ABSTRACT
The wording of the “Call for Papers” for this collection of essays was taken directly from Combined and Uneven Development, a book which scholars at the Warwick Research Collective published in 2015, and which proposed a new theory of “world-literature” as the literature of the world-system. After all, scholars passionately committed to anti- or counter-exceptionalist perspectives continue to work perfectly comfortably with the idea that what is identified by “world-system” might just be the global aggregate of all the nation-states – they continue to work, that is to say, with the idea that the “world” in “world-system” is merely the product of all of the nation-states that make it up. To posit the modern world as a singular system has the undoubted merit of acknowledging the structural connectedness of its operative inequalities, arising from the territorial partition of the globe by the imperial powers during the final decades of the nineteenth century.
