ABSTRACT
In his singularly impressive and important work, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond demonstrates more convincingly than anybody in my opinion why Europe “won,” or put differently, why it was this relatively small archipelago, appended to a huge Asian landmass thumbing into the Atlantic Ocean, that created the preconditions and the fundamentals for a system of society, governance, warfare, economy, and culture that was to conquer the rest of the world. Best known under the term “capitalism,” the search for and analysis of its origins and nature gave rise to virtually every discipline of what we have come to know as the social sciences. And capitalism's trials and tribulations continue to nurture them. In his own magnum opus, The Modern World System, Immanuel Wallerstein analyzes capitalism's rise to a “world system” by assigning it a core, a semi-periphery, and also a periphery. To no one's surprise, capitalism's core rests in the northwestern part of the Atlantic Ocean anchored in the Low Countries and, most important, Great Britain.
