as a whole, but only indicate the transition of a particular society to a lower level within the world-system (from the core to the semi-periphery, or from the semi-periphery to the periphery).

Notes from the Editors, November 2019

2019 ◽  
pp. c2-64
Author(s):  
The Editors
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Monthly Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein

buy this issue Immanuel Wallerstein, the celebrated world-systems theorist and longtime contributor to Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press, died on August 31, 2019. Wallerstein first achieved international fame with the publication in 1974 of his The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (the first in a four-volume masterwork on the Modern World-System. We pay tribute to Wallerstein in this new issue of Monthly Review.

scholarly journals Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences

2006 ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuela Boatca
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Past ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The World ◽  
Systemic Crisis ◽  
Late Modern

This paper claims that, since many of the concepts relevant to our analysis of systemic change were coined in and about the core, the potential with which solutions to world-systemic crisis are credited in the long run should be assessed differently depending on the structural location of their origin. In the periphery, such concepts as conservatism, socialism and even liberalism took forms that often retained nothing of the original model but the name, such that strategies of applying them to (semi)peripheral situations ranged from “stretching the ideology” to “discarding the (liberal) myth” altogether. In a first step, “the hypothesis of semiperipheral development” (Chase-Dunn and Hall), according to which the semiperiphery represents the most likely locus of political, economical, and institutional change, is amended to say that, at least for the late modern world-system, the strength of the semiperiphery resides primarily in the cultural and epistemic sphere. In a second step, this contention is illustrated with the help of major challenges that the Eastern European and Latin American (semi)peripheries have posed to the world-system’s political fields and institutional settings both in the past and to date—with different degrees of success corresponding to their respective structural position. In light of these examples, it is argued that a comparative analysis of continuities among political epistemologies developed in the semiperiphery can help us understand the ways in which similar attempts can become antisystemic today.

Two Paths of Agrarian Capitalism, or a Critique of Chayanovian Marxism

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-627 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lehmann
Keyword(s):  
World System ◽  
The State ◽  
Structural Function ◽  
Subsistence Agriculture ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The Core ◽  
Cheap Labour ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein

In the ideology of “dependency” and the “world system” the preservation of a comprador bourgeoisie highly dependent on its control of the state apparatus perpetuates the condition of underdevelopment to the benefit not only of that class but also of the world capitalist system, and obviously to the detriment of the remainder of the population of poor countries (Wallerstein 1984). According to these theories, the condition of dependency is sustained also by the perpetuation of petty-commodity production and other precapitalist relationships. In his enumeration of the implications of accumulation in “socially and sectorally disarticulated economies” (that is, third world countries), Alain de Janvry, who places himself, with some reservations, in the world-system school, states that “subsistence agriculture becomes the ultimate embodiment of the contradictions of accumulation in the disarticulated economies; … the peasant household constitutes an articulated-dominated purveyor of cheap labour and cheap food [even though] subsistence agriculture slowly disintegrates under this domination as it performs its essential structural function under disarticulated accumulation” (1981:39). For Immanuel Wallerstein, the state-class relationship and the persistence of pettycommodity production are both features of the “peripheral condition” and explain why it is so difficult (though not absolutely impossible) in his schema for countries to graduate from his periphery and semiperiphery to the core of advanced economies. The argument runs as follows: in its expansion across the globe the capitalist world economy creates social structures and state structures that fit the needs of the core economies by establishing a ruling class in control of the state and holding monopoly power within the national economy.

scholarly journals Ontological Continuity in the Modern World-System: Agency, Areas, and the Structures-of-Knowledge Approach

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Grant Kimberlin
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Labor Economic ◽  
The Third ◽  
Units Of Analysis ◽  
Interstate System ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein

With the passing of Immanuel Wallerstein, it is worthwhile to take note of his contribution to problematizing the unit of analysis. Rather than the states-as-containers interpretation, Wallerstein contributed that spatiotemporal units of analysis could be more meaningfully discussed in terms of their interactions within a larger system. The more well-known of his arenas are the axial division of labor (economic) and the interstate system (political). The third, the structures-of-knowledge methodology, aims to expand the “broadly cultural” arena as well. This paper will consider his project of reasserting agency through structural metanarrative with suggestions for ways to use his analysis to lend greater continuity to area-knowledge at a crucial time of transition.

scholarly journals CAPITALISM, SLAVERY AND THE MAKING OF BRAZILIAN SLAVEHOLDING CLASS: A THEORETICAL DEBATE ON WORLD-SYSTEM PERSPECTIVE

Almanack ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 151-175
Author(s):  
Marcelo Rosanova Ferraro
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
World System ◽  
World Market ◽  
System Perspective ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Class A ◽  
The World ◽  
Northern United States

Abstract This article examines the connections between slavery and capitalism in the making of the nineteenth-century Brazilian slaveholding class through a theoretical debate of global history and World System perspective. The expansion of the coffee frontier in Parahyba Valley was connected to the world market after the Industrial Revolution, and there planters emerged unifying national slaveholders interests through state institutions. Therefore, the making of the Brazilian slaveholding class in the 1830s and its crisis after the 1860s was as much a part of the World System dynamic as the rise and decline of other ruling classes in the nineteenth century, like the slaveholding classes of Cuba and the southern United States and the bourgeoisies of Europe and the northern United States.

The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (5) ◽  
pp. 1372-1385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harsha Ram
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Singular System ◽  
World System ◽  
World Market ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The World

One of the Principal Challenges Facing the Study of Global Modernisms, as of Any Transnational Cultural Phenomenon, is the question of scale. In declaring the contemporary world to be “one, and unequal,” several recent theorizations of world literature rest on the foundational assumption of a unified—albeit uneven—planetary scale (Moretti, “Conjectures” 56; see also Casanova 62-74; WREC 6-12). As such they model the dynamic of literary circulation across world regions according to the geographic distances, as well as the disproportionate access to socioeconomic and cultural resources, that separate and distinguish the world's centers from their peripheries. These distances, and the inequalities they generate, are perceived as the necessary by-products of two spatial logics, that of the expanding world market and that of the modern Westphalian system of sovereign and competing nation-states. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequalities, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century and from its simultaneous unification in the wake of accelerating trade and new infrastructures of transport and communication. Nevertheless, the premise of a singular modernity (Jameson 142) has been repeatedly challenged (Chakrabarty 6-16; Mitchell; Scott 113-15; Orsini). It has been faulted for its developmentalist logic, involving an implied or explicit adherence to the related assumptions of linear or stadial historicism and spatial diffusionism, which together reduce the negotiated impact of modernity on the world's far-flung regions to a process of top-down modernization originating in and imposed by the West. The force of this critique is blunted once the world system (Wallerstein; Hopkins et al.) is grasped as a profoundly uneven totality, allowing us to view the multiply differentiated space-times that coexist in the global present as produced by the imbalances constituting the world system as such (in literary scholarship, see Anderson, “Modernity”; Moretti, Modern Epic 50-52; Wollaeger 13-14; Lazarus 232-41, WREC 1-95; for corresponding debates in historiography and the social sciences, see Harootunian 62-63; Cooper 113-49; Chibber).

scholarly journals World-Systems Analysis, Globalization, and Incorporated Comparison

2000 ◽  
pp. 668-689 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip McMichael
Keyword(s):  
System Development ◽  
World System ◽  
World Market ◽  
World Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Local Sustainability ◽  
Epistemological Challenge ◽  
The World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
World Systems Analysis

When Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) subverted the mid-1970s social science scene with his concept of the ‘world-system,’ development, the ‘master’ concept of social theory, suffered a fatal blow. Wallerstein’s critique of development emphasized its misapplication as a national strategy in a hierarchical world where only some states can ‘succeed.’ Wallerstein’s path-breaking epistemological challenge to the modernization paradigm reformulated the unit of analysis of development from the nation-state to the ‘world-system.’ To be sure, the past three decades have seen reformulations, coined to address the failures of the development enterprise: frombasic needs, through participation in the world market, globalization, to local sustainability. But development, the organizing myth of our age, has never recovered.

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