Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
To Start: Understanding the World in Which We Live ix
1. Historical Origins of World-Systems Analysis: From Social Science Disciplines to Historical Social Sciences 1
2. The Modern World-System as a Capitalist World-Economy: Production, Surplus-Value, and Polarization 23
3. The Rise of the States-System: Sovereign Nation-States, Colonies, and the Interstate System 41
4. The Creation of a Geoculture: Ideologies, Social Movements, Social Science 60
5. The Modern World-System in Crisis: Bifurcation, Chaos, and Choices 76
Glossary 91
Bibliographical Guide 101
Index 105

Promotional Information

An introduction to world systems analysis by its creator.

About the Author

Immanuel Wallerstein is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. Among his many books are The Modern World-System (three volumes); The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-first Century; Utopistics: Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-first Century; and Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. He is the recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award and is a former president of the International Sociological Association.

Reviews

"At a time when globalization is at the center of international debate from Davos to Porto Alegre, an introduction to 'world-systems analysis,' an original approach to world development since the sixteenth century, is timely and relevant. This is a lucidly written and comprehensive treatment of its origins, controversies, and development by Immanuel Wallerstein, its undoubted pioneer and most eminent practitioner."--Eric Hobsbawm, author of Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century "Immanuel Wallerstein's mind can reach as far and encompass as much as anyone's in our time. The world, to him, is a vast, integrated system, and he makes the case for that vision with an elegant and almost relentless logic. But he also knows that to see as he does requires looking through a very different epistemological lens than the one most of us are in the habit of using. So his gift to us is not just a new understanding of how the world works but a new way of apprehending it. A brilliant work on both scores."--Kai Erikson, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of Sociology and American Studies, Yale University