ancient cities

970 World-Systems Perspective
Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Samir Amin, Andre
Gunder Frank, and a few others. The three volumes
of The Modern World-System by Wallerstein,
published in 1974, 1980, and 1989, laid out a firm
foundation for the development of the field by
outlining a number of key concepts and formulations.
The Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton
University, State University of New York, where
Wallerstein was based from 1976 to 2005, has been
instrumental for the development of world-systems
studies along with its journal Review (1977–
present). In 1977, Wallerstein helped to found a
new section under the American Sociological
Association: the Political Economy of the World
System (PEWS), which organizes an annual meeting
on world-systems studies and has attracted
researchers across academic disciplines. The
Institute for Research on World-Systems, founded
by Christopher Chase-Dunn at the University of
California, Riverside, is another key institution in
the field. The Journal of World-Systems Research
(1995–present) is the official publication for the
PEWS section, and it regularly organizes theme
issues featuring current debates in the field.
The main areas of focus for world-systems studies
include world economic relations and inequality,
trends and cycles of capitalist expansion and
contraction, interstate relations and the rise and
fall of hegemony, prehistoric and premodern
world-systems, and third-world development.
Since the 1990s, facing new empirical conditions
of the world economy, the WSP has incorporated
a few new research areas, such as transnational
social movements; global economic restructuring
of manufacturing and services; climate change and
environmental activism; transnational capitalist
class and corporate networks; global food problems
such as commodification of food, land rights,
and displacement of peasants; and grassroots
movements against food insecurity. What unifies
these different research areas is the common
assumption that political and socioeconomic processes
should be studied in their world-historical
context and from a relational perspective focusing
on uneven development.
The key concepts laid out by Wallerstein include
totality, world economies, world empires, and core,
semiperiphery, and periphery relations. Wallerstein
is interested in social change over a long historical
period, and he takes the capitalist world economy
as the basic unit of analysis. He identifies three
types of totality or historical modes—minisystems,
world economies, and world empires. Minisystems
are tribal economies based on a single culture, and
most of them have been swallowed up by modernization
and capitalist development. World economies
and world empires are world systems based
on multiple cultures. Both seek the extraction of
economic surplus, but they employ a different
mode of extraction, with the world economy based
on unequal division of labor and market exchange
and the world empire based on state-sponsored
tributary systems such as colonies and empires.
To use the sixteenth century as an example,
China was a world empire organized around one
political center and ruled by mandarins who could
enforce policies over its vast territory, whereas
Europe was a world economy organized as a set of
competing states with different strengths, where
financial capital had great influence over state
policies. There is a high degree of interdependence
between world economies and world empires
because surplus extraction characterizes both market
exchange and interstate relations.
Corresponding to the distinction between world
economies and world empires, world-systems
scholars have investigated, respectively, the political
and economic dimensions of the world-systems.
With regard to the political dimension, researchers
focus on interstate systems such as imperialism
and hegemony. According to Wallerstein, imperialism
refers to the domination of weak states or
regions by strong states, whereas hegemony refers
to the temporary domination of one core state over
all other states. World-systems scholars have examined
hegemonic cycles, conflicts, and stability
within the hierarchy of nation-states, as well as the
key determinants of interstate relations. They view
capitalist economic systems and individual countries’
ability to extract economic surplus as the
primary determinants of the interstate hierarchy,
with military–political capacity as a secondary
support for hegemonic assertions. Holland, Britain,
and the United States are examples of hegemonic
powers throughout the modern history, and each
of them rose to a dominant position based on a
different mode of surplus extraction.
With regard to the economic dimension, the key
formulation is core, semiperiphery, and periphery
relations. According to the WSP, capitalism is a