Although I find Wallerstein of use, I approach him with a certain amount of caution. Following the lead of Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), Wallerstein's approach employs systems theory, namely that the "World System" is functional and will be the norm until it ceases to be functional, at which point it will be replaced or fixed.

The idea that the world has been functioning (with a lower case "f") as a larger system (with a lower case "s"!) is extremely useful, and anyone working with the history of cultural and/or economic studies dealing with topics for the past several centuries would be foolish to ignore this core, fundamental fact. With few exceptions, everyone has been sucked (with a capital "s"!) into the international vortex.

That said, I prefer to go to Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) for what I feel is a more elegant and nuanced treatment of the same subject. As a Marxist, he saw the seeds of the downfall of the world system as implanted in the system at its birth: unlike Parsons and Wallerstein who would think of the world system as perfectly functional until it was not, Hobsbawm stressed the tension within that system, planted there at its very birth. His dual chapters on "The World Unified" and "Nationalism" in his monumental series of books on the various ages of Europe give eloquent voice to this idea, namely that while the world was increasingly unified by a common economy and by every-stronger lines of communication, the built-in tension also resulted in the growth of nationalism. The nuance that Hobsbawm gives us is all too painfully expressed even today with the turmoil that is a reaction, to a certain extent, to the globalization of everything from the economy to an emerging post-modern complex of values and morals expressed by a digital age that Hobsbawm (and Wallerstein) could only image on the best of days. The tension that is part of the balance of our modern world system is painfully apparent.

Thanks for doing this, /u/commiespaceinvader ! I look forward to the chance to share my knowledge about Wallerstein and his theories.

Before we get into the meat of World-Systems Analysis, let’s start off with some historiographical context to help us understand what it arose in response to.

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries history was dominated by studies which centered on the nation-state at its principal unit of analysis. You could have national histories (history of England, history of France, etc.) or international diplomatic histories, but all of these counted the nation-state as its basic unit of measurement and emphasized phenomena internal to it in their analysis of its evolution.

This includes both Positivist historiography (the kind that focuses on political and military history, dates of rulers and battles, etc.) and Marxist historiography, as evidenced in the classic economic studies of Maurice Dobb (among others).

This approach began to be questioned by new historiographical ‘schools’ such as the Annales (especially the second generation, in the person of Fernand Braudel) and Marxist economists, like Paul Sweezy.

In addition, the postwar period also accelerated the collapse of the remaining European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, which lead to the idea of a 'third' world (neither first - developed - nor second - socialist bloc - but third, underdeveloped and not necessarily in the sway of one or the other). This sparked renewed interest in explaining how and why the third world had become so impoverished while Western Europe and (by then) the United States had flourished. Increasingly, academics from the third world chimed in with their own attempts to answer why their country was facing so many pressing issues.

It is from this period that we start getting theories of 'underdevelopment', 'unequal exchange', etc. One example of how far these ideas were reaching is found in one of Cuba's greatest films, 'Memories of Underdevelopment' (Memorias del Subdesarrollo) (1968), based on a short story of the same name, tried to apply this theory of underdevelopment to understanding the contemporary Cuban reality of the early years of the Revolution.

Also, keep in mind that I’m consciously making sweeping generalizations and that logically there are exceptions to this summary.

In this context, Braudel, already mentioned above, came out with his classic study, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1972) which attempted not only to transcend the nation-state as a unit of study but also propose an alternative; worlds. Braudel proposes an approach which uses trade and culture as essential mechanisms which bind a given territory together (ie. ‘economy and society’). He also tries to show that many of the transformations which take place in any given territory (such as a nation-state or proto-nation-state) are best understood when studied in connection with the rest of the 'world' to which it is most closely tied. These worlds are not necessarily the same thing as the world, rather they refer to tightly interconnected societies which can often be limited to specific geographic spaces (such as the Mediterranean).

Immanuel Wallerstein took this idea and ran with it. Wallerstein was, by training, a sociologist, but one who had seriously begun to question the validity (much less necessity) of separating the study of society into disconnected disciplines (sociology, political science, economics, history, anthropology, etc.). Instead he proposed a unidisciplinary approach (a true 'social science') which would study the complex, interconnected Capitalist world-system which eventually encompassed the whole globe, using elements from each of the existing disciplines. He was also partly inspired by the issue of the underdevelopment of the emerging third world.

Now that we've talked about the origins of World-Systems analysis, let's get to the meat of what it actually means. Wallerstein is attempting to study the origins and development of Capitalism, which he defines as a purely modern phenomena dating mostly to Western Europe in the 16th century. At that time the 'world' under study included most of Europe and, to a lesser extent, other territories, like Russia, which mostly engaged in an exchange of luxury goods and not a high volume trade in basic agricultural or manufactured goods (thus being ‘external’ to the system, though partly connected to it). In order to understand what is 'internal' or 'external' to the system and what relationships these countries have to each other, we have to talk about core, semiperiphery, and periphery.

A 'core' country in the World-System is one in which the types of production which are the most enriching are (relatively speaking) mostly concentrated within their borders. As the value of specific products decreases and the technology and expertise required to produce them competitively spreads to other countries these industries will eventually stop being top moneymakers and will thus increasingly be relegated to other parts of the world-system (such as how textiles are now largely made outside of the first world, though they were critically important to the Industrial Revolution, though patents and designs are still made/owned in the first world). It is key to understand that being a 'core' country is relative as there is no magic threshold of industry or wealth that makes a country 'core'. It is a matter of its relative development to the other countries within the system.

Core countries are also those where, at least in the Modern Capitalist system, traditional capitalist relations of paid free laborers is most developed. Contrary to Marxist thought, for Wallerstein slavery, peonage, and other forms of unfree labor are typical of the system. They aren't bugs, they're features. It's just that the relative wealth of core territories facilitates wage-labor, in particular highly remunerated wage-labor compared to the rest of the world.

Core countries also typically have strong states which permit them to decree (and actually implement) policies which help reinforce their place within the system as well as take action against threats (military intervention, diplomacy, etc.) from other parts of the system.

The basic idea for core countries is to guarantee that capital flows from other parts of the system (mostly the semiperiphery and periphery) to individuals, firms, and corporations within their own borders. As this is easier to do in exchanges with the third world than against military, economic, and technological peers among the core states, this results in a focus on colonial or neocolonial exploitation of the third world.

(continued)

I'm a pretty big fan of Wallerstein's World Systems approach. One of my favorite extensions of his work is Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence, which I think shows pretty conclusively how the use of resources extracted from periphery countries was completely essential the emergence of the industrial revolution in Britain and in Western Europe more generally.

Enrico Dal Lago has extend this model to suggest that there existed a "European Landed Estate System" similar to the plantation agriculture systems of the Western Hemisphere, in which landowners in periphery or semi-periphery areas deliberatley organized their holdings within the local political systems to prevent labor mobility and thereby maximize production of agricultural commodities (or other extractive industries) for export to the core regions in Western Europe.

One interesting aspect of Wallerstein is the application of his theory to Mesoamerica, particularly Late Postclassic Mesoamerica when the Aztecs where an increasingly dominant force. Blanton and Feinman (1984) argue that Mesoamerica at this time can be viewed through the lens of several "cores" which are, as a whole, producing an integrating socio-economic system organized around trade.

We suggest that a consequence of the growth of powerful core states in ancient Mesoamerica was a widespread stimulation of trade, a reorientation of priorities in many places towards production and exchange in the world-system arena. And the effects of these activities of the core states were felt far beyond the area militarily dominated by these same states.

The argument that Mesoamerica could be understood as the interaction of economic cores which cut across political and even cultural boundaries was taken up by Smith and Berdan (2000) who laid out some definitions and regional guidelines, and then was expanded upon by Smith (2001) who situated the system not merely within Mesoamerica, but within a broader region which also encompassed what is now the American Southwest.

There is a long tradition of seeing Mesoamerica as a fairly integrated cultural area, and certain similarities can be seen cross culturally, not just in overlapping and consistent artistic styles and religious practices, but also in socio-economic organization. In some sense then, discarding the modern (and anachronistic, in this case) structure of nation-states makes sense, particularly when paired with a widespread and cross cultural agreement about political arrangements for economic exchange, production, and extraction.

Personally, I find the application of Wallestein to Cemanahuac to be an interesting theoretical exercise, but one that is a bit of distraction from understanding these past culture on their own merits and idiosyncrasies. The kind of nakedly extortionary practices of the Aztecs can be fit into a world-system where the core twists the periphery into becoming a participant in fueling the economic development of the former. Without the underpinning of modern capitalistic ideas, however, it is hard to see how the system Wallerstein described in the Cold War period can be precisely mapped onto a society operating outside the discourse of capitalism. Attempts to place Mesoamerica within Wallerstein's world-system seem to necessarily see tribute demands through the lens of capitalist procurement of raw materials, eliding over ritual warfare, dynastic exchanges, and ostentatious gift giving as a display of power.

One thing that does strike me about World-Systems theory, however, is that is almost seems to posit, or at least depend upon, a closed system. Wallerstein could take the whole globe and divide it into core, semi-periphery, and periphery, and sort of blunt division which will always be the weakness of World-Systems Theory, or really any theory of world system. The divisions are never so neat, and counter-ideas like Appadurai's (1990) idea of various "scapes" (Ethno/Ideo/Finan/Techno/Media) cutting across the boundaries of core and periphery to address that even withing the core there is periphery.

I'm digressing, but to return to the idea of World-Systems being predicated upon a "closed" system, this is perhaps why Mesoamerica is such an attractive target for the application of the theory. While a large and diverse area, particularly if we, like Smith, loop in Northern Mexico and the Southwest (i.e., Aridoamerica and Oasisamerica), there is a certain boundedness to the region. To the South, Mesoamerica trails off into Central American mountains and jungles. To the West lies the unending Pacific. To the East is the Caribbean, which shows some sign of contact, but ultimately no sustained or heavy integration. To the North the land descends into scrubland and desert, before giving way to the relatively sparsely populated regions which, like the Caribbean, do not seem to have been integrated into the Mesoamerican world system. Up until the early 16th Century, in other words, Mesoamerica existed as a sort of world unto itself, suitable for labeling out discrete cores and peripheries.

Having been unfamiliar with this idea, is there anything at, say, article length that might make a good introduction?