Book Review: Richard Rubinson (ed.) Dynamics of World Development, Political Economy of the World-Systems Annuals, vol. 4 (Beverley Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1981, 288 pp., £18.95, pbk., £8.25)

1982 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-256
Author(s):  
Diana Tussie
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World Systems ◽  
The World ◽  
World Development

Rise and Fall

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 727-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
E. Susan Manning ◽  
Thomas D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Global System ◽  
Systems Perspective ◽  
Early States ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Regional System

The world-systems perspective was invented for modeling and interpreting the expansion and deepening of the capitalist regional system as it emerged in Europe and incorporated the whole globe over the past 500 years (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994). The idea of a core/periphery hierarchy composed of “advanced” economically developed and powerful states dominating and exploiting “less developed” peripheral regions has been a central concept in the world-systems perspective. In the last decade the world-systems approach has been extended to the analysis of earlier and smaller intersocietal systems. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills (1994) have argued that the contemporary global political economy is simply a continuation of a 5,000-year-old world system that emerged with the first states in Mesopotamia. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) have modified the basic world-systems concepts to make them useful for a comparative study of very different kinds of systems. They include very small intergroup networks composed of sedentary foragers, as well as larger systems containing chiefdoms, early states, agrarian empires, and the contemporary global system in their scope of comparison.

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