ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the roots of Immanuel Wallerstein’s Marxian World-Systems Analysis (WSA) to core debates of the period 1945–1970 regarding the concepts of: core-periphery of ECLA and dependency theory; Marx’s Asiatic mode of production; European historians’ differences regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism; and ‘total history’ of the ‘Annales School’ variety of historiography. Historically Wallerstein studied the growth, downturns, crises, and changing hegemonies and hubs, and expansions and contractions of the emerging and developing capitalist world-economy (CW-E) between 1300 and 1450 (in his book The Modern World-System I, henceforth MWS I), 1600–1750 (in MWS II), 1730–1840s (MWS III), and 1945–1967, and 1967–1973 (and MWS III and others). Thematically, he offered: his view of system; definitions of and assignment of specific economic roles to the three zones of the core-semi-periphery-periphery within the TimeSpace of spatio-temporal systems; concepts of world-system, world-empire, and world-economy; and dynamism imparted to the static spatial picture of the modern world-system (MWS) by four types of closely interrelated and interactive processes within it: cyclical rhythms, secular trends, contradictions, and crises; and account of states and states systems in the MWS, which together with classes, ethnic/national groups, households, etc. stem from the development of the CW-E, and postdate, not antedate capitalism. The chapter shows that, for Wallerstein, the state-system, state-building and geopolitics are the political aspects of the capitalist mode of production; states bear a deeper geographical reflection of core-peripheral production processes beyond this enforcement of unequal exchange, their positions varying as quasi-monopolies ‘exhaust themselves’; since possession or lack of hegemony affects the stances of states on the nature of the international trading order, the periodic appearance or disappearance of a hegemonic power is an explanatory task for theory; and ‘antisystemic movements’ and a geoculture are also products of the CW-E. The chapter also shows how Wallerstein charts the ‘long curve’ that depicts the ‘construction, definition, affirmation, and then decadence of U.S. hegemony’; divides the ‘long twentieth century’ into two halves, the ‘first’ starting from 1870 and ending around epoch-making 1968–1973, and the ‘second’ unfolding since then to the present; and debunks the recent rhetoric about globalization as ‘nothing but the basic operating principle’ of the CW-E. The chapter ends with internal historical critiques, external historical critiques, and external theoretical historical critiques of Wallerstein’s framework.
