ABSTRACT
Immanuel Wallerstein is generally considered the driving intellectual force behind the “world-system” school of thought. He has articulated his view of development in a series of books and articles, perhaps the best known of which is The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Academic Press, 1974). Wallerstein sees dependency theory as a sub-set of his broader world-system perspective. In this chapter, he attempts to explain the existence of the gap between rich and poor countries by arguing that all states form part of a capitalist world economy in which the existence of differences in wealth is not an anomaly but rather a natural outcome of the fundamental processes driving that economy. According to this perspective, the gap between rich and poor ultimately will disappear, but only when the capitalist world system that has been in place since the sixteenth century itself disappears.
