ABSTRACT
World-systems theory (WST) argues that any country’s development conditions and prospects are primarily shaped by economic processes, commodities chains, divisions of labour, and geopolitical relationships operating at the global scale. World-systems theorists posit the existence of a single global economic system since at least the outset of European industrialization around 1780-90. According to WST doyen Immanuel Wallerstein and others, the global system dates back even further, to at least 1450, when international trade began to grow, and when Europe embarked on its ‘age of discovery’ and colonization (Frank and Gills, 1993). Contrary to much social science thinking, WST stresses the futility of a ‘statist orientation’ – that is, the attempt to analyse or generate development by focusing at the level of individual countries, each of which is profoundly shaped by world-system opportunities and constraints (Bair, 2005).
