ABSTRACT
It was intended in part as a corrective to Immanuel Wallerstein's work on the sixteenth-century et seq. world-system. The chapter's criticism was that Wallerstein, while creatively extending the work of other historians and correcting for some of their biases, had still accepted the main line of western historical scholarship: namely, that the 'story' becomes interesting only with the 'rise of the West' after 1450. The major metatheoretical dilemma in the work was to see elements of continuity and discontinuity between what conceptualized as successive but linked world-system stages; and to account for how and why the transition occurred when it did. Once again, Central Asia was poised in opposition to China as it had traditionally been and presented a barrier rather than a frictionless medium through which trade and exchange moved relatively freely. Even after the closing of the Central Asian frontier, however, the sea trade from the Red Sea to the east.
