ABSTRACT
This chapter presents tentative conclusions about how modes of accumulation have become transformed in world-systems. It also considers the implications of comparative world-systems approach for understanding the possible futures of the modern world-system. One of the main purposes in developing the comparative world-systems framework was to study how transformations of systemic logic have actually occurred in world-systems. Transformations occurred over very long time periods, and the processes involved both slow cumulation of changes by the diffusion of technologies and institutions, and more cataclysmic events in which structures were erected over the top of or in between earlier structures. The common feature is that even though transformational institutions tended to arise first in the semiperiphery, it was necessary for a core polity to become the agent of a mode of accumulation in order for that mode to become predominant. The chapter examines the contemporary transformation problem in comparative context by briefly cataloging possible changes and assessing the likelihood of each.
