European World Economy Research Articles

Modernisation through Railways: Economic and Social Change in the Ottoman Empire in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT In the nineteenth century, significant developments in transport and transport infrastructure technologies led to drastic changes not only in countries’ economies but also in their societies. The European world economy absorbed the Ottoman Empire into its ambit and railway construction initiated by Europeans also shaped the nature and direction of social and economic changes in the vast territory that the Empire had controlled. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of railways on Ottoman society modernization. The paper investigates how economic and social changes took place in traditional life in the empire and how and to what extent the lives and consumption patterns of Anatolian people were changed by the construction of railways.

Florence-A chert end scrapers from the Lasley Vore (34TU65), Deer Creek (34KA3) and Longest (34JF1) sites and the eighteenth-century southern Plains hide trade

The importance of stone end scrapers in southern Plains artifact assemblages increased from AD 1200 to the mid-1700s. With Native involvement in the French hide trade, beginning in the early eighteenth century, end scrapers of Florence-A chert underwent a series of changes designed to lessen the costs of hide production (Vehik et al. [2010]. The Plains Hide Trade: French Impact on Wichita Technology and Society. In Across a Great Divide, edited by Laura L. Scheiber and Mark D. Mitchell, pp. 149–173. University of Arizona Press, Tucson). Using data from the earlier study plus more recent analyses of other sites, we reinvestigate earlier ideas and introduce additional thoughts about how end scraper technology changed with Native involvement in the European world economy. Results reaffirm many of the earlier conclusions regarding technological changes in Florence-A chert end scrapers. We also explore unanticipated impacts of site formation processes, complexities of end scraper maintenance, and the ramifications of changing roles in the bison hide trade.

A Critique of Immanuel Wallenstein’s World System Theory in The Modern World System.

-The Modern World System Capitalist Agriculture and The Origin of The European World Economy, is Immanuel Wallenstein‟s historical exposition of the structure and character of the prevailing global sociopolitical and economic relation. He made an insightful note on the exploitative nature of this relation. And the inevitable consequences are highlighted. The claims in this study are by no means original but by adding the semi-periphery in this analysis he has expanded the existing theory of global political economy from bimodal to trimodal structure. However, the strength of Wallenstein study lies not in the originality of its theory but on the fervent and pugnacious contention of the study that the contemporary global socio-political and economic composition would suffocate development in the periphery nations, undermine liberal democracy and promote global inequality. And ultimately favour the rich capitalist nation over the poor ones if the present trend is allowed to continue.

Cosmopolitanism and Adriaen van der Donck's A Description of New Netherland

1655, Adriaen van der Donck published his promotional tract A Description of New in an attempt to attract settlers to the Dutch colony in North America. As its title suggests, Van der Donck's text primarily a description of the land, resources, and opportunities that await potential colonists in New Netherland. For seventeenth-century readers, transatlantic emigration was an enterprise fraught with potential complications, not the least of which was the stability of national identity in an alien environment. To convince his readers that the environment on the other side of the Atlantic was suitable for Dutch settlers, Van der Donck devoted the first section of his tract to a discussion of New Netherland's landscape, flora, fauna, and climate. Ina chapter titled Of the Air, Van der Donck writes that [t]he gentle governess of mind, strength, and form alike in humans, animals, and plants the air, also termed the temperamentor (2008 ed., 64). Van der Donck here suggests the importance of climate as it relates to the problem of cultural assimilation and geographic movement. Seventeenth-century understandings of the relationship between identity and travel were based on the Galenic theory of the four humors, which held that the early modern body was subject to the influence of one's environment. (1) Travel in the seventeenth century thus brought with it the potential for dramatic alterations in an individual's psychology and physiology. Van der Donck invokes this early modern scientific discourse in the opening lines of his chapter, only to assuage any fears of alteration when he writes that the air in the colony is as dry, pure, and wholesome as could be desired--so much so, in fact, that people who are not at their best, whether in the West Indies, Virginia, or other parts of the world, soon feel fit as a fiddle when they come to New Netherland (64). In short, he writes, Galen has a lean time of it there>> (64). The Description thus takes up the identity issues that accompany geographic movement in the seventeenth century, specifically the fear of physical and cultural assimilation brought about by travel, only to assuage those doubts and set up the colony of New as a geographic or climatological extension of the United Provinces. While this rhetorical strategy not uncommon in colonial promotional literature, (2) I suggest that what makes Van der Donck's text unique the way in which it struggles with the possibility of a cosmopolitan model of colonization that embraces circulation and difference, working within the humoral model to suggest the possibility of maintaining Dutch cultural identity despite travel and dislocation. The text experiments with a model of belonging that relies not on birth within the territorial borders of the Dutch Republic, but rather on residence in either the United Provinces or its colonies. (3) Van der Donck, I argue, thus able to transform the multiplicity of peoples emigrating to the United Provinces and its colonial holdings into a manageable and productive population that would secure Dutch interests within the European world economy. (4) Even as the text encourages a sense of identity grounded in geography, however, it must reassure its specifically Dutch readers of the stability of Dutch cultural and national identity in the New World through its emphasis on the economic integration of emigrant workers into the Dutch colonial project. (5) This tension in the text between embracing a diverse, mobile labor force and securing a stable Dutch identity, I argue, suggests the ways in which the Description imagines the economic and political security of Dutch nationalism as dependent on a population that must be constructed out of the cultural contacts and connections of the Dutch colonial project in the Americas. This tension in the text mirrors the ambivalence toward cosmopolitanism that we see on the ground, as new and more restrictive residency requirements were instituted in New Amsterdam in 1657. …

Black Marxism: an incorporated analytical framework for rethinking Chinese labour in South African historiography

In recent years, the perceived threat of China has been uncritically conflated with the activities of various Chinese actors, including laborers and migrants, in the African continent. Characterizations of Chinese people resonate with that of the late 1800s and early 1900s and continue to displace them from the history of specific African countries. This is especially true in South Africa, where there is little memory of how indentured Chinese laborers were imported to help revitalize the gold mines after the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). In the paper, I offer an analysis of two dominant strands of historical writings about South Africa, aiming to show how the ways in which history were conceived at particular political junctures was largely responsible for the absence of the Chinese laborers. Importantly, I discuss how Robinson's challenges to Marxism and its theory of history in Black Marxism provide a space to unthink notions of capital, labor, and race. In the paper, I further explore how the dialectical, multi-temporal, and multi-spatial view of history that he puts forth already envisioned the presence of and included theses laborers who were brought into the European capitalist world-economy on a large scale by the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Immanuel Wallerstein's Theory of the Capitalist World-System

One of the most significant tendencies in the development of Western historiography and social sciences in the last three decades has been the consolidation of a new multidisciplinary field of inquiry, comparative historical sociology (CHS). Reinhard Bendix, Charles Tilly, and Immanuel Wallerstein can be considered parents/creators of CHS in the U.S.A. The theory of the Capitalist World System (CWS), initiated by the American sociologist and historian I. Wallerstein (b. 1930), who started his career researching the contemporary history of Africa, is one branch of the CHS. This theory was formulated in opposition to Eurocentrism, which is characterized by a belief in the endless (linear) progress of European civilization and which discounts other (non-European) cultures. Wallerstein's popularity and influence in Western social sciences reached its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s, so that while perhaps coming late in the game, nonetheless knowledge and acquaintance with the ideas of this author can be useful for the conceptual renewal of modern Lithuanian historiography and for the investigation of problems in the socio-economic history of Central and Eastern Europe. The main strength of the CWS's approach is the possibility to expand historical thinking to regional and global perspectives in reply to the challenges facing social, political, and geopolitical reality and to interpret the history of every region in the historical context of local and world (meta) civilization. The main objectives of this article are: 1) to clarify the methodological traits and sources of the CWS's theory; 2) to reconstruct retrospectively the development of the CWS's theory in the works of Wallerstein (from the 16th to the second half of the 19th c.); 3) to discuss the critique and reception of CWS's theory. The subject of Wallerstein's study of CWS's theory is the origin and development of the capitalist world-system itself. CWS arose on the basis of the European world-economy during the "long" 16th century (1450-1640) and has been in existence ever since. CWS is an economic world based on capitalist production and division of labor, politically organized in the form of a union between sovereign and competing states. An especially important distinguishing feature of CWS is the differentiation into three economic zones: the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery (according to their role in the world division of labor). The most important theoretical sources of CWS are dependency theory, F. Braudel's theory of history, K. Marx's theory of capitalism, and the Marxist theory of imperialism. Because of the dominant significance of Marxist sources, CWS can be considered a neo-Marxist theory. The development of the CWS's theory (from the 16th to the second half of the 19th c.) has three stages: 1) agrarian capitalism - the beginning of the CWS's theory; 2) mercantile capitalism - the outcome of the consolidation of the CWS's theory; 3) globalization period of the CWS. The critics of Wallerstein's theory of the CWS could be relatively differentiated into two groups - historians/sociologists based on Marxism and sociologists/ economists. The first group emphasizes that the theory of CWS is deficient in empirical adequacy, ignores the relationship between class structure and economic development, exaggerates the importance of the market on the internal socio-economic development of countries, and orients toward economism. Sociologists and economists notice that the theory does not analyze explicitly the influence of institutions on the emergence of capitalism and institutional development of the hierarchy of geo-economic zones. Synthesis of global and regional contexts investigating socioeconomic reality of the past could give higher empirical adequacy to the CWS's theory. On the other hand, the influence of the CWS's theory is confirmed by the further development of international political economy and radical renewal of cultural anthropology (not mentioning historical sociology).

American Liberalism, One Worldism & World-Systems Analysis

Liberalism is a system of norms and values elaborated by the European world-economy in the course of its constitutive process. It is a matter of organizational principles determining the acting subject, economic action, the state and, the entire picture of social imaginary, starting from the prescriptive nucleus of ‘freedom’ rights. The history of liberalism is the story of a methodical structuring of norms and values,which postulates a possessive and acquisitive subject in a system of ceaseless pursuit of endless accumulation. This methodical structuring had already begun in the XIII century with the formation of the Mediterranean world-economy, centered on the free city states of the Ital-ian peninsula.1 Initially, the above elaboration utilized elements of ancient both Graeco-Roman and Judaic-Christian organizational experience, but the identi?cation of a new nucleus adequate to the new system was not realized until the XVII century, with the establishment of Dutch hegemony in the world-system and the emerging English organizational power.

Book Review: Scandinavia in the European World-Economy, ca. 1570–1625: Some Local Evidence of Economic Integration

Book Review: Scandinavia in the European World-Economy, ca. 1570–1625: Some Local Evidence of Economic Integration

Scandinavia in the European World-Economy, ca. 1570-1625. Some Local Evidence of Economic Integration (review)

The history of Scandinavia's integration into the European World-Economy during the long sixteenth century (ca. 1475-1625) is explored for the first time in this stimulating book. Although its focus is on the latter part of the period, the study brings together the long-term developments that affected Scandinavia from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. By combining his own in-depth research with current studies of Scandinavian and Baltic landscapes, the author documents the decisive influence of geography, socio-economic conditions and political structures on responses to economic change. The study thus shatters, once and for all, the notion of a uniform response to economic integration in Europe's northern periphery.

Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis, and Early Modern European History

TEXTS SUCH AS GLOBAL RIFT by L. S. Stavrianos or Daniel Chirot's Social Change in the Twentieth Century have acquainted many teachers of with the terminology, concepts and interpretations of worldsystems analysis, particularly as elaborated by Immanuel Wallerstein. A prolific writer and forceful polemicist on a wide range of topics from contemporary Africa to social theory, Wallerstein is best known for The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974) and The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York, 1980), the first two volumes of a projected four-volume reinterpretation of post-medieval world history.1 Both volumes of The Modern World-System have been extensively discussed in this country and abroad and, as a glance at any recent issue of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index reveals, they continue to be referred to repeatedly. Reviews in sociological journals have acclaimed their author's unparalleled boldness of vision to raise all the important issues and his theoretical ambitions, while so eminent a scholar as Charles Tilly has praised Wallerstein's powerful contribution to sociological practice, notably his role in restoring time and history to the research agenda.2 In similar terms to their sociologist colleagues, and

14: Korea and East Asia: Premigration Factors and U.S. Immigration Policy

14: Korea and East Asia: Premigration Factors and U.S. Immigration Policy

Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus

Book reviewed in this article:DEBORAH HARRISON, The Limits of Liberalism: The Making of Canadian Sociology.KI HANG KIM AND FRED WILLIAM ROUSH, Mathematics for Social Scientists.MARTIN BULMER (ed), Social Research and Royal Commissions.HERBERT RICHARDSON (ed.), New Religions and Mental Health: Understanding the Issues.ALAN B. ANDERSON and JAMES S. FRiDERES, Ethnicity in Canada: Theoretical Perspectives.S.J. WILSON, Women, the Family and the Economy.IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN, The Modern World‐System II. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World‐Economy, 1600–1750.JOSEF WILCZYNSKI, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism and Communism.DAVID GAGAN, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land and Social Change in Mid‐Victorian Peel County, Canada West.M. PATRICIA MARCHAK, Ideological Perspectives on Canada (2nd ed.).KEVIN DWYER, Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question.JOHN PORTER, MARION PORTER, and BERNARD BL1SHEN, Stations and Callings: Making it Through the School System.JEAN‐GUY VAILLANCOURT, Papal Power: a Study of Vatican Control over Lay Catholic Elites.LUIS A. SERRON, Scarcity, Exploitation, and Poverty: Malthus and Marx in Mexico.SALLY M. WEAVER, Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968–1970.TSUYOSHI KATO, Mdtriliny and Migration: Evolving Minangkabau Traditions in Indonesia.WALLACE CLEMENT, Hardrock Mining. Industrial Relations and Technological Changes at INCO.

The Struggle for Control of the World Capitalist Economy

Review of The Modem World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy by Immanuel Wallerstein.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Struggle for Baltic Markets: Powers in Conflict, 1558-1618

In recent decades Swedish historians have been inclined to see the Baltic question of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a struggle for the control of Russia's trade with Western Europe. An earlier school of Swedish historians generally had overlooked the operation of economic forces, attaching primary importance to political and strategic considerations. The reinterpretation of Swedish Baltic historiography began in 1935 with the publication of Ingvar Andersson's study of Erik XIV's Baltic diplomacy during the 1560s. The economic interpretation of Baltic policy begun by Andersson has been further developed and documented by Artur Attman in a number of important monographs and articles published since 1944. The Struggle for Baltic Markets: Powers in Conflict, 1558-1618 is the most recent of these studies and s(immarizes some thirty to forty years of research and publication concerning Baltic history. Attman's story begins with Ivan IV's attack on Livonia in 1558 and ends in 1617-18 with the Treaty of Stolbovo and the conclusion of a fourteen-year truce between Russia and Poland. According to Attman, during these sixty years Russia aimed at establishing direct trade and commercial contacts with Western Europe, Sweden tried to control Russia's trade via the Arctic and the Gulf of Finland, and the main objective of Poland-Lithuania's Baltic policy was to shut Russia off from the Baltic Sea and gain control over the lines of communication to the Russian market (p. 209). Missing from Attman's monograph is the broader context of interacting economic, social, strategic, and political forces that help us understand Baltic policy during the period 1558-1618. For example, because of the little attention Attman pays to political considerations, the reader is hardly aware of Sweden's vulnerable position in the Baltic area and Scandinavia as long as Denmark controlled Norway, Halland, Skane, Gotland, and Osel. Nor does the reader obtain from Attman's book a clear picture of the complicated social, economic, political, and military factors that led to the Treaty of Stolbovo and the failure of Russian policy in the Baltic region. Even the economic side of Baltic policy is not presented by Attman in the perspective of the place of the Baltic in the European world economy, for he does not bring out clearly the role of Polish grain exports in feeding the English and the Dutch, in advancing the prosperity of European seafarers and merchants, and in contributing to the economic and social decline of Polish peasants and townspeople. His presentation of Baltic policy tends to be one dimensional and, as economic history, old fashioned.

The emergence of modern science and world system theory

Viewing the modern world as a single system of interdependent economic and political units rather than as isolated societies poses new possibilities, not only for the analysis of these units themselves, but for social and cultural developments such as the origin and evolution of modern science. It is generally conceded that the growth of modern science had been facilitated by various social conditions. Yet efforts to identify these and to specify their effects have met with only limited success, inducing most historians of science to emphasize the internal intellectual unfolding of scientific thought, rather than the effects of external social factors.1 Recent work on the history of the European world-economy, however, provides new opportunities to refocus the analysis of the relations between social conditions and the rise of modern science.

Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical CritiqueThe Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century.Immanuel Wallerstein

The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. By Immanuel Wallerstein. New York and London: Academic Press, 1974. Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System aims to achieve a clean conceptual break with theories of “modernization” and thus provide a new theoretical paradigm to guide our investigations of the emergence and development of capitalism, industrialism, and national states. This splendid undertaking could hardly be more appropriately timed and aimed. For quite some time, modernization approaches have been subjected to telling critical attacks (e.g., Gusfield 1967; Frank 1966; Bendix 1967; Tipps 1973; Smith 1973; Tilly 1975, chap. 9). They have been called to task for reifying the nation-state as the sole unit of analysis, for assuming that all countries can potentially follow a single path (or parallel and converging paths) of evolutionary development from “tradition” to “modernity,” and, concomitantly, for disregarding the world-historical development of transnational structures that constrain and prompt national or local developments along diverse as well as parallel paths. Moreover, modernization theorists have been criticized for the method of explanation they frequently employ: a historical ideal types of “tradition” versus “modernity” are elaborated and then applied to national cases; if the evidence seems to fit, one assumes that a particular historical instance is adequately explained; if not, one looks for the “chance” factors that account for its deviation. In the opening pages of The Modern World-System , and in a related essay (also published in 1974) called “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System,” Wallerstein unequivocally defines his approach in direct opposition to these features of modernization theory.

Organizing Underdevelopment from the Inside: The Bureaucratic Economy in Tanganyika, 1919-1940

Current research into the origins of African underdevelopment follows, with few exceptions, a paradigm that satisfies the yearnings of many scholars for systems of exploitation with global implications. This paradigm explains Africa's incorporation into a growing macro-entity called the European world-economy, European worldsystem, then capitalist world-system. Argument continues over the timing and techniques of incorporation, but several fundamental assumptions of the paradigm have gained wide and almost uncritical acceptance. Most basic is the notion of levels of economy, which rise from locality through territory, then ascend from metropolis to some final global unit, much like the great chain of being. Linking these levels in ways that allegedly harm the lowest are the combined actions of different agents and agencies. These agents appear more often as members of groups and even classes than as individuals with personal goals. On every level key groups of non-African traders and other business people work to fashion unequal or inequitable relations with various African communities. These relations sometimes coalesce in such intermediate structures as the export economy, which connects local and territorial economies with their metropolitan and global counterparts. Although multitiered, the essential thrust of the paradigm and its variations is bipolar: how impresarios

The so-called world system: Local initiative and local response

Certain obvious matters having to do with The Modern World-System* need not detain us [ 1 ]. By now, the bare outlines of Wallerstein's argument have become familiar to a large and articulate population which has apparently not had time to read the book ? an unfortunate but rather common problem in contemporary scholarship. Many reviewers suggest that the substantive criticisms of Wallerstein's thesis will come from regional specialists, and specialists in particular historical periods, who will be able to use their detailed knowledge to test and improve ? or disprove ? the sweeping and lucid conceptual devices the author is developing [2]. His now familiar argument is as follows: "In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, there came into existence what we may call a European world-economy" (p. 15). That emergence rested on three prin? cipal developments: European political, military and economic expansion; the differ? entiation of forms of labor for different seg? ments of the whole; and the growth of strong national states in the European heartland. This single worldwide economic system did not rest on one form of labor use or exaction, but precisely on a combination of different forms. Wallerstein posits three forms of labor, each appropriate to one such segment. The core is based on free labor, and is western European; the semiperiphery is based on tenantry and share-farming, and is south European; the periphery is based on forced labor, and is both eastern European and American in locus. These three forms of labor exaction are not contra dictory so much as intimately interdependent; each "zone" is typified by different political structures, different economic functions and different systems of stratification, as well as by its different ways of relating labor to the other factors of production. The world-system, as it developed, never confined capitalism to the political limitations of single states. Its postulation, if accepted, implies that an analysis of capitalism not limited to the study of single states will be more complete and, in certain ways, less static. Moreover, it calls into question attempts to analyze local economic subsystems in terms of their component modes of production, to the extent that such analyses ignore or circum? vent the significance of the overarching world system within which such subsystems must function. By implication, then ? and to some extent quite explicitly ? Wallerstein's inter? pretation challenges certain global and me? chanical Marxist treatments of the nature and rise of capitalism, and of the relationships among developed centers of capitalism and their satellites, colonies, tributary areas and frontiers. Thus, for instance, he writes:

The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Immanuel Wallerstein

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Immanuel Wallerstein Hermann KellenbenzHermann Kellenbenz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 48, Number 4Dec., 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241491 Views: 2Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1976 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:PHILIP L. KOHL The Use and Abuse of World Systems Theory: The Case of the Pristine West Asian State, (Jan 1987): 1–35.https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-003111-5.50004-X

THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM: CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN WORLD-ECONOMY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. By Immanuel Wallerstein. New York: Academic Press, 1974. 426 pp. $16.50

THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM: CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN WORLD-ECONOMY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. By Immanuel Wallerstein. New York: Academic Press, 1974. 426 pp. $16.50 Gerhard Lenski Gerhard Lenski University of North CarolinaChapel Hill Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 54, Issue 3, March 1976, Pages 701–702, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/54.3.701 Published: 01 March 1976