In these essays, written (with one exception) between 1978 and 1982, Immanuel Wallerstein elaborates on the political and theoretical implications of the world-systems perspective outlined in his celebrated books The Modern World-System and The Capitalist World-Economy. Whereas those books centred on the historical development of the modern world-system, the essays in this volume explore the nature of world politics in the light of Wallerstein's analysis of the world-system and capitalist world-economy. Throughout, the essays offer new perspectives on the central issues of political debate today: the roles of the USA and the USSR in the world-system, the relations of the Third World states to the capitalist 'core', and the potential for socialist or revolutionary change. Different sections deal with the three major political institutions of the modern world-system: the states, the antisystemic movements, and the civilizations. The states are a classic rubric of political analysis. For
This book, first published in 1992, seeks an explanation of the pattern of sharp discrepancy of wage levels across the world-economy for work of comparable productivity. It explores how far such differences can be explained by the different structures of households as 'income-pooling units', examining three key variables: location in the core or periphery of the world-economy; periods of expansion versus periods of contraction in the world-economy; and secular transformation over time. The authors argue that both the boundaries of households and their sources of income are molded by the changing patterns of the world-economy, but are also modes of defense against its pressures. Drawing empirical data from eight local regions in three different zones - the United States, Mexico and southern Africa - this book presents a systematic and original approach to the intimate link between the micro-structures of households and the structures of the capitalist world-economy at a global level.
The main thesis of this study is that the world economy is undergoing a profound structural change that is forcing companies to reorganize their production on a global scale. This is being brought about both through the relocation of production to new industrial sites, increasingly in the developing countries, and through the accelerated rationalisation measures at the traditional sites of industrial manufacture. The authors have designated this structural movement as 'the new international division of labour', and argue that it has led to the crisis that can be observed in industrial countries, as well as to the first steps towards export-oriented manufacturing in the developing countries. They see these trends as being largely independent of the policies pursued by individual governments and the strategies for expansion adopted by individual firms, and argue that the conditions currently prevailing in the capitalist world economy mean that the efforts of individual countries to
Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that a region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. By drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, on a vast array of slaveholder manuscripts, and on regional slave narratives, she pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South. These include a higher incidence of ethnic mixing between African and Native American slaves, heavier reliance on the field labor of women and children, and more frequent assignment of slaves to non-agricultural occupations. Dunaway also calls into question the notion that large numbers were necessary before slaves could engage in community building and resistance.
In The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, Wilma Dunaway calls into question the dominant paradigm of the US slave family. She contends that US slavery studies have been flawed by neglect of small plantations and export zones and exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and Slave narratives, she identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families, including forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination of new threats to family persistence that emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Wilma Dunaway breaks new ground by focusing on slave experiences on small plantations in the Upper South. She argues that a region was not buffered from the political, economic, and social impacts of enslavement simply because it was characterized by low black population density and small slaveholdings. By drawing on a massive statistical data base derived from antebellum census manuscripts and county tax records of 215 counties in nine states, on a vast array of slaveholder manuscripts, and on regional slave narratives, she pinpoints several indicators that distinguished Mountain South enslavement from the Lower South. These include a higher incidence of ethnic mixing between African and Native American slaves, heavier reliance on the field labor of women and children, and more frequent assignment of slaves to non-agricultural occupations. Dunaway also calls into question the notion that large numbers were necessary before slaves could engage in community building and resistance.
In The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation, Wilma Dunaway calls into question the dominant paradigm of the US slave family. She contends that US slavery studies have been flawed by neglect of small plantations and export zones and exaggeration of slave agency. Using data on population trends and Slave narratives, she identifies several profit-maximizing strategies that owners implemented to disrupt and endanger African-American families, including forced labor migrations, structural interference in marriages and childcare, sexual exploitation of women, shortfalls in provision of basic survival needs, and ecological risks. This book is unique in its examination of new threats to family persistence that emerged during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
This book, first published in 1992, seeks an explanation of the pattern of sharp discrepancy of wage levels across the world-economy for work of comparable productivity. It explores how far such differences can be explained by the different structures of households as 'income-pooling units', examining three key variables: location in the core or periphery of the world-economy; periods of expansion versus periods of contraction in the world-economy; and secular transformation over time. The authors argue that both the boundaries of households and their sources of income are molded by the changing patterns of the world-economy, but are also modes of defense against its pressures. Drawing empirical data from eight local regions in three different zones - the United States, Mexico and southern Africa - this book presents a systematic and original approach to the intimate link between the micro-structures of households and the structures of the capitalist world-economy at a global level.
Beginning in the late Middle Ages, and accelerating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there developed in many rural regions of Europe a domestic industry, mass-producing craft goods for distant markets. This book presents an analysis of this 'industrialization before industrialization', and considers the question whether it constituted a distinct mode of production, different from the preceding feudal economy and from subsequent industrial capitalism, or was part of a process of continuous evolution characterized by the spread of wage labour and the penetration of capitalism into the process of production. It is a full-scale attempt to take a look at the place of proto-industrialization in the genesis of capitalism, and will interest economic and social historians, as well as anthropologists, sociologists, and others concerned with the development of capitalism.
Written by well-known scholars, this book raises pertinent questions and takes up alternate perspectives on the growth and development of international trade between Europe and Asia, especially India, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Through a comparative and comprehensive study of merchant communities, markets and commodities the individual authors argue, contrary to conventional views, that Asian merchants were in no way inferior to Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen. The book emphasizes the continuing and growing importance of India's overland trade, even in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, traces the little-known world of Armenian merchants, the hitherto obscure, but voluminous, Indian trade with the Ottoman Empire, and by unearthing new evidence, demonstrates that the export activity of Asian merchants through the overland route from Bengal was higher, in fact, than the combined total of European exports.
This is the third volume of Immanuel Wallerstein's essays to appear in Studies in Modern Capitalism, following the immensely successful collections The Politics of the World Economy and The Capitalist World Economy. Written between 1982 and 1989, these pieces offer Wallerstein's perspective on the events of this period, and the background to his interpretation of the momentous events of 1989. In his introduction Wallerstein argues that the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the process of perestroika bear out his basic analysis: that the decline of US hegemony in the world-system is the central explanatory variable of change; and that the collapse of the communist empire and the approach of European unity cannot be understood without reference to this decline as a critical stage in the cyclical rhythm of the capitalist world economy. As part of the analysis the book also charts the development of a challenge to the dominant 'geoculture': the cultural framework within which the world
