World System Theory

World system theory (WST) is an explanation of the way in which the world has developed since 1500. The sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930) invented this concept in his 1974 book The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century and later followed up with two more volumes, taking the story to the nineteenth century. WST divides the world into a core, peripheries, semiperipheries, and external regions as a means of elucidating why certain regions in the world have developed to a greater extent than others. Many others, including sociologists and historians, have used this paradigm to understand economic, political, and social developments in the world. Most world histories in one way or another refer to this paradigm. Wallerstein used WST to explain world development up to the twentieth century in a series of subsequent volumes, though his work on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains the most influential.

Antecedents

Although WST was the first theory to encompass most of the world, there are a number of similar theories that preceded Wallerstein’s paradigm. Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), a French historian, published various books on regional economic networks, including the rise of capitalism in the world. His The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip Ⅱ, first published in 1949, presaged the largescale regional economic history that transcended political boundaries. Likewise in the mid-1960s, dependency theory emerged from Latin America, where a number of neo-Marxist authors argued that the economic development of that region had been distorted by the dependent relationship between the metropolis and satellites that continued beyond the colonial period. Dependency theory, like WST a bit later, argued that the underdevelopment of former colonies was the logical outcome of a capitalist world system that favored western Europe and, later, the United States.To a large extent, it was an answer to modernization theory, which developed after World War Ⅱ and which posited that the underdeveloped world was at an earlier phase of economic development and simply needed to catch up to the industrialized nations.

The Mechanics of World Trade

World systems theory has as its basis the assumption that unequal trade patterns have significant economic, social, and political consequences. Wallerstein created WST to explain the rise of western Europe as the major player in world history in the modern era and to show how Europe and, later, the United States remained in a dominant position since then. Wallerstein hypothesized that all regions within the world fell into one of his four general categories. Core regions are those that have strong states, manufacturing, freelabor regimes, and are able to take advantage of peripheral regions through the trade of manufactured goods for raw materials. Peripheries are the politically weak regions that produce the raw materials for the core. They are characterized by poverty among the majority of the population, based in part on the coerced cashcrop labor systems that are needed to provide the core with cheap raw materials. Semiperipheries are regions that are either on their way up to becoming core regions or core regions that have declined. Although they may wield significant military might, they are relatively weak economically visàvis the core and mainly have sharecropping (tenant farmers paying rent in the form of crops) within their own boundaries. External regions are those that have not yet been integrated into the world system.

Treaties and the World System

The following text is an extract of the first ten articles of a treaty between the British East India Company and the Nawab Shujau-d-daula, of Oudh, and the Nawab Najmu-d-daula, of Bengal set forth in 1765 after the British had established themselves as the rulers of Bengal. The treaty allows British control over trade, a military presence, and also requires Bengal to pay compensation to England for its expenses in the war. One-sided treaties such as these were a major factor in the European core establishing control over the Asian periphery.

Article 1. A perpetual and universal peace, sincere friendship, and firm union shall be established between His Highness Shujau-d-daula and his heirs, on the one part, and His Excellency Najmu-d-daula and the English East India Company on the other; so that the said contracting powers shall give the greatest attention to maintain between themselves, their dominions and their subjects this reciprocal friendship, without permitting, on either side, any kind of hostilities to be committed, from henceforth, for any cause, or under any pretence whatsoever, and everything shall be carefully avoided which might hereafter prejudice the union now happily established.

Article 2. In case the dominions of His Highness Shujau-d-daula shall at any time hereafter be attacked, His Excellency Najmu-d-daula and the English Company shall assist him with a part or the whole of their forces, according to the exigency of his affairs, and so far as may be consistent with their own security, and if the dominions of His Excellency Najmu-d-daula or the English Company, shall be attacked, His Highness shall be in like manner, assist them with a part of the whole of his forces. In the case of the English Company’s forces being employed in His Highness’s service, the extraordinary expense of the same is to be defrayed by him.

Article 3. His Highness solemnly engages never to entertain or receive Cossim Ally Khan, the late Soubahadar of Bengal, & C., Sombre, the assassin of the English, nor any of the European deserters, within his dominions, nor to give the least countenance, support, or protection to them. He likewise solemnly engages to deliver up to the English whatever European may in future desert from them into his country.

Article 4. The King Shah Aalum shall remain in full possession of Cora, and such part of the Province of Illiabad (Allahabad) as he now possesses, which are ceded to His Majesty, as a royal demesne, for the support of his dignity and expenses.

Article 5. His Highness Shujau-d-daula engages, in a most solemn manner to continue Balwant Singh in the zemindaries of Benares, Ghazepore, and all those districts he possessed at the time he came over to the late Nabob Jaffier Ally Khan and the English on condition of his paying the same revenue as heretofore.

Article 6. In consideration of the great expense incurred by the English Company in carrying on the late war, His Highness agrees to pay them (50) fifty lakhs of rupees in the following manner; viz. (1) twelve lakhs in money, and a deposit of jewels to the amount of (8) eight lakhs upon the signing of this Treaty, (5) five lakhs one month after, and the remaining (25) twenty-five lakhs by monthly payments, so as that the whole may be discharged in (13) thirteen months from the date hereof.

Article 8. His Highness shall allow the English Company to carry on a trade, duty free, throughout the whole of his Dominions.

Article 9. All the relations and subjects of His Highness, who in any manner assisted the English during the course of the late war, shall be forgiven, and no ways molested for the same.

Article 10. As soon as this Treaty is executed, the English forces shall be withdrawn from the dominions of His Highness, except such as may be necessary for the garrison of Chunar, or for the defence and protection of the King in the city of Illiabad (Allahabad) if His Majesty shall require a force for that purpose.”

Source: Keith, A. B. (1922). Speeches and documents on Indian policy, 1750-1921. Vol. 1 (pp. 28-30). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Western Europe as the Principal Actor

Wallerstein posited that the world system began in the 1400s as the result of the peculiar historical circumstances of Europe’s late medieval period. In addition to commercial dynamism, some of the small states that emerged from feudalism during this period, including Spain, Portugal, France, and England, became highly centralized and thus were able to expand and compete for colonies on a worldwide scale. Through mercantilism (which for Wallerstein is a type of capitalism), they protected their own workers in a free-wage system and created a colonial system in which the colonies provided raw materials in return for manufactured goods. England and France evolved into core states that dominated commercially, whereas the Iberian countries declined into a semiperipheral status, with little manufacturing and sharecropping becoming dominant. In turn, the colonial regions became peripheral; trade patterns favored the western European core regions. To pay for the manufactured goods (always more expensive than raw materials because of the value added through manufacturing), the peripheral regions had to coerce labor to keep costs down.The colonial elites aided in this endeavor by helping to repress workers through systems such as, in the Spanish Andes, the mita, which supplied indigenous labor to silver mines. Under the mita, colonial officials obligated the chiefs of Andean Indian villagers in a swath from Cuzco to Potosí to send a seventh of all adult males to the mines and spend a year working in the mine shafts.

The western European core was able to take advantage of other regions without dominating them militarily. Eastern Europe, for example, became peripheral after the recession of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries resulted in a manorial reaction and a second serfdom for the peasantry there. In the sixteenth century the eastern European aristocracy cultivated grains to export westward and so gain access to western European goods; to do so, they forced free peasants into serfdom to work on their estates.

Up until the nineteenth century, a number of regions, including most of Africa, Russia, and China, remained largely unaffected by western European penetration. These regions developed their own, noncapitalist systems that at times also relied on coercive labor practices. During the period of imperialism in the nineteenth century, however, even these regions were pulled into the world economic system, though Russia and later China became external after their Communist revolutions.

WST has been used to explain a number of other phenomena, such as the dynamics of frontier regions in the Americas, the environment, or gender relations in developing countries. WST has also proven fruitful in disciplines beyond historical sociology and history, such as geography (looking at product flows in regional perspective) and archaeology (in which the types of trade goods found from different regions provide a kind of economic hierarchy and make possible suppositions about social systems beyond the region being excavated).

Criticisms of World System Theory

There are a number of criticisms that have been made of WST, some of which have been answered by Immanuel Wallerstein and other scholars in his camp. First of all, external regions were probably never quite external. Even Russia and China were involved in the world system before the nineteenth century (though China perhaps less so). The sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, for example, showed that there was a world system in the thirteenth and fourteenth century dominated by Arab traders before western Europe became dominant. One might make similar cases for systems centered on China as well.

Likewise, the semiperiphery is a fuzzy category, more a catch-all for examples that do not fit in other categories than a true analytical category in its own right. Spain and Portugal weren’t quite part of the core, but they clearly did dominate their colonies. They prohibited the manufacture of certain products in their colonies (Spain, for example, prohibited the manufacture of wine and olive oil) and thereby hindered their possessions’ development.

WST does not take into account sufficiently the actions of subalterns in the peripheries. Western Europe is seen as the actor and the rest of the world as the acted upon. But subaltern activities had important consequences. For example, in the plantation economies of the Caribbean, a quintessential peripheral region, slave resistance and rebellion were important factors that mitigated and changed the kind of exploitation that took place.The successful slave rebellion of Haiti created all kinds of changes in the rest of the Caribbean and eventually helped bring about the end of slavery in the region.

The world system, as conceived by Wallerstein, is too static. The model is too simplistic to take into account the complexities of economic interactions. In theory, unequal trade keeps peripheral regions in their place. The unequal terms of trade continue to siphon off capital from the peripheries, making it impossible for them to become core regions. But this has not been the case historically. The United States, for example, was a peripheral region of England, but it later emerged as an industrial power. Likewise, South Korea was a periphery until the mid-twentieth century but has since become a successful industrial power. Lastly, WST, true to its Marxist roots, assumed that the only way to leave the world system was through socialist revolution. This may be the case, but it appears that the Communist utopia is, at least for the present, dead.

Overall, WST has been very useful for understanding worldwide processes. It has showed how economic systems (and particularly trade regimes) affected politics, social structure, and labor systems. Archaeologists have been able to use its insights about core-periphery relations to think about how to read the existence and frequency of trade items among archaeological remains. It has probably been most useful for explaining the processes and effects of European expansion in the six-teenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Erick D. Langer

【Famous sayings】：

The invasion of Russia is to save Western civilization. · Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. · Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

【Further Reading】：

Abu-Lughod, J. (1991). Before European hegemony:The world system A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Braudel, F. (1995). The history of civilization. New York: Penguin.

Braudel, F. (1996 ). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and development in Latin America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Cooper, F., Stern, S., Mallon, F., Isaacman, A., & Roseberry, W. (2000). Confronting historical paradigms: Peasants, labor, and the capitalist world system in Africa and Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Frank, A. G. (1969). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Hall, T. D. (2000). A world-systems reader. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Shannon, T. (1996). Introduction to the world-systems perspective (2nd ed). Boulder, CO: Westview.

Sklair, L. (1994). Capitalism and development: Immanuel Wallerstein and development studies. New York: Routledge.

Wallerstein, I. (1980). The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, I. (1980). The modern world-system II: Mercantilism and the consolidation of the European world-economy, 1600-1750. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Wallerstein, I. (1988). The modern world-system III: The second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy, 1730-1840s. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.