ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two domains in which the imperial difference in Eastern Europe is relevant to world-systems analysis. First, in the production of epistemic frames and second, in the conceptualisation of the alleged anomalies in the course of capitalist development. During the first modernity, when the secondary and peripheral Europe of the fifteenth century became the conquering Europe in the Atlantic and at the same time the first center of the capitalist world-system, both the European territorial dominance and the extent of its epistemic power were still partial. Western Europe's neocolonial relationship with its Eastern agrarian zones and the modes of labor control instituted as a result have been theorized in Romania as early as the nineteenth century in terms strikingly similar to those used in dependency theory a century later. The form of labor control labeled in Romania "neoserfdom" would enter world-systems analysis as "coerced cash-crop labor".
