Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

119 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
comprehend that messy and evolving web of relations we call capitalism. In much the same
fashion, the Nature/Society binary short-circuits research into the cumulatively- and cyclicallyevolving
configurations of human and extra-human nature over the longue durée, including the
movements of the present crisis.
The problem with taking history seriously is that it “continually messes up the neat
conceptual frameworks and the more or less elegant theoretical speculations” we’ve worked so
hard to construct (Arrighi 2000:117). The relation of theory and history is of course at the center
of a vast literature in historical sociology, and I will not reprise the debates here. 12
I do wish,
however, to place the methodological and theoretical implications of Arrighi’s accounting of
historical capitalism into dialogue with the challenges of rethinking modernity as a socioecological
process and project.
If history has its way of “messing up” our models, how do we respond? We can begin
with a reflexive approach to specificity, in two principal ways. The first involves the conceptualhistorical
task; the second, a historical-conceptual challenge. We may consider these in turn.
The conceptual-historical task implicates the reflexive interrogation of the relation
between theory and history in successive phases of capitalist development. A concept of
imperialism appropriate to the analysis of world power in the 17 th century is unlikely to be
adequate for explaining the “new imperialisms” of subsequent eras. 13 Arrighi often reminded
students that while the signifier, “imperialism,” had remained constant over the 20 th century, the
bundle of relations that it signified had changed substantially. 14
This sensibility informs his first
rule for the conceptual mapping of historical capitalism:
The idea still dominant in world-system analysis of a quantitatively expanding
but structurally invariant world capitalist system must be abandoned, including
and especially the notion of Kondratieff cycles, hegemonic cycles, and logistics
as empirical manifestations of such a structural invariance (2004:38).
The temptations of “structural invariance” find traction beyond world-systems analysis.
In the closely related field of world environmental history, commercialization often appears as a
primary form of structural invariance, through which market forces inflict great damage to
landscapes (e.g. Richards 2003; Hughes 2001). But this forgets that world markets are not created
equal. The world market of the long 16 th century, and the world market today, are not only
quantitatively, but also qualitatively variant. Conceptual specificity and empirical specificity are
dialectically bound. There is, then, good reason – for environmental historians and world-systems
analysts both – to revisit the kind of conceptual-historical sensibility Marx evinced in observing
that “every particular historical mode of production has its own special laws of population”
(1976:784). Can we not also include, alongside population, specific socio-ecological
configurations of market exchange, industry, business enterprise, class structure, imperial power,
and urbanization in successive eras of capitalism? This observation poses new questions
12 Classic texts are Abrams (1982), Burke (1980), and Skocpol (1984).
13 This is not to rule out the cross-fertilization of concepts. Consider Chase-Dunn and Hall’s classic work
on comparing world-systems over the longue durée of civilization (1997).
14 An argument Arrighi developed throughout his career (1978b, 2007, 2009).