World-Systems Perspective

The world-systems perspective is a strategy for explaining institutional change that focuses on whole intersocietal systems rather than on single societies. This perspective is not a single theory but rather a collection of theories that explain different aspects of historical social change. The main insight is that important interaction networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and conflict) have woven polities and cultures together since the beginning of human sociocultural evolution. These explanations of institutional change take intersocietal systems (world-systems) as the units that evolve. However, intersocietal interaction networks were rather small when transportation was mainly a matter of hiking with a pack. Globalization, in the sense of the expansion and intensification of larger economic, political, military, and information networks, has been increasing for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.

The intellectual history of the world-systems perspective has roots in classical sociology, Marxian political economy, geopolitics, and theories of social evolution. But in explicit form, it emerged only in the 1970s when Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein began to formulate the concepts and to narrate the analytic history of the modern world-system.

The idea of the whole system means that all the human interaction networks small and large, from the household to global trade, constitute the world-system. It is not just a matter of “international relations” or global-scale institutions such as the World Bank. Rather, at the present time, the world-system includes all the people of the Earth and all their cultural, economic, and political institutions and the interactions and connections among them. The world-systems perspective looks at human institutions over long periods of time and employs the spatial scales that are required for comprehending these whole interaction systems. Interaction networks become larger with the development of technologies of transportation and communications, and so small regional world-systems have expanded and merged to become the Earth-wide system of the present.

The modern world-system can be understood structurally as a stratification system composed of dominant core societies (themselves in competition with one another) and dependent peripheral and semiperipheral regions, a few of which have been successful in improving their positions in the larger core/periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their relative positions.

This structural perspective on world history allows us to analyze the cyclical features of institutional change and the long-term patterns of development in historical and comparative perspective. We can see the development of the modern world-system as driven primarily by capitalist accumulation and geopolitics in which businesses and states compete with one another for power and wealth. Competition among states and capitals is conditioned by the dynamics of struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral peoples to domination and exploitation from the core. In the modern world-system, the semiperiphery is composed of large and powerful countries in the Third World (e.g., Mexico, India, Brazil, China) as well as smaller countries that have intermediate levels of economic development (e.g., the East Asian newly industrializing countries). It is not possible to understand the history of institutional change without taking into account both the strategies and technologies of the winners and the strategies and forms of struggle of those who have resisted domination and exploitation.

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