ABSTRACT
The world-system “hypothesis” emerged as a response to the first Eurocentrism, which thought that Europe, since its supposed Greek and Medieval Latin origins, produced “from within” the values and the instrumental systems that were universalized in the last five centuries, that is, in the time of modernity. Without contradicting the perspective, although implying a completely different intellectual commitment, the concept of “post”-modernity indicates that there is a process that emerges “from within” modernity and reveals a state of crisis within globalization. China is one example that demonstrates the degree to which European world hegemony was impossible before the Industrial Revolution. Max Weber had the intuition that if Europe not been the region most prepared to carry out the Industrial Revolution, it would have been China or Hindustan. European hegemony, principally British and French, was a result of the Industrial Revolution, in turn ideologically based on the “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.”.
