ABSTRACT

World-systems theory (WST) argues that any country’s development conditions and prospects are shaped primarily by economic processes, commodities chains, divisions of labour and geopolitical relationships operating at the global scale. World-systems theorists posit the existence of a single global economic system since at least the start of European industrialization around 1780-90. According to WST doyen Immanuel Wallerstein, and others, the global system dates back even further, to at least 1450, when international trade began to grow, and when Europe embarked on the ‘age of discovery’ and colonization (Frank and Gills 1993). Contrary to much social science thinking, WST stresses the futility of a ‘statist orientation’ – that is, the attempt to analyse or generate

development by focusing at the level of individual countries, each of which is profoundly shaped by world-system opportunities and constraints (Bair 2005).