Structural changes in the core regions of the world-economy, 1830–1945

Abstract

As Britain lost global hegemony in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, first two, then three powers competed for her position. Each power followed a different path toward hegemonic status in the capitalist world-system. Japan adopted the British model of a system based on seaborne trade, in particular in such products ofan extensive tropical and sub-tropical agriculture as cotton and rubber. An intensive and productive rice agriculture avoided the need for much food importation. The Northern States of America, after the Civil War, increasingly detached the cotton-producing, sub-tropical Southern states from the British periphery and attached them to her own but without structurally changing the agrarian labor system of the South. Extensive production was typical, but America still had huge surpluses for agrarian exports after the needs of American industry were met. The American version of the British world-system was not, however, subject to geo-strategic disruption by naval warfare. Germany pursued the most innovative strategy. An intensive research-based, highly technified agriculture developed at home. Substitutes for both domestic and tropical crops were found through the application of skills from chemistry and physics. Germany's success, and the subsequent diffusion of German technology to the rest of the world, brings Wallerstein's model of the capitalist world-system into question, at least after 1940.