Capitalist World Economy Research Articles

The Rise of Historical Sociology.

Preface List of figures 1. Like a Phoenix Rising The post-war resurgence of historical sociology What is historical sociology? Three phases of post-war historical sociology 2. Out of the Ashes War and peace The end of ideology? The American way: Parsons and Smelser Interpreting social dynamism Handling and channeling social change A laboratory report The sociologist as patriot Three ways to persuade Citizenship and social class Order and justice Old empires, new nations: Eisenstadt and Lipset Ideology and social conflict: Marshall and Bendix 3. Taking Flight Injustice and domination Human interdependence: Bloch and Elias Feudal society The civilizing process An uppity generation? Two critical rationalists: Moore and Thompson Social origins of dictatorship and democracy The making of the English working class Moral codes and human choice States and social revolutions Comparing and explaining Skocpol, Trotsky and Eisenstadt The politics of social policy Counter-revolution Collective action Coercion, capital and European states Reason and revolution: Skocpol and Tilly 4. Soaring High History from above Two Marxian perspectives: Anderson and Wallerstein From ancient Greece to absolutist monarchy The figures of descent The capitalist world-economy Comparing Wallerstein and Anderson Infrastructures of power: Braudel and Mann Evolution and discontinuity (1) The longue duree The Mediterranean world Civilization and capitalism The sources of social power Greece and Rome The European dynamic Classes, nations, states and warfare Constructing theories: Runciman and Giddens The methodology of social theory Social evolution Structuration or evolution? From class-divided to class societies Surveillance and citizenship Nationalism Evolution and discontinuity (2) 5. Historical Sociology in the 1990s Historical sociology as an intellectual field Established and outsiders Involvement and detachment Exploration, generalization and theory Strategies of explanation Historical sociology and capitalist democracy The first phase: democracy expounded The second phase: democracy exposed The third phase: capitalism explored and exposed The fourth phase: democracy re-examined A new audience for historical sociology The future of the past Notes Bibliography Index

Technology and the Modern World-System: Some Reflections

This article represents a preliminary attempt to conceptualize the relationship between technology and global inequality, using a political economy of the world-system perspective. Despite the crucial role that technical innovation and adaptation play in the process of international development, many macroanalyses of social change focus little explicit attention on technology. Only neoevolutionary theory discusses its role in long-term social change, and then in ways that miss some key dimensions. The author argues that technology is a social product designed to fit the needs of the rich and powerful. In the contemporary world, it is usually produced by a highly organized (and expansive) research and development (R&D) industry, often explicitly linked to military- industrial complexes. Rhetoric about increased globalization notwithstanding, technology is a key resource in the present capitalist world-economy that is very unevenly dtstributed, with the advanced industrial "core" states (and their giant transnational corporations) controlling technological innovation and dissemination. Even newly industrializing countries (NICs) like South Korea, which many consider technologically sophisticated, experience profound technological dependence, limiting their prospects for truly autonomous economic growth. Differential control of technology and techno logical innovation is a defining trait of global inequality in the late twentieth century.

Foundations of Class Compromise: A Theoretical Basis for Understanding Diverse Patterns of Regime Outcomes

Since 1945 regions undergoing dependent development have displayed a great diversity of regime outcomes. In contrast, the nations of the capitalist core have experienced relatively stable democratic regimes. In this paper I begin the development of a theoretical framework for comprehending these diverse patterns. I argue that regime outcomes vary across regions of the capitalist world economy because structural economic constraints also vary by region. Dependent economies are characterized by two major constraints: 1) the lack of a locally dynamic accumulation process and 2) the persistence of widespread and deep income inequalities. These two factors increase the level of class conflict even while they reduce the level of state resources. Thus, regime officials have insufficient resources to address accumulation and consumption demands simultaneously. Variation in regime outcome in the capitalist periphery is produced by variation in situations of dependency (i.e., the forms of integration into the capitalist world economy) that produce different class structures and levels of economic constraints. In the capitalist core, however, locally dynamic accumulation processes and relatively low income inequality provide the structural conditions for stable democratic regimes.

“Ethnic” Violence in the Post-Communist Periphery

This article focuses on two apparently very different manifestations of this phenomena in the relatively recent history of the peripheries of the former communist zone of the modem world system: armed banditry in Mozambique, and inter-ethnic violence in the Southern republics of the former Soviet Union. It offers an interpretation of such violence, and its significance, which is not based on a cultural or anthropological reading. Rather, it argues that both manifestations stem from the larger phenomenon of Communist-style delinking from the capitalist world-economy.

The Changing World Food Order: The Case of Turkey

The last two decades of the twentieth century have witnessed new methods of domination by the core of the capitalist world economy over its periphery. On matters concerning international organization of capital accumulation the core makes use of international institutions such as the G7, the IMF and the World Bank, and the GATT on a larger scale than ever before. In the present study, we will discuss the history of world agriculture and food production in the twentieth century in an attempt to explain how the current structure of metropolitan domination in these sectors has been shaped in the post-war era. We will, then, investigate the transformations that Turkish agriculture and food production have been undergoing during this period.

Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large Technological Systems

The ArgumentThis essay argues that a prime source of contemporary technological pessimism is the loss of place that accompanied the conquest of space through the construction of large technological systems of transportation and communication. This loss may involve physical destruction, or it may involve the more subtle withdrawal of economic, political, and cultural meaning and power from localities in favor of these far-flung systems.The argument proceeds in five stages. First, key terms are defined, notably “environmental damage” and “technological system.” Second, the origins of the modern ideology of circulation are traced in the development of a capitalist world-economy, and in the historical theories of Enlightenmentphilosophes(with special attention to Turgot and Condorcet). Third, possible relations between that ideology and nineteenth-century systems-building are briefly sketched. Fourth, the ambiguous political character of these systems — at once liberating and constraining — is noted. Finally, the cultural challenge of overcoming spatial alienation is described with reference to some late nineteenth-century writers who sought to trace new pathways both spatially and linguistically.

Coping with Global Debt Crises: Debt Settlements, 1820 to 1986

The settlement of the external debt of insolvent sovereign borrowers has become one of the most important issues in relations between the north and south since the outbreak of the global debt crisis in the early 1980s. For the past eight years representatives of governments and international organizations, bankers, and scientists have suggested several proposals and plans to solve the present debt crisis. The most prominent schemes in this respect are the Baker Plan of 1985, which suggested massive new credits for the most highly indebted developing countries, and the recently adopted Brady Plan, which proposes partial debt discounts and reductions in interest rates. Both of these debt settlement proposals were initiated by the United States and are supported by the other principal creditor countries. However, despite the ten years of crisis management, world leaders have not yet agreed upon a longterm solution to the current debt problems. In the history of the capitalist world economy, the current problems of coping with a global debt crisis do not represent a unique event. Rather, recent empirical studies demonstrate that sovereign borrowers have experienced many instances of debt-servicing difficulties during the past 150 years (Eichengreen and Portes 1986; White 1986; Eichengreen and Lindert 1989; Marichal 1989; Suter 1989).

Global Structures and Political Processes in the Study of Domestic Political Conflict

The comparative study of domestic political conflict has experienced a paradigm shift with the replacement of theories emphasizing deprivation and system imbalance with theories of the political and structural sources of protest and rebellion. This review summarizes criticisms of the earlier theories, arguing that these have been subsumed by newer theories that focus on the relationships between political processes, the state, the capitalist world economy, the inter-state system and the origins and dynamics of social protest and political rebellion. We outline two useful approaches: a political process theory that emphasizes the impact of internal political institutions and processes, such as political exclusion, indigenous organization, and political opportunity structures; and theories of global structures that focus on the external or international processes of incorporation into the capitalist world economy, the social effects of foreign capital penetration, and political dependence on core states. Finally we examine the possibilities for constructing a synthetic theory of political conflict by treating these theories alternately in an additive fashion or through specifying indirect effects. Problems of measurement and methodology are discussed, especially the importance of developing dynamic models of political conflict.

‘White gold’ or ‘white blood'?: The rubber plantations of colonial Indochina, 1910–40

The expansion of rubber production in colonial Indochina after 1910 can be understood through the changing patterns in the capitalist world economy. However, the plantation system which evolved in colonial Indochina, including the methods of labour procurement, the closed compounds, the rigorous work regime and harsh disciplining of labourers, the forms of payment as compensation for expenditure of labour, and the strategies designed to speed-up and stretch-out labour-time, was embedded within an historically-specific context, and hence can only be explained by reference to the localised socio-economic conditions in which metropolitan capital and indigenous labour confronted each other.

Purchasing patterns of the California missions in ca. 1805

During the first decade of the 19th century, Yankee otter-hunters were trading illegally with the California missions, exchanging manufactured goods for pelts. Two documents of this period, an 1804 Spanish factura (shipping list) and the 1806–1807 account book of the smuggling ship Mercury, reveal differences in the types of items supplied by these two trade networks. Over the next quarter century the Spanish economic system in California would be replaced by the Anglo-based capitalist world economy. The effect of this trend on both Hispanic cultural ties and the material culture of the colony is discernible in these early inventories.

General and Miscellaneous - The Modern World System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s. By Immanuel Wallerstein. San Diego: Academic Press, 1989. Pp. xi, 372. $39.50, cloth; $17.50, paper.

General and Miscellaneous - The Modern World System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s. By Immanuel Wallerstein. San Diego: Academic Press, 1989. Pp. xi, 372. 17.50, paper. - Volume 52 Issue 1

Democratic Stability in Venezuela: Elite Consensus or Class Compromise?

An elite framework is often used to explain democratic stability in post-1958 Venezuela. I argue that a class-compromise model is more useful, not onlyfor understanding the Venezuelan case but also for explaining the variation in regime outcomes across regions of the capitalist world economy and within the periphery. To contrast the utility of the two models, I analyze Venezuela's political history since 1945. To demonstrate the more general usefulness of the class-compromise model, I compare Venezuela to two countries in which democratic regimes were destabilized-Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973. Democratic stability occurs when state managers are able to balance capital accumulation and consumption policies. Democratic instability occurs when state managers lack sufficient resources to satisfy the consumption demands of a mobilized working class without threatening the accumulation interests of capitalists.

Historic European Household Structures and the Capitalist World-Economy

This study approaches the history of household patterns in early modern Europe from the perspective of Wallersteinian world-system theory. It is shown that the European core during this time was characterized predominantly by simple nuclear households. By contrast, the European periphery and semiperiphery were far more likely to be characterized by complex households. We explain these relationships in terms of the mode of labor control predominating in each zone of the world-economy. Simple nuclear households become the norm where labor is being freed from traditional feudal bonds and where capitalist labor markets exist. Complex households are most likely to persist under traditional feudal relationships because they constitute adaptations to the labor needs that arise under such circumstances. Complex households are also common, although somewhat less so, where sharecropping is a predominant mode of labor control.

Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System

Acknowledgements Introduction: The lessons of the 1980s Part I. Geopolitics, Post-America: 1. North Atlanticism in decline 2. The Reagan non-revolution, or the limited choices of the US 3. Japan and the future trajectory of the world-system: lessons from history 4. European unity and its implications for the interstate system 5. 1968, revolution in the world-system 6. Marx, Marxism-Leninism, and socialist experiences in the modern world-system 7. The Brandt report 8. Typology of crises in the world-system 9. The capitalist world-economy: middle-run prospects Part II. Geoculture, The Underside Of Geopolitics: 10. National and world identities 11. Culture as the ideological battleground of the modern world-system 12. The national and the universal: can there be such a thing as world culture 13. What can one mean by southern culture 14. The modern world-system as a civilization 15. The renewed concern with civilization(s)? Index.

Book reviews : Wallerstein, I. 1989: The modern world-system III. The second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy, 1730-1840s. San Diego and London: Academic Press. xi + 372 pp. £32.00 cloth, £18.00 paper

Book reviews : Wallerstein, I. 1989: The modern world-system III. The second era of great expansion of the capitalist world-economy, 1730-1840s. San Diego and London: Academic Press. xi + 372 pp. £32.00 cloth, £18.00 paper

The Seventeenth-Century Crisis in South Asia

In several of the world's regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.

The Rise and Change of Comprehensive Planning: The Finnish Experience

Finland is a Nordic country with only 4.9 million people occupying a large land area, and with a small developed national economy. In many respects Finland stands midway between eastern and western Europe in the historical development of its social and economic structures (Alapuro, 1980; Allardt, 1982). Although it has been a periphery for the industrial centres of Europe, it acts as an interface between eastern and western centres. Finland was more agrarian and less industrialised than other western European countries even as late as the 1960s. Nevertheless it had already been drawn into the capitalist world economy at the end of the l9th century because of its forest resources and the increase in the demand for paper and pulp. Thus the fact that forests were largely owned by farmers has been of vital social and political importance. Between 1960 and 1975 Finnish society underwent one of the fastest structural transformations in Europe, to become an industrial, capitalist welfare state. Education had a crucial role to play in the transformation process. In fact the education system was one of the channels of migration from rural areas and from agriculture to the cities, and into both industry and the service sector (Antikainen, 1981, 1985). For individual migrants, education was an important personal resource, or as social and cultural capital. Since the late 1960s the ideal of a comprehensive education system has been the major rationale behind Finnish education policy. This article tries to describe how the ideology of comprehensive educational planning has been produced, altered and implemented and has failed to be implemented in Finland in recent decades.

Transnational tobacco companies and health in underdeveloped countries: Recommendations for avoiding a smoking epidemic

This paper examines the impact of transnational tobacco companies on health in underdeveloped countries and makes recommendations for avoiding a coming smoking epidemic. Although tobacco is generally seen as primarily a health problem, tobacco's future in the Third World depends upon a number of nonhealth related considerations, especially political and economic factors. Unfortunately, there is very little relationship between what the World Health Organization and others have recommended, and what most Third World countries are doing today. Although the controversy concerning cigarette smoking and health has only become a ‘burning issue’ in recent decades, tobacco products have been used around the world for hundreds of years. The public outcry against cigarette smoking has become increasingly widespread since the 1964 U.S. Surgeon General's report on smoking and health. The ill effects of cigarette smoking are now widely considered collectively as the number one preventable health problem in the world, responsible for an estimated 2.5 million deaths per year. In response to declining sales in developed countries, the tobacco transnational corporations have begun focusing their attention on Third World markets, where tobacco consumption has increased dramatically in recent years. Cigarettes not only take precious limited resources away from desperately needed basic human needs, but they also inflict future health problems on vast numbers of Third World people who have only a vague understanding of the risks involved in cigarette smoking. Until Third World governments address the long-term consequences of their short-term lust for cash, the probabilities of a smoking epidemic in the Third World grow increasingly likely. Given the capitalist world economy in which Third World countries are embedded, the possibilities for avoiding a smoking epidemic are all the more clouded.

Colonial Empires and the Capitalist World-Economy: A Time Series Analysis of Colonization, 1640-1960

For most of the history of the capitalist world-economy, imperial conquest was the principal factor in creating a periphery to the European imperial core. This study focuses on how the dynamics of the capitalist world-economy affected the pattern of colonization in the periphery. Colonization is considered a hierarchical alternative to market relations, increased when market relations perform poorly and slowed when the market expands. A time series regression analysis, covering the tonguee duree of the whole system, provides initial comprehensive quantitative support for two central propositions in world-system theory. The findings indicate that long waves of economic expansion and periods of unincentric hegemony negatively affected the rate of colonization. Major wars among core states had no immediate impact but had long-term positive effects. A shift in the international regime brought about by the rise of socialist states also contributed to the decline offormal colonization. The findings point to the utility of long waves, hegemony, and international regimes in long-term historical studies of the trade-off between market and hierarchical relations.

Colonialism, urbanism and the capitalist world economy

International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchVolume 13, Issue 1 p. 1-18 Colonialism, urbanism and the capitalist world economy Anthony D. King, Anthony D. KingSearch for more papers by this author Anthony D. King, Anthony D. KingSearch for more papers by this author First published: March 1989 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1989.tb00105.xCitations: 21AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume13, Issue1March 1989Pages 1-18 RelatedInformation