ABSTRACT
Studying thousands of years of world system history is an ambitious undertaking. Attempting to explain what happened over the long term in a non-descriptive fashion is even more ambitious. For that matter, ‘merely’ describing what took place in recorded history is no simple feat. Thus, it is fortunate that a number of social scientists have begun to tackle such projects. The undertaking will no doubt require a small army with each platoon chipping away at their version of history’s reality. The armies are necessary because the task is imposing. It is also important. For, fundamentally, what each perspective on world system history shares is a commitment to the idea that contemporary structures and processes are embedded in a long-term, historically contingent context. To make sense of these contemporary structures and processes, it is necessary to appreciate how and why they have assumed their present form. In many cases, the present forms may not be much different from older forms. Indeed, a central question is to what extent have major structures and processes been characterized by continuity-and how far back in time does that continuity extend? Social science students of world system history are betting that the continuity extends back much farther than most people realize. In the 1970s, world system analysis was provocative and revolutionary because the argument was that we needed to encompass the last five hundred years in our models of socioeconomic and political behavior, and to do so from a systemic perspective. In the 1990s, the new assertion is that hundreds of years are no longer sufficient. Now, it is thousands of years that must be accommodated in our theories and analyses of systemic change.
