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

The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century Reviews

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  Eren Buğlalılar

  EN
  
  It took 2 years for Wallerstein to find a publisher for his masterpiece. Interestingly enough, he was the famous American social scientist Charles Tilly who agreed to publish the piece in his publishing house and primed the bomb.
  
  The book is influenced from a wide range of theories and practices from Marx to Cuban Revolution. To me, its theses mark the victory for his side during the debates between the orthodox and new-left Marxists.
  
  His very insightful theses contrast with his extremely dull style. My neurons refused to fire during the chapters about the economic history of England.
  
  TR
  
  Wallerstein sonradan klasikleşen bu kitaba yayıncı bulamayınca, son noktayı koyduktan ancak iki sene sonra yayımlatabilmiş. İlginç bir buluşma bu kitap vesilesiyle yaşanmış ve kitabın yayıncısı ABD’li sosyal bilimci Charles Tilly olmuş.
  
  Dünya Sistemleri Analizi’ne giden yol uzun. Wallerstein kitabını yazarken Marx’tan başlayıp Küba Devrimi’ne uzanan bir teoriler ve pratikler tarihinden etkilenmiş. Sunduğu tezle 1960-70'lerin feodalizm-kapitalizm tartışmalarında da -bence- kendi kanadının üstünlüğünü ilan etmiş.
  
  Wallerstein Avrupa merkezli dünya sisteminin 16. yüzyılda ortaya çıktığını ve büyük atılımını Amerika'nın sömürgeleştirildiği yıllarda yaptığını söylüyor. Bu tez yazarın en önemli katkıları olarak görülen diğer tespitlere götürüyor bizi: i. Uluslararası işbölümüyle birlikte ülkeler arasındaki merkez-çevre ayrımının yapısallaşması. ii. Kapitalist pazar içim üretim yapan çevre ekonomiler, merkez ülkelerdekine benzemeyen üretim örgütlenmelerine sahip olsalar da (proletarya yerine kölecilik, yarıcılık, serflik), buraların feodal, köleci olarak değil kapitalist olarak nitelendirilmesi gerekliliği. iii. Bir organizmaya benzeyen dünya sisteminde merkez ülkeler arasında sancılı, şiddetli bir liderlik el değişimi yaşanmasının neredeyse kaçınılmazlığı.
  
  Tezlerin ilginçliği Wallerstein'ın bunaltıcı üslubuyla tezat oluşturmuş. Özellikle İngiltere'nin ekonomi tarihi tartışmasında sıkıntıdan öldüm. Bir de bu cilt daha çok Fransa, İngiltere ve İspanya gibi merkez ülkelerin gelişimine yer vermiş, Atlantik’in diğer yakası az kalmış.
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  L. A.

  This is a great work of history but I have some caveats. I have very little ill to say about anything actually contained in the volume, it was extremely insightful and as someone trying to develop a Marxist understanding of history it was invaluable work of historical materialism. Wallerstein is phenomenal at developing the concrete relationships and tensions that would drive the leading edge of the ascent of western Europe onto the course that we recognize today. He shows how economic pressures created drives that sometimes ran afoul of political or ideological complications and grand political politics either became mired in economic pitfalls or achieved at least a temporary coherence.
  
  My biggest disappointment was with the lack of attention paid to the victims of exploitation and colonialism. It was especially disappointing because I knew that the author was supposed to be an expert on African independence movements and I expected substantially more development of at least the economic and political structures that were put into place in order to bring these populations into the European world economy. I'm certainly no historian so these may be the tics of an academic who doesn't want to retreat ground very familiar to more expert readers (and Wallerstein certainly doesn't seem to be particularly interested in expressing anything reminiscent of agitprop in his writing) but that seems to me to be more of a failure of a bourgeois academia, but whatever. In any case, I had the great fortune to be passed several chapters from Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism which were in a similar style of historical analysis but were much more satisfying in their treatment of the historical modes of oppression and colonialism. It is something I am very strongly considering tackling next.
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  Med

  یک کتاب اصلی و خیلی مهم در خصوص درک و فهم تاریخ سرمایه داری و ریشه های به وجود امدن ساختاری که در حال حاضر جهان مشاهده میکنبم. البته والرشتاین جلدهای دیگری رو هم به این کتاب اضافه کردت که منتظر ترجمه شون هستیم.
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  Alejo López Ortiz

  Feliz la nación cuyo pueblo no ha olvidado como revelarse
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  Boone Ayala

  Wallerstein (in this first volume of an incredibly dense, multivolume work) takes as his unit of analysis not particular states but a "world-system," an economic system that is "larger than any juridically-defined political unit" and view "the basic linkage between the parts of the system [as] economic" (15). This volume is about the emergence of the new, capitalist world system from feudal roots.
  
  In Chapter 1, "The Medieval Prelude," Wallerstein, following RH Hinton, describes a "general crisis of feudalism" that is "the culmination of 1000 years of development, the decisive crisis of a system." The nature of the crisis was that they arrived at "the inherent limitations of the reward system of feudal social organization... for if the optimal degree of productivity had been passed in a system and the economic squeeze was leading to a generalized seignior-peasant class war, as well as ruinous fights within the seignorial classes, then the only solution that would expand the economic pie to be shared, a solution which required, given the technology of the time, an expansion of the land area and population base to exploit. This is what in fact took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries" (20).
  
  "It was precisely the immense pressures of this conjuncture [the crisis of feudalism, a conjuncture between secular trends, an immediate cyclical crisis, and climatological decline] that made possible the enormity of the social change. For what Europe was to develop and sustain now was a new form of surplus appropriation, a capitalist world-economy. ... It will be the argument of this book that three things were essential to the establishment of such a capitalist world-economy: [1] an expansion of the geographical size of the world in question, [2] the development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones of the world-economy, and [3] the creation of relatively strong state machineries in what would become the core-states of this capitalist world-economy" (29).
  
  Ch 2, "The New European Division of Labor" sketches Based on wages and the availability of land, England and Holland entered the 16th century with a slight advantage in industrial production and commercial shipping, whereas Eastern Europe had more available land and lower wages. "the slight differential already established in production specialties meant that profit maximization was achieved, or at least thought to be achieved, by doing more extensively and more efficiently what one already did best" (79). "The agricultural specialization of the core encouraged the monetization of rural work relationships, as the work was more skilled and as landowners wished to rid themselves of the burden of surplus agricultural workers. Wage labor and and money rents became the means of labor control. In this system, a stratum of independent small-scale farmers could emerge and indeed grow strong both on their agricultural products and on their links to new handicraft industries" (82).
  
  Ch3, "The Absolute Monarchy and Statism" details the formation of states as an element within the world-system. Absolutism and centralization was especially vital in the core state, as it "created the stability that permitted this large-scale shift of personnel and occupation without at the same time, at least at this point in time, undoing the basic hierarchical division of status and reward" (110). Critically, it was the collapse of Habsburg/French empire that made the further entrenchment of this division of labor possible. "Conflict within the world-system, this weakening of Spanish world dominance, made it possible for the bourgeoisie of the United Provinces to maneuver to maximize its interests" (138). In the aftermath of the destruction of Habsburg dominance (from 1559) the world-system was restructured. "The new system was to be the one that has predominated ever since, a capitalist world-economy whose core-states were to be intertwined in a state of constant economic and military tension, competing for the privilege of exploiting (and weakening the state machineries of) peripheral areas, and permitting certain entities to play a specialized, intermediary role as semiperipheral powers" (131).
  
  These were the conditions that allowed the capitalist world system to emerge, and provided the opportunity for specialization and the creation of strong core states that actively promoted the interests of the budding bourgeoisie. "This is particularly the case in the advantaged areas of the world-economy - what we have called the core-states. In such states, the creation of a strong state machinery coupled with a national culture, a phenomenon often referred to as integration, serves both as a mechanism to protect disparities that have arisen within the world-system, and as an ideological mask and justification for the maintenance of these disparities" (231).
  
  Volume 2 will turn to the consolidation and entrenchment of this world system in the age of mercantilism, 1600-1750.
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  Simon Butler

  An impressive, challenging work of historical synthesis that adds some distinctive arguments to the debates about the origins of capitalism and the transition from feudalism. Wallerstein's main agenda is to outline his world systems theory i.e. the emergence of an historically unprecedented capitalist world-system over the long 16th century. This world system/world economy was defined by a) the development of unified capitalist states (e.g. England, the Netherlands, France) in contradistinction to the comparatively diffuse empires of Spain, Portugal, Venice, Genoa, Russia or the Ottomans, and b) an unequal division of labour between the core-states, and the peripheral and semiperipheral areas. Importantly, Wallerstein includes the Spanish and Portuguese plunder and colonisation the Americas as an critical part of the periphery that created the modern world-system. It also deals in detail with scholarly debates about the significance of the Dutch and English Revolutions, the wars and conflicts of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the rise and decline of the Spanish Hapsburg empire, and the descent of Northern Italy from the medieval industrial and commerical powerhouse of Europe to a semiperipherial status by the dawn of the 17th century.
  
  I was prompted to finally read this because I recalled a conference speech that I attended in Sydney more than 10 years ago in which the Marxist scholar Michael Lebowitz said, as an aside, that Marx could be considered a world-systems thinker. I thought to myself at the time I had to read Wallerstein one day because I didn't know anything about world-systems theory. I won't presume to say I know precisely what Lebowitz meant by his comment. However, it does seem to me that a world-systems approach has some striking similarities with Marx's outlook. For instance, Marx once argued that the "the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production" was signalled by "the discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins ...".
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  Ajay

  A remarkable book. The Modern World-System I is the first in a series that convincingly explains the actual process of economic, social, and political development on a world-scale. There are points of difference between my view and that of Wallerstein, by-and-large this work is compelling and revolutionary.
  
  Not for the casual reader, this is a book targeted at an audience with a deep curiosity for history and a bias towards economic explanations for political and social change.
  
  Not only does this book build the foundations for a theory of world-economics and development that provides a counterpoint (disproving many of the tenants) of Neoliberal/free market bullshit, but it raises into question enormous societal, cultural, and economic assumptions that underpin our modern understandings of capitalism and globalization.
  
  The decision to start with the period 1450 - 1640, may feel arcane. Days too long past. But, I appreciate starting here because it allows us to ask and answer questions of key import.
  Why did Europe (and indeed Portugal) discover the New World?
  Why did the industrial revolution and modern capitalism arise in Europe and not China?
  Why did Spain fail to translate it's Transatlantic Empire into a European Imperium?
  What drove the rise and fall of nations and economies throughout this period?
  How does a "world-system" work and necessarily lead to inequality in development, values, institutions, and peoples?
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  sube

  It seeks to analyse the emergence of the first *durable* world-system, i.e. a system compromising a multitude of political-jurodicial subjects with boundaries, rules of legitimiation, coherence, etc. with a corresponding world-economy: capitalism. It wide in depth, having at times very mind-breaking parts (on banditry, distinction external area / periphery, growth of the state machinery, ...) however the extensive discussions of bullions can become a bore. Nonetheless, highly informative.
  
  It is very useful in adding another layer on historical analysis: a state may be commercially capitalist, say Russia in 16th century, but not part of the world-economy but an isolated area at the time trying to create its own autonomous world-system. Etc. Very useful in analysing things.
  
  
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  José

  comienza muy fuerte pero se hace muy bola hacia la segunda mitad, salvo el último capítulo sobre la expansión de la periferia (rusia) y la semiperiferia (portugal) y el fracaso de la segunda
  a ver qué tal el segundo volumen
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  Sofia Pi

  I absolutely loved Wallerstein and his analysis of modern capitalism. I am looking forward to reading the next two volumes.
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  Paul Peterson

  An awesome book for sure!
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  Alex

  provides lots of detail about the rise of capitalism in Europe in the "long sixteenth century" (about 1450-1640), as a result of the exploitation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, as well as the emergence of wage-slavery for the domestic population. also interesting is the connection to the emergence of the strong 'nation-state' and how this was both shaped by, and shaped, early capitalism.
  
  a bit dense, too detail-heavy, and at times boring, so there are probably better books out there about this subject. regardless, the subject is very interesting.
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  Marlobo ♥ epilogues

  Brillante trabajo. A mí, leer a Wallerstein me cambió la manera de ver y entender la historia y, consecuentemente el presente. Sin duda, uno de los grandes innovadores de la historiografía del siglo XX.
  
  Wallerstein habla ya en ese momento nada más y nada menos que de globalización y complejidad, palabras e ideas que tardaría casi 20 años más en ser términos corrientes. Y no sólo lo explica con claridad conceptual es notable, sino también con visión crítica.
  
  Se podrá acordar o no con sus posturas, lo que no se puede es desdeñar su construcción teórica.
  
  
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  Kersplebedeb

  Really good arguments, however for someone without the historical background knowledge, the level of detail was overwhelming, and in fact distracting. As were the almost unending endnotes. These are quibbles, and say more about me that about the book i am sure. Still, they made it a lot more difficult to read. Add to that the fact that almost all of the sources are secondary sources, and i am left unsure how convinced i should or should not be by the argument.
  
  That said, obviously, a massively important book.
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  Nachtreich

  Nell'intenzione di portare lentamente avanti le proprie tesi circa la relazione tra centri e periferie, fa più da revisione sistematica che altro, concentrandosi su fonti secondarie. Tutti i discorsi circa l'Europa come culla del sistema economico mondiale sono intrapresi mettendo a confronto ipotesi, modelli teorici, dati proposti da altri autori e messi a confronto.
  
  Ricca la disponibilità di note a piè di pagina. Necessario far avanti e indietro con altre fonti già che il testo è articolato in modo tale da rendere necessarie molte conoscenze pregresse.
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  Turan

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