Oct 17 2005
Book Review – E. Wallerstein, Modern World System I
SIS 500 Book Review: The Modern World-System I, by Immanuel Wallerstein
In this book, Wallerstein argues that the modern “world system” came about first in the 16th century. The fact he includes Spanish Americas in this overwhelmingly European phenomenon stresses the differences he sees between a political world empire and his definition of a world system, which is an economic hierarchy in a capitalistic framework.
According to Wallerstein, the recession and hardship in the 14th and 15th century Europe brought about the end of the Middle Ages. In addition to natural disasters, the expanding social and political superstructure has outpaced the productivity level of that age (p23). Great social and economic turmoil followed and the result was a new world economy that was built on division of labor and capital accumulation.
There is little question that, in Wallerstein’s world system, the economic relations between its actors are deterministic. It supersedes state boundaries. It shapes national identities, not being shaped by it. According to Wallerstein, there are 3 tiers: the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. Defined exclusively by their respective labor relations and roles in the world economy, the makeup of each tier is a mixture of nations (as we know today), religions and geological regions. Even superiority inherited from history could become irrelevant in a capitalistic world system: while the Great Britain joined the core late but went on to become a world empire, Spain squandered all its earlier fortunes precisely because it tried to construct an empire via purely political means.
Although Wallerstein builds his case mainly by studying 16th century Europe, by calling the system “modern”, he certainly implies we live by the very system today. The “global economy”, as we know today, accentuates the division of labor to extreme. Yet the term “labor” may fit more naturally in Wallerstein’s world system than it does today, because manual economic activities have precipitated to the bottom of economic solution. However, if we base the division model on level of productivity and capital intensity, then we are able to not only retrofit in Wallerstein’s 16th century Europe, but today’s global system as well. The evolution of division also produced parallel historical events. One could argue the crumbled Soviet Union followed a similar trajectory of the bankrupt Holy Roman Empire. Or today’s United States simply replaced Great Britain at the top of the same economic food chain.
Yet it would be a mistake to equate Wallerstein’s Division of Labor to that of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. Whereas the concept of comparative advantages may be considered morally agnostic, Wallerstein makes it clear his Division of Labor is synonymous to structural exploitation and coercion. When dissecting labor relations in each tier, he assigned feudalism and slavery to the periphery, sharecropper to the semi-periphery and wage labor (or self-employment) to the core (p87). One may argue such characterization may be too board or too simplistic to account for intra-tier exploitations—after all, sheep in the 15th century England did not “eat” Polish peasants, few can argue the inequality that is inherently in such division. This becomes ever more evident as the world system matures. The 19th century Irish Potato Famine may have been remembered as a natural calamity, it was nevertheless the result of core-periphery arrangement. In his emotionally charged yet thoroughly documented book, “Paddy’s Lament, Ireland 1846-1847” (Harvest/HBJ Book, 1987), Tom Gallagher said, from the Union of 1800, the Irish was “systematically discouraged until Ireland become an agricultural country” that planted almost nothing but potato in exchange for manufactured goods of England.
Since Wallerstein professed at the beginning of the book his sympathy towards the “downtrodden” (p4), he viewed the Iberian explorers in the 15th century no more than the frontier’s men of that era (p34). At the end of the 14th century, he seems to argue, the conjuncture of population growth and economic depression created such a pressure that Europe had to expand. The Portuguese had decided the cost of expand overseas was much cheaper than intruding into territories of established European states. Having expelled the Moors back to Africa at the end of the Reconquista certainly helped too. What was more significant, however, beside their seagoing capability and its location, was the injection of Italian capital. Although Wallerstein did not probe further, I couldn’t help but speculate whether some of the Italian fortunes had their roots in the Crusades?
It is interesting that Wallerstein immediately turned to China after he answered “why Portugal?” After all, China had a similar, albeit isolated, expedition to the other coast of Africa around the same time. So why not the Chinese? Wallerstein tried to advance several theories, some of which, like those from Weber and Joseph Levenson, sounded awfully close to the sentiment expressed by Jared Diamond in his book “Guns, Germs, and Steels” (Norton, 1999). This school focused on China’s social structure, i.e. a highly centralized political legacy, being too institutionally calcified to respond to new stimulus. Sensing such analysis alone might not fit well in his world economy thesis, Wallerstein, rather hastily in my opinion, added the differences between rice and wheat to explain the ultimate lack of pressure to expand overseas. I’d venture to speculate that such Malthusian tension has always existed in China. But over thousands of years and after series early historical accidents, China has accepted the existence of a pressure release mechanism in the form of dynastic changes. Some of those changes were triggered by domestic tensions, others by external invasions, such as those from the North or Northwest.
Wallerstein book is a very interesting but demanding read. To someone like me that lacks systematic knowledge of European history, his penchant to use legacy and non-English terms to denote historical events certainly did not help either. However, his approach, compared to that of Diamond, is more intellectual inquisitive and more inclusive in others’ arguments. Nowhere is more obvious than in his descriptions of capital accumulation and division of labor, evidently, the two corner stones of his concept of the “World System”.