ABSTRACT
Immanuel Wallerstein counters that the modern world was built by a reconversion of the upper class from landed seigniors to capitalist bourgeois in order to maintain and expand their hold on surplus-value. The world-economy was actually constructed first and, within its framework, nation-states developed through a process of "densification." Sovereignty is a word that came into the political jargon in the sixteenth century. Sovereignty means that a state has the right to a monopoly of force within its boundaries, provided it is organized with respect to and recognized by the existing interstate system. The saga of an expansive world economy is a European saga; the history of the global economy is the history of European expansion and dominion. The global economy had its beginning, then, in the 15th century, when the Europeans first left their shores and crossed the ocean: Christopher Columbus to what came to be known as America in 1492; Vasco da Gama to India in 1498.
