ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the social and economic agency of people in relation to large-scale, long-term socioeconomic trends. He highlights the spatial hierarchy within world-economies, which were often divided into a core, a middle zone and a vast periphery. The author provides an early blueprint for the notion of the global city itself. There have been world-economies if not always, at least for a very long time – just as there have been societies, civilizations, states and even empires. Moreover since each world-economy lasted a very long time, it changed and developed within its own boundaries, so that its successive ages and different states also suggest some comparisons. The data available is sufficiently plentiful to allow us to construct a typology of world-economies and at the very least to formulate a set of rules or tendencies which will clarify and even define their relations with geographical space.
