ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by presenting a working typology of world-systems as a tool for making comparisons. A world-system is composed not only of intersocietal interactions but also of the totality of interactions that constitute the whole social, economic, and political system. The chapter begins a comparative study of world-systems with those sedentary foragers who lived most of the year in hamlets. It includes under the heading "kin-based mode dominant" all those world-systems in which none of the societies may be said to have had states. The chapter hypothesizes that primary state-based world-systems were politically structured as interstate systems of competing city-states within a core region. Secondary multicentric empire systems are distinguished from primary empire systems by the prior existence of empires and often by the larger size of the constituent empires. Armed with a working typology and some guides for mapping world-systems, the chapter suggests how to begin building a theory of world-system transformations.
