Impact of Imperial Discourses on Changing Subjectivities in Core and Periphery: A Study of British India and British Nigeria

Eurocentric imperialism incorporated the non-European geographical region in the economic and political milieu of Europe and made the world a global whole. To Mitchel Foucault, the process started with endo-colonization of European people and advent of rational governance exercises experimented first in European states and later exported to non-western regions. The study aims to analyze the different outcomes of European governmentality in European core and non-European periphery and changing subjectivities and cognitions in non-European world with ruptures accompanied by European modernity. The theoretical frame and conceptual toolkit of Archaeology/Genealogy, Governmentality, Power/knowledge etc. are borrowed from Michel Foucault the postmodern historian of ideas. For analytical purpose, the concept of Archeological historicity is linked with World System approach as employed by Lenin and Immanuel Wallerstein. The analytical scheme is to describe events in longue durée from sixteenth century; record shifts in the core Europe, and parallel shifts in peripheral colonial/postcolonial world, to understand the material and discursive conditions of existence. The finding of research is that events and processes lead to different outcomes in core and periphery. A two-level comparison is made: the comparison of European Core with two peripheral regions, i.e., British India and British Nigeria and comparison of two peripheral regions incorporated in the world system as reservoirs of raw material and market

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Notes from the Editors, November 2019

Monthly Review ◽

10.14452/mr-071-06-2019-10_0 ◽

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.

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

Alma mater Vestnik Vysshey Shkoly ◽

10.20339/am.02-21.072 ◽

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).

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Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. (Studies in Social Discontinuity.) New York: Academic Press. 1974. Pp. xiv, 410. $16.50

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/ahr/80.5.1323 ◽

1975 ◽

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

World Economy ◽

World System ◽

Modern World ◽

Academic Press ◽

Immanuel Wallerstein

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The Growth of the World SystemThe Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-1750.Immanuel Wallerstein

American Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1086/227600 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol 87 (6) ◽

pp. 1389-1395 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Arthur L. Stinchcombe

Keyword(s):

World Economy ◽

World System ◽

Modern World ◽

The World ◽

Immanuel Wallerstein

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Empire, imperialism and the Bush doctrine

Review of International Studies ◽

10.1017/s0260210504006242 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 30 (4) ◽

pp. 585-608 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Michael Cox

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

International Relations ◽

World System ◽

Class Struggle ◽

International History ◽

The Past ◽

Bush Doctrine ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

State Survival

It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world.If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.

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World-System Theory

International Relations ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0272 ◽

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).

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