scholarly journals Special Contribution: Interview with Immanuel Wallerstein “Retrospective on the Origins of World-Systems Analysis

2013 ◽  
pp. 202-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
New Left ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Special Contribution ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Modem World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Methodological Holism

Nearly four decades ago, in 1974, Immanuel Wallerstein published the first volume of his magnum opus, The Modem World-System. That same year, Perry Anderson, British historian and editor of the New Left Review, released the first two installments of his own large-scale history on the origins of modernity. The coincidence of publication invited many scholarly comparisons of their macro-historical perspectives. It is noteworthy that both writers think in terms of totalities. To totalize is to insist on methodological holism. Wallerstein conceives of totality in terms of world-systems, while Anderson advocates for totalization. This is a meaningful contrast. World-systems are closed totalities in the sense that they are historical systems, with a beginning, an end, and identifiable geographical boundaries. Totalization is historically open-ended, and thus invites analyses, in Anderson's case, beginning in Antiquity and without a specified end. While they each write about the modern world, Wallerstein and Anderson conceive of that world in drastically different terms. Neither scholar, however, has asserted his view as a singular paradigm of social analysis. Wallerstein has instead claimed world-systems to be a "call for a debate about the paradigm."

The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914, Immanuel Wallerstein, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 273-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Khachaturian
Keyword(s):  
World System ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Alternative Mode ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Systems Framework

AbstractThe book continues Immanuel Wallerstein’s historical narrative of the modern world-system. It focuses primarily on the social and political developments in the European core during the nineteenth century, tracing the rise of liberal hegemony, the growth of the administrative state, and the emergence of modern social science. It also examines the rise of anti-systemic socialist, feminist, and nationalist movements that challenged the liberal project. The book successfully illustrates how the world-systems framework can be used to analyse the intersection between the national and the international spheres. Through its historical critique of the human sciences, it also makes an effective case for the viability of world-systems analysis as an alternative mode of critical social-scientific inquiry.

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 Piracy in a Contested Periphery: Incorporation and the Emergence of the Modern World-System in the Colonial Atlantic Frontier

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 542-564
Author(s):  
P. Nick Kardulias ◽  
Emily Butcher
Keyword(s):  
Systems Analysis ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
World System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
World Systems ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Distinct Line ◽  
Freedom Of Action

This article uses world-systems analysis to examine the role that pirates and privateers played in the competition between European core states in the Atlantic and Caribbean frontier during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Piracy was an integral part of core-periphery interaction, as a force that nations could use against one another in the form of privateers, and as a reaction against increasing constraints on freedom of action by those same states, thus forming a semiperiphery. Although modern portrayals of pirates and privateers paint a distinct line between the two groups, historical records indicate that their actual status was rather fluid, with particular people moving back and forth between the two. As a result, the individuals were on a margin between legality and treason, often crossing from one to the other. In this study we discuss how pirates and privateers fit into the margins of society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also known as the Golden Age of Piracy, specifically using the example of Edward Teach, aka Blackbeard. The present analysis can contribute to our understanding not only of piracy, but also of the structure of peripheries and semiperipheries that in some ways reflect resistance to incorporation.

scholarly journals Anthropocene Fiction and World-Systems Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-371
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
James Burgann Milner
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Systems Analysis ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Annales School

As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein’s work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s L’apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova’s La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply “distant reading” more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner’s model of the “global SF field” identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed “Anthropocene fictions” and Daniel Bloom “cli-fi”, which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.  

scholarly journals Nuclear War in the Rivalry Phase of the Modern World-System

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 348-371
Author(s):  
Robert A. Denemark
Keyword(s):  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
World System ◽  
Modern World ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Way

Large-scale war is a world-system phenomenon of the rivalry phase. Such conflicts have once again become a concern, and nuclear weapons make these prospects especially dangerous. This is particularly problematic since several world-systems perspectives suggest the chances for war will be greatest in the period from 2030 to 2050. I review the logic of rivalry, the reasons for the endurance of nuclear weapons, old and new nuclear strategies, and the processes that may pose the greatest existential dangers. Chase-Dunn and Podobnik (1995) identified processes that militate both in favor of and in opposition to nuclear war, and I pay particular attention to the way in which world-systems developments that increase the likelihood of major war have persisted, while those that retard the chances for major war have diminished. These dangers suggest that it may be time to turn some of our attention to the dynamics of systemic war and nuclear weapons.

scholarly journals Spaces, Trajectories, Maps: Towards a World-Systems Biography of Immanuel Wallerstein

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 448-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georgi Derluguian
Keyword(s):  
Systems Analysis ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
World Systems Analysis ◽  
Intellectual Movement

World-systems analysis, although itself a macrohistorical perspective, eminently allows for writing individual biographies because these are structurally conditioned and historically contingent trajectories developing in specific time and space. The biographical genre seems particularly useful in intellectual popularization and in exploring how macro-level concepts behave in observed empirical situations. This article offers and demonstrates specific recommendations and methodological warnings in application to the personal trajectory of Immanuel Wallerstein, the founder of world-systems analysis as an intellectual movement.

Capitalism, Structural Crisis and Contemporary Social Movements: An Interview with Immanuel Wallerstein

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaël Curty
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Systems Analysis ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Political Action ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Porto Alegre ◽  
Capitalist World Economy ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Immanuel Wallerstein ◽  
World Systems Analysis

Immanuel Wallerstein is internationally recognized as the founder of world-systems analysis and is highly regarded for his groundbreaking analysis of the capitalist world-economy. In this excerpted interview, Immanuel Wallerstein analyzes the contemporary struggles between social movements representing the ‘spirit of Davos’ and the ‘spirit of Porto Alegre’ and explores the possibilities for social and political action for more equality and democracy in the 21st century.

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