ABSTRACT
Rosenberg and Boyle's ‘Understanding 2016: China, Brexit and Trump in the history of uneven and combined development’ (2019) is an insightful analysis. It leverages the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) derived from Trotsky's work on the puzzle of why the proletarian revolution emerged in underdeveloped Russia. The analysis fulfills many of the requirements for reinvigorating IPE set out by dissatisfied senior scholars who lament the narrowing of the study of IPE. But UCD is not unique in this regard. It shares many attributes with world-systems analysis (WSA). I argue that instead of searching for philosophical excuses for ignoring others, we should speak to similarities as well as differences, and seek insights from other perspectives. WSA insights on China, the west, the nature of combination and inequality, and the periphery, are then reviewed. I conclude that scholars of UCD and WSA should be considering one another’s work.
