Week 13: The World-System

The world-systems perspective is an integral social science approach that advocates the study of long-term, large-scale historical systems in their totality. Its evolutionary version includes comparisons between the modern Europe-centered system of the last six centuries with earlier regional whole interpolatory networks. Relevant evidence comes from archaeology, ethnography, and historical documents as well as demographic and economic estimates. Research by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, ecologists, geographers, economists, and sociologists is often germane to studies of whole interaction systems. The general theoretical approach rests on institutional materialism with roots in the works of Marx and Weber (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 2000).

Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Giovanni Arrighi were the originators of the world-system perspective in the 1960s and the 1970s (Amin, 1980a; Arrighi, 2010 [1994]; Frank, 1966, 1967, 1969; Wallerstein, 2011a [1974]). They focused primarily on the modern world-system thathad emerged with European predominance. Wallerstein (2000: 74) announces:

we take the defining characteristic of a social system to be the existence within it of a division of labor, such that the various sectors or areas are dependent upon economic exchange with others for the smooth and continuous provisioning of the needs of the area.

In such a formulation, human social systems are clusters of social life with recurrent social relations, implying an established structure of interdependent parts. In the terms of complexity science, this approach emphasizes the primacy of properties of the system as a whole over its components. Wallerstein’s approach employs a typology of world-systems as follows: a mini-system is an entity with a complete division of labor and a single cultural framework; a world-economy is a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural and political entities; a world-empire is a division of labor with a single political authority (Wallerstein, 2000: 75). The modern global system, then, is a world-economy with multi- ple sovereign states linked into a single eco- nomic division of labor. The ‘world’ idea refers to a whole self-sufficient entity, which is not necessarily earth-wide. In the past, there were whole regional world-systems.

The comparative evolutionary1 world-systems perspective emerged when some of the world-system scholars became interested in the long-term continuities as well as the qualitative transformations in the logic of development that only become evident when the modern world-system is compared with earlier world-systems (Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997; Frank and Gills, 1993).

The comparative and evolutionary world-systems perspective is a strategy that focuses on whole interpolity systems (world-systems) rather than single polities; its main insight is that important interaction networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and fighting) have woven polities together since the beginning of human sociocultural evolution (Chase-Dunn and Khutkyy, 2017).

World-systems are defined as whole systems of interacting polities and settlements.2 Systemness here means that these polities and settlements are interacting with one another in important ways – such interactions are two-way, necessary, structured, regularized, and reproductive. These interactions impact human life and affect the resulting social continuity or social change.