BENTON, Lauren - From The World-Systems Perspective To Institutional World History - Culture and Economy in Global Theory

From the World-Systems Perspective to Institutional World History: Culture and Economy in
Global Theory
Author(s): Lauren Benton
Source: Journal of World History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall, 1996), pp. 261-295
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
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From theWorld-Systems Perspective to
InstitutionalWorld History: Culture and
Economy inGlobal Theory*
LAUREN BENTON
New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark
have undertaken the task in this paper of asking whether a world

I systems perspective, now more than two decades old, continues to
be of use. This question is a bit peculiar, since many scholars continue
to work within the perspective and clearly find it useful. Their reli
ance, however, is almost
always carefully qualified, and it seems timely
to ask whether the repeated qualifications do not signal the need
for fundamental revisions or even a wholesale abandonment of some
aspects of the perspective. At the same time, a significant group of
scholars writing about institutional economic change has consistently
elected not to use the world-systems framework. Can the qualified ac
ceptance of one group and the studied rejection of the other together
lead us to a r??valuation of the perspective's future?
I argue in this paper that a series of research strategies and theoret
ical moves designed to respond to powerful critiques of the world
systems perspective has now run its course. Rather than replicating
these approaches, which have yielded useful research and some new
insights, we now need to push further, following the logic of the
critiques resolutely, even when this means challenging fundamental
features of the perspective. Some clues as to how this might be done
can be found in alternative approaches to the study of economic
change?in particular, institutional analysis. A second source of valu
able insights is a recent body of research on colonial cultures. Al
*
Iwould like to thank Philip Curtin and Ian Christopher Fletcher for comments on an
earlier draft of this paper.
Journal ofWorld History, Vol. 7, No. 2

?1996 by University of Hawai*i Press
261

2?2 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL I996
though neither set of writings provides a framework that can serve as a

true alternative to world-systems theorizing, both approaches offer
insights about ways to respond more fully to that perspective's central
problems. My discussion focuses on the problem of representing cul
ture and its influence on global change, a problem that often emerges
in attempts to reconcile an understanding of the open-endedness of
historical process with structural representations of global relation
ships. Drawing on the strengths of all three approaches, I will suggest
yet another sort of enterprise, something I am calling here institu
tional world history, as a potentially fruitful avenue for studying cul
tural processes and the global economy as inextricably linked.
The argument proceeds in four steps. First, Iwill examine the sorts
of critiques that have been made consistently of the world-systems per
spective, with particular attention to critiques of Immanuel Waller
stein's work. Second, Iwill describe four strategies, or analytical moves,
that have been designed to respond to these critiques as research has
continued under the world-systems banner. Third, I will give a brief
analysis of institutional analysis and its own shortcomings. Finally, I
will propose alternative approaches to the central problems of the
world-systems perspective, drawing in part on insights from cultural
theory.
Critiques
Although the world-systems perspective surely antedates the contribu

tions of Wallerstein and extends to writers who would perhaps not
consider themselves his followers, it is useful to take the publication in
1974 of the first volume of The Capitalist World-System as a coming of
age of this perspective.1 Wallerstein's book attracted widespread atten
tion and?remarkably, given its complexity?became the focal point
for debates about the world-systems approach that have continued
1 as a specific
Wallerstein himself argues that the world-systems analysis approach
emerged in the mid-1970s: "World-systems analysis has existed under that name, more or
less, for about fifteen years. Some of its arguments, of course, have longer histories, even
very long histories. Yet, as a perspective, it emerged only in the 1970s. It presented itself as
a critique of existing dominant views in the various social sciences, and primarily of devel
opmentalism and modernization theory which seemed to dominate social science world
wide during the 1960s" (Wallerstein 1990, p. 287). Stern notes that Latin America
specialists came to view Frank's influential work on dependency "as a kind of vulgar pre
view" of Wallerstein's work; he observes, too, that Wallerstein's later books and articles
leave the framework of the first volume intact (Stern 1988, pp. 830-31, 837).

Benton: World-Systems Perspective and Institutional World History 263
now for two decades. Wallerstein argued in that volume that a capital
ist world economy emerged in the sixteenth century that was different
from any earlier large-scale formations ("world-empires") because it
was a multistate system that contained within it a division of labor. He
identified three areas within the capitalist world economy: a core,
characterized in part by the predominance of wage labor and the exist
ence of strong states; a periphery, with coerced labor and weak states;
and a semiperiphery, where semicoerced labor (sharecropping) pre
dominated. The three areas were interconnected in a single economic
system. The core produced industrial goods for the periphery, which in
turn produced agricultural goods and raw materials for the core. The
semiperiphery acted as intermediary. Though Wallerstein termed this a
world-system, he argued that in the sixteenth century it excluded most
of the world and stretched from Eastern Europe toWestern Europe to
the colonies of the New World.
One aspect of the great appeal of this formulation was that it
responded neatly to a central, thorny problem of both Marxist theory
and the historiography of the New World. Scholars had struggled for a
way to characterize economies
the colonial of Latin America, and the
emerging plantation complex in particular. These areas appeared feu
dal in many respects, yet at the same time they clearly differed from
the feudalism of Europe by virtue of their role as producers of commod
ities for Europe. Wallerstein's argument that the essence of capitalism
consisted in the juxtaposition of different forms of labor allowed these
regions to be incorporated into the capitalist world economy without
requiring them to exhibit the features of a capitalist economy. Waller
stein's work also systematized arguments about the persistent economic
dependence of the periphery that had been circulating among Latin
American scholars since the 1960s. Finally, the work proposed a way
out of the interesting but stalled debate about the transition from feu
dalism to capitalism in Europe by suggesting that the debate had cen
tered too narrowly on conditions inside Europe as determining the rise
of capitalism.
Many of the commentaries and reviews that appeared in the late
1970s were enthusiastic, and most reviewers seemed sure that the book
would have enormous influence (as it assuredly has had). But criticism
was also pervasive and pointed. Critics had clearly identified a set of
problems that continue still to preoccupy Wallerstein's followers and
to involve them in some fancy footwork to remain within the frame
work he established. One thrust of the early critiques questioned the
historical support for Wallerstein's argument. The other more explic
itly addressed the theoretical problems raised by the approach.

264 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL I996
In the initial response toWallerstein, the challenges on the basis of

historical inaccuracy were considerable. They were of two kinds: one
pointed to specific inaccuracies, while another, broader criticism ques
tioned Wallerstein's decision to locate significant historical disconti
nuity in the sixteenth century. The narrow critiques were by no means
unimportant. One strand noted the historical inconsistencies of a fun
damental piece of Wallerstein's schema: the idea that there was a
direct relationship between placement in the world economy and both
state strength and forms of labor. Skocpol, among other critics, ques
tioned these relationships, noting that "there were more and stronger
absolutisms outside the core than in it" (Skocpol 1977, p. 1084).
Others pointed out that Wallerstein gives confusing and contradictory
accounts of important cases like Russia?a strong state that was ulti
mately incorporated as part of the periphery?and France, a strong
state partially in the core that was nevertheless no stronger than, say,
Spain, that firmly descended
and to the semiperiphery by the seven
teenth century (Markoff 1977). Indeed, the semiperiphery seemed to
be especially problematic inWallerstein's formulation. In addition to
the inconsistencies in describing state structure for this group, its func
tioning inside the system is not fully explained. At times, to be in the
semiperiphery is described as a state of in-betweenness; at times, it is
made to signify something more: a role as political buffer as well as
financial intermediary. But critics complained that it was unclear from
Wallerstein's account which semiperipheral states were playing which
roles when, or even how the political mechanism worked.2
Further, historians were quick to point out that forms of labor also
did not distribute neatly in the way Wallerstein described. Some
argued that the core was not particularly corelike by Wallerstein's defi
nition for the sixteenth century. Foreign trade was not decisive in the
role of economic growth in core states, and labor regimes were still
heterogeneous (Rapp 1976; Cameron 1976; Sella 1977). Even in the
periphery, the fundamental relationship between world-system status
and labor extraction was hardly clear-cut. Enserfment of the Eastern
European peasantry was in place a century before the grain trade
became important, and in the Americas, there was considerable diver
sity by region in both the nature and the timing of incorporation in
the world economy (Sella 1977; Mintz 1977).
2See Markoff in more contemporary

1977. The problem of the semiperiphery persists
analyses. Arrighi, for example, finds it necessary to split the category further because of the
heterogeneity of its members within southern Europe alone; some countries are more accu
rately described as being on "the perimeter of the core," while others are best described as
being "at the upper end of the periphery" (Arrighi 1985a, p. 18; see also Martin 1990).

More recent works have continued to raise questions about these

categories and the characteristics assigned to them. For example, Stern
has argued that even in the places within Spanish America where one
would most expect to find coerced labor in consistent use, close histor
ical analysis reveals a much more complex?and also different?pic
ture. Of labor relations in colonial mining, he writes:
for a brief period. . . the labor system is best described as a

Except
fluctuating combination of wage relations, share relations, and forced
labor relations in which voluntary share relations predominated?both
because such relations were the most and be
numerically frequent
cause their influence tended to "distort" or "twist" other labor rela
tions in the direction of "sharecropping" (Stern 1988, p. 854; empha
sis added).
A second strand of the early historical critiques questioned the

definition of "externality" inWallerstein's world economy. The exclu
sion of the trade in "preciosities," which Wallerstein sees as far less
influential than the trade in bulk commodities and staples, was seen
as especially problematic. Defining bullion as a preciosity and sugar as
a basic commodity not only strained common sense, it seemed also to
separate us from potentially revealing analyses of how the flow of
luxury commodities sustained elite status and prospects (Schneider
1977). It shifted attention, too, from a complex long-distance trade
relationship connecting Europe to the eastern Mediterranean, Indian
Ocean, Central Asia, and East Asia. More than trade flowed over
these networks; through contact with Asia, Europe was learning
about the possibilities of production (the quality of manufacturing
in Europe was lower than in Asia in important categories of goods,
such as cotton textiles and steel); about the necessity of manufactur
ing growth for the expansion of profitable trade (the lesson of hav
ing to sustain a bullion flow to pay for Asian goods that could not
be purchased with European goods was not lost); and about tech
nologies that could be borrowed, adapted, and improved upon. But
even without taking into account the direct or indirect impacts of
trade itself, the idea of "externality" and the related idea that the
European world economy was developing according to an indepen
dent internal logic appeared odd in light of the influence of the strug
gle with the expanding Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century.
Many of the state structures that play such a central role inWaller
stein's theses about the world economy were partially formed in
response to this struggle. Much is lost, Lane argued, and little is

gained "by treating the dynamics of development independently"

(Lane 1976, p. 29).
This strand of historical critique has had continued resonance
among scholars, both sympathetic and hostile. Jones, for example,
complains that Wallerstein's approach does not pay enough attention
"to the possibility of independent growth elsewhere" and is thus too
Eurocentric.3 Others more supportive of Wallerstein's views have
argued that he underestimates the complexity of large economic
systems outside Europe before the sixteenth century. The most de
tailed critique in this respect isAbu-Lughod's treatment of three world
economies focused on three "core" areas in the Middle East and Asia
from 1250 to 1500 (Abu-Lughod 1989).
Abroader historical critique articulated by the late 1970s had diffi
culty not just with the internal structure, boundaries, and autonomy of
the world economy as formulated by Wallerstein, but also with its
chronological placement. One group of scholars suggested that Waller
stein had misunderstood the extent and nature of Europe's economic
ties to Asia, as well as the character of the economy both inside and
outside Europe. It is possible, they argued, to perceive a "pre-capitalist
world-economy" with some features of Wallerstein's capitalist world
economy in some places
in medieval Europe (Sella 1977) and in the
trading Europe and Asia before the sixteenth
relations bridging cen
tury (Schneider 1977). A second group of scholars took issue with
Wallerstein's definition of the sixteenth century as capitalist. They
would push the creation of a world capitalist economy later, to the
eighteenth century, when an escalation of world trade made the pat
tern of core exports of manufactured goods and imports of peripheral
raw materials more to core-country structures of gover
significant
nance, and when the rise of the factory system altered the mode of
production in the core resolutely (Nell 1977; Dodgson 1977).
These debates have continued. On the one hand, Wolf (1982) in
an influential work argued that although Europe's influence extended
outside Wallerstein's world economy in the sixteenth century, it was
not a capitalist world economy until the advent of industrial labor and
commodification on a global scale in the eighteenth century. On the
other hand, Jones argues that the evidence for patterns of continuity
in growth within Europe stretching back to the tenth century is com
pelling and that discontinuities in the sixteenth century (and even in
3
Jones 1988, p. 88. Of course, Jones's own earlier work on the European "miracle" suf
fers from this flaw (Jones 1987).

the eighteenth century) are greatly exaggerated (Jones 1988). Frank,

too, though more supportive ofWallerstein's views, has challenged the
view that the sixteenth century marked the emergence of a qualita
tively different world system. Building, he suggests, on McNeill's and
Hodgson's use of the term oikumene (or ecumene) to describe the single
bio-ecological zone of Eurasia, he sees a single world system ("without
the hyphen") as extending over the long span of cultural and eco
nomic interaction (Frank 1990a, 1990b; Frank and Gills 1993; Waller
stein 1993).
These and otherproblems raised about historical accuracy are not
trivial because they are linked implicitly and often explicitly with fun
damental theoretical critiques. It is useful to group various theoretical
objections under three headings.
The first concerns the obvious danger of functionalism: the struc
ture of the system is seen as dictated by the "needs" of the core. As
Lipietz observes, it becomes difficult then to view historical change at
any place within the system as truly open-ended (Lipietz 1986).
Describing a "local response" objection, Mintz notes that the different
"subsegments" of the peripheral zone of the Caribbean were articu
lated in different ways with the world economy and that these patterns
depended crucially on local histories (Mintz 1977). Brenner, too, has
argued persuasively that a given region's articulation with the world
economy was directed largely by internal class composition and con
flicts (Brenner 1976; Aston and Philpin 1985). His critique has often
been represented as principally an attack on the "Marxist heresy" at
the heart of Wallerstein's model: its representation of the system's
structure as lying "not in the sphere of production, but in that of the
circulation of commodities."4 More important, though, is Brenner's
contribution to the general position that local politics?defined to
include contested cultural representations about race, ethnicity, and
class?formed people's consciousness and therefore guided their actions
as much as or more than pressures to adjust to shifts in the interna
tional economy, no matter how powerful and invasive those pressures
were.
some critics,
For the functionalism of Wallerstein's perspective
placed it squarely within a larger tradition of colonial and postcolonial
history that portrayed the "other" as having no independent existence
and that represented "history" as a property of the advanced industrial
4 in this way not to it; his

Padgug describes the objection but does himself subscribe
phrase is quoted inMintz 1977.

countries (Ortner 1989; see also Wolf 1982). In general, the world-sys
tems perspective has done poorly in recognizing or representing the
complexity of culture. The tendency has been to adopt Polanyi's views
about the historical succession from reciprocity to redistribution to
market exchange, and therefore to see culture as crucially important
only in precapitalist economies (Chase-Dunn 1989, chap. 5). Local
cultural variation clearly exists within the capitalist world system, but
it is not an important force. Where Wallerstein in a later work has
labored to take culture into consideration, he views it in clearly func
tionalist terms as a force that holds the system together:
The world-economy has developed certain systematic cul

capitalist
tural pressures designed to further its operation. Those pressures that
seek to discipline and channel the work force are those we have come
to call racism and sexism. Those pressures that seek to discipline
and channel the world's cadres or "middle" strata are those we have
come to call or universalism or "science" (Wallerstein
rationality
i99i,p. 107).
Here again, culture is called into existence by the capitalist world

economy to further its ends. Wallerstein even writes of the system's
need to find the "right dose" of universalism, racism, and sexism since
"the 'right dosage' has made possible the functioning of the system"
(Wallerstein 1991, p. 107).
A second thrust of theoretical objections has addressed not the
lack of attention to local culture and politics?-"motion in the system"
?but the nature of change in the system as a whole.5 Clearly, in fol
lowing Marx, Wallerstein reproduces ideas from classical economics
about the evolutionary nature of capitalist growth (and, eventually, its
"progression" to something else, possibly world socialism). A central
irony of the perspective is that, although it asserts that a distinction
between wage labor and coerced labor is the essence of capitalism, it
represents "incorporation" of regions successively in the world econ
omy as inevitable and emphasizes the significance of predominant
forms of labor in various regions of the world system rather than his
torically conditioned mixes. Critics point most frequently to two phe
nomena that seem to be poorly explained. One is the variability of
capitalist growth outside the core and the persistence, especially in
5The isTrouillot's used in a piece that seeks in part to rescue the world
phrase (1982),
systems perspective from functionalism.

areas fully incorporated into the world economy, of forms of labor ap

propriation not associated with "classic" capitalism. The second is the
vitality within the core itself of "peripheral" forms of labor.6 These
problems suggest the need to redefine capitalism itself as inherently
more varied and historically unstable than the world-systems perspec
tive implies.
A final and related theoretical objection to the approach has to do
with an aspect of its analytic focus, specifically with Wallerstein's over
simplification of state structures.
This problem is important because,
although Wallerstein's is to provide
intent a unit of analysis?the
world economy?that stands over the nation-state, the perspective
returns to an analysis at the level of the state in the concern with state
strategies for movement "up" or "down" from one category to another
within the world economy. Yet, such analysis is informed by an inade
quate notion of what the state is. In Wallerstein's early work, the
sixteenth-century state is defined essentially by its ability to erect
bureaucracy and amass armies?an insufficient characterization for the
sixteenth century and surely an impoverished guide to the complexity
of the state in later periods (see Skocpol 1977)? There is also an under
determined notion of how the state is structured. The key relationship
noted is that between state structure and placement in the world econ
omy. But what about "historically preexisting institutional patterns,
threats of rebellion from below, and geopolitical pressures and con
straints" (Skocpol 1977, p. 1080)? More generally, the very idea of a
simple continuum from weak to strong states may be problematic.7
The theoretical problems recognized in the initial reviews of
Wallerstein's work continue to be raised by critics. Wallerstein has cer
tainly nodded in their direction, but he also clearly continues to see
the problems as resolvable within the framework he established early,
with perhaps only slight variations (for example, a greater specificity
in the description of "anti-systemic movements"; see Arrighi et al.
6On both these points, see Portes et al. 1989. On "peripheralization in the core," see
Sassen 1991, 1994. Nash (1975, 1994) also argues that global integration can be highly
variable. There is an interesting body of literature that analyzes "incorporation" as a process
of articulation of capitalism with other modes of production. See Stern (1988) for a sum
mary and for a related argument about the variety of forms of labor in the Latin American
periphery. Wolf (1982) offers a framework for viewing global economic interaction that
builds in part on this literature.
7 notes the "duality of [Third World]
Migdal states?their unmistakable strengths in
penetrating societies and the surprising weaknesses in effecting goal-oriented social changes"
(Migdal 1988, p. 9). But he has trouble getting away from language suggesting a continuum
from weak to strong states.

1989; Wallerstein 1990). Scholars influenced by Wallerstein's work

have been more willing to address these problems directly. The result
is a body of literature inspired by the world-systems approach but seek
ing to correct or compensate for its shortcomings.
Qualifications
The or qualifications
corrections to the world-systems approach can be
summarized by describing four theoretical and analytical moves that
have been moderately successful?particularly when used in combina
tion?in making the framework sensitive to the power of local culture
and politics to build the system "from below," flexible enough to
accommodate variable patterns of labor use and other forms of eco
nomic divergence, and attentive to a wider array of political and state
institutions and their impact. The first three involve a flight from
grand theorizing to a focus on "middle-ground theorizing" that isolates
particular aspects of the world economy.8 The last moves in the oppo
site direction: away from the examination of variation in particular
places and regions, and toward a universal and further distilled version
of world-systems theorizing.
The first involves careful shifting in the scope and scale of analysis.
Examples of a scale-shifting strategy can be found in monographs from
the 1980s on the insertion of regional peasantries in the world econ
omy (for example, Trouillot 1988; Verdery 1983; Roseberry 1983) and
in more recent studies of industrial labor and regional economic
change (for example, Benton 1990; Blim 1990). Anthropologists have
played an important role in developing this strategy of tracing clear
and direct connections (and causal effects in both directions) from
local communities and even individual families to global markets and
pressures emanating from the position of particular countries and
regions in the world economy. For example, in a study of sectoral re
structuring and industrial labor in Spain, I trace sectoral linkages verti
cally, from pressures related to Spain's international market position
(and placement in competition with other "semiperipheral" coun
tries), to companies' strategies to respond to market shifts through
decentralization and product diversification, to the actions of individ
8Merton uses the phrase "theories of the middle in a some

(1957) range" (though
what different sense). Portes and Walton (1981) employ a similar term in describing one
strand of theorizing about the world-economy and urban change. See also Chase-Dunn
1989, Part IV

ual workers and groups of workers attempting to redefine career trajec

tories in rapidly changing sectors. In seeking to show the power and
complexity of political conflicts in framing restructuring, I shift the
focus of analysis from local alliances and labor conflicts to regional and
national alliances and policy debates (Benton 1990). Similarly, Blim
(1990) is able to draw connections between the perspectives and strat
egies of entrepreneurial families in one region of central Italy and the
changing place of the Italian textile industry (and of northern and
central Italy more generally) in the world economy. Trouillot (1988)
traces links between Dominica's peripheral place in the world econ
omy and the lives of even those Dominicans who appear to be the
furthest removed from exposure to the forces of world markets.
A closely related second strategy is to focus attention on the state
as a complex intermediary between local and international forces.
Underlying this approach is the recognition that, though Wallerstein
may have oversimplified or incorrectly identified the key patterns of
association among state strength, placement in the world economy,
and forms of labor extraction, these relationships are critical and do
constitute an important starting place for study of the world economy.
The relationships have been explored in studies of dependent develop
ment in the "semiperiphery." Consider, for example, analyses of the
overlap of class, state, and international interests (Evans 1979); com
parative studies of development strategies in semiperipheral countries
(Martin 1990; Arrighi 1985b; Gereffi and Wyman 1990; Kaufman
1979; Evans 1985); and, linked less explicitly to world-systems theoriz
ing but clearly influenced by it, studies of state intervention in agricul
tural and industrial development in Southeast Asia (for example,
Amsden 1985, 1989; Wade 1983). Thus the "wing" of world-systems
analysts who focus on the state overlaps considerably with the school
of new institutionalists, broadly defined (see below).
Third, attention has been shifted to the study of various trans
national phenomena or processes that by their nature tie local practice
to global structure. One example is migration. Studies of the move
ment of labor from periphery to core countries explore a structured
relationship of inequality at the same time that they treat the move
ment as a complex cultural phenomenon determined as much by par
ticipants as by structural forces. A second example is the focus on
international production strategies of multinational firms or, more
broadly, the transnational reach of sectoral restructuring moves (for
example, Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). By definition, these foci
require attention to movement and instability in the system, but they
also may be grounded in a world-systems notion of structured global

inequality. By definition, they also require attention to the involve

ment of the state in the creation of a regulatory context for capitalist
production that is highly complex and itself not predetermined. As
with the scale-shifting strategy, this approach has been successful in
generating rich empirical research about transnational processes and
in making concrete the abstract idea that international processes are
at work that transcend national boundaries to powerful effect.
A fourth and rather different approach has been to broaden the
historical range of application of the world-systems perspective. This
move has two prominent variants. The first is argued by Frank, who
sees a single world system extending throughout history and empha
sizes its unchanging logic. Wallerstein, too, has engaged in this reduc
tionism in offering a list of a dozen (and, elsewhere, six) characteristics
of the capitalist world economy; Frank sees these as extending much
earlier. At times, he emphasizes three characteristics taken directly
from Wallerstein, who identifies a "descriptive trinity": core-periphery
tensions, A/B cycle phases (Kondratieff cycles), and hegemony-rivalry
relationships among dominant powers. At other times, the emphasis is
on accumulation and exchange as the most important features and the
source of continuity in the single world system (see Frank and Gills
1993, pp. 7> 29).
The second variant of this move supports Wallerstein's contention
that the capitalist world economy is historically unique and dates from
the sixteenth century, but posits the earlier existence of other world
systems. Abu-Lughod takes this approach in her work applying Waller
stein's notion of world economy to areas outside the West in the
period from 1250 to 1500. She identifies at least three regions that
served as core areas to trading networks stretched over multistate
systems. The "rise" of the capitalist world economy, she argues, can
only be understood as a response to the transformation of those other
world economies, a discontinuous shift brought about by a conjuncture
of international shifts (with the bubonic plague acting as a special
catalyst). Unlike Chase-Dunn, Abu-Lughod views the current period
as one of further discontinuity, and she suggests that the way to extend
the logic of Wallerstein's analysis over time is not to reify it, but to
look for the possibility of the emergence of world economies that, like
the thirteenth-century be structured differently.
cases, may In turn, she
implies, the historical comparisons can reveal what we should view as
the truly universal elements of world-systems analysis (Abu-Lughod
1990; see also Frank 1990b; Amin 1991; cf. Chase-Dunn 1984, 1989).
This theoretical approach and the three analytical strategies
described above are flawed in opposite ways. The first three solutions

are marred by a peculiar irony: studies designed to demonstrate how

structures are generated out of particular conflicts are so en
global
gaged with the complexity of that demonstration that they often leave
the larger outlines of that structure more or less unaltered. Studies on
industrial restructuring, for example, simultaneously reveal apparently
novel forms of global capitalist organization and assume uncritically
the relative of a global structure divided
stability into core, semiperiph
ery, and
periphery. The "middle ground" theorizing is sometimes
impressive, but few theorists have attempted a jump from there to
reconfiguration of the implicit model of the global economy.9
At the other extreme, of course, the proposal to extend historical
analysis is also flawed. The search for the "essential logic" of the per
spective produces such a stripped-down version of world-systems theo
rizing that the power and originality of the perspective appear lost.
One problem is simply that the search for continuity distracts from an
understanding of real historical change, even fundamental change in
economic organization and productive capacity.10 Another is that the
argument tends to devolve into simple assertion because it is?like
Wallerstein's original framework of the world system?impossible to
disprove. There is but one unit of analysis?a single world system?
with characteristics so broad that one would be hard pressed not to
find them. Conspicuously missing from the list are the sorts of features
that made Wallerstein's initial formulation so intriguing: in particular,
the explicit linking of core, periphery, and semiperiphery status within
the world economy with forms of labor control and with particular
patterns of state intervention or political formation.
The search for earlier world systems seems more promising, though
it has the disadvantage of accepting Wallerstein's representation of the
9
Harrison (1994) and Harvey (1989) might be offered as counterexamples here of the
orists who have looked at such processes as industrial restructuring and sought to generalize
from them about the nature of global capitalism. However, neither approach challenges the
world-systems perspective, and both incorporate much of it implicitly. Thus, Harrison's
emphasis on capital concentration confirms the inevitable dominance of the core, and
Harvey's description of flexible accumulation again portrays capitalist accumulation in the
core as the determinant force in structuring a tiered global order. I place discussion of these
works on the margins here, too, because by focusing on capital accumulation and change in
the advanced industrial countries, neither conveys the complexity of interaction between
local political conflict and international economic shifts to the extent accomplished in
monographs in the three analytical traditions outlined above.
10
Chase-Dunn (1984) can thus maintain that trends such as the growth by newly
industrialized countries and the, internationalization of production in the last two decades
are interesting but unimportant because they leave the central logic of the system
unaltered.

capitalist world economy as the central contrasting case, without tak

ing into account the serious empirical and conceptual problems critics
have raised (see Abu-Lughod 1989). While the first approach would
transform the world-systems perspective into a mere cataloging of gen
eralized tensions and tendencies, the second historicizing strategy
leaves Wallerstein's sixteenth-century world economy, his periodiza
tion, and the model's central features disturbingly intact.11
There is no doubt that the world-systems perspective has stimulated
two decades of scholarship and that in response toWallerstein much of
that literature has argued strenuously that local social change can help
shape the international economy; that economic development is an
open-ended process; and that all economic behavior, including market

exchange, work, and entrepreneurship, is informed by cultural under
standings, constrained by normative patterns of social relations, and
subject to change. These claims and observations have been made in
works that qualify but do not reject the framework of the world system,
and they seem to be compatible with its central points: that there is a
global division of labor, that state structure and the status of workers
within countries and regions are closely related to their place in that
global system, and that capitalism encompasses, and expands with the
help of, seemingly remote places and apparently different systems of
production and forms of labor. The question now is whether this care
we can
fully qualified vision of the world system is the best do.
Alternatives
Do we need to be concerned the subtle but important flaws in

about
the qualified world-systems perspective? A suggestion that some find
because they never did fight their way through
appealing?perhaps
Wallerstein's footnote-laden opus in the first place, perhaps because
they were put off by its rhetoric of redemption in the form of world
socialism?is that the approach should be abandoned altogether, even
in its carefully qualified forms. One possible argument is that the per
should be set aside simply because it is a master narrative?
spective
never mind the need to examine its explanatory power.12 Another,
11
Note tries for some revision by proposing the possibility of multi
that Chase-Dunn
within the capitalist the correction
ple modes of production world-economy (1989);
addresses the problem of the heterogeneity of labor forms, but not the other critiques?
least of all the perspective's functionalism, which Chase-Dunn seems at times to celebrate,
as in his discussion of culture as the "glue" that holds this system together (1994, chap. 5).
12This view can be associated with the postmodernist of master narratives.
critique
However, a perusal of the literature on postmodernism reveals tremendous confusion about

more interesting, approach challenges the value of the perspective by

ignoring it.
This approach can be constructed out of a broad range of studies
that together I term "institutional analysis." There is considerable
diversity within this approach, and it is probable that some of the
scholars I include under this umbrella would object to being placed
there. Within the field of economics alone, there are at least two tradi
tions of institutional analysis. One dates to the contributions of Thor
stein Veblen and includes some contemporary scholars who share his
interest in examining how social norms both provide and take on the
character of goals for economic actors. Another, more active variant
seeks to understand institutions as both constraints on and the out
come of rational choice strategies of individuals who seek to maximize
their own (material) interests. Many of these scholars use game theory
to reveal how social actors can
strategic positioning by rational
produce complex?and sometimes inefficient?institutions, and to
analyze how such institutions in turn impose constraints on future
choices. Some observers have called these strands "old" and "new"
institutional economics.13
Within political science, institutional analysis has been especially
influential in organizational theory and comparative and
politics,
scholars in both fields have interacted with sociologists, anthropolo
gists, and historians in applying aspects of institutional economics in
their research.14 Some comparativists have sought to distinguish them
selves from the "rational choice" approach to institutions,
calling them
the economy. It is not uncommon to find, in the midst of an of the fragmenta

explanation
tion and artificiality of master narratives, a peculiar reliance on rather antiquated and
pedestrian narratives about global economic to take but one example,
change. Lyotard,
seems to recognize the great slipperiness of meaning in every field except the economic,
where he pictures a relentless and quite fearsome that even the greatest
capitalist machine
fan of Fordism would find fanciful (Lyotard 1984, 1979). There is a clear influence here of
Marxist base-superstructure representations of cultural shifts as more fluid and volatile than
more structural economic One sees a curious link to some
slowly changing relationships.
Marxist economic analysts, for whom institutional
seemingly disorganized restructuring
marks just a wrinkle in the larger, relatively unchanged fabric of advanced capitalism,
would be less to the master narrative
though they likely disguise (Harvey 1989). A related
discussion of the problem of culture in institutional analysis follows.
13
Rutherford (1994) provides a useful analysis of the features of the "new"
contrasting
and "old" institutional economics and concludes that there are more commonalities than
often believed. North (1990), perhaps the most prominent of the current institutional
offers a clear overview of the perspective,
economists, though not all his views are widely
shared. See also Eggertsson (1990) for another clear outline.
14
An influential work outlining institutional in organizational
analysis theory is Pow
ell and DiMaggio (1991). For a clear introduction to institutionalist in com
perspectives
parative politics, see Hielen and Steinmo and the other articles in Steinmo et al.
(1992)
(1992). For applications by some anthropologists, see Acheson 1994.

selves "historical institutionalists." Like the proponents of the "old"

institutional economics, this group argues that institutions not only
constrain the strategic choices of individuals but also shape their goals,
so that social norms and ideas have considerable explanatory power.
Some historical institutionalists move consciously away from the focus
of economists on strategizing and instead characterize institutional
arrangements as the outcome of ongoing social conflict among groups
(Thelen and Steinmo 1992).
Why consider these disparate approaches under a single banner?
Despite the differences, institutionalists do share some central con
cerns and approaches. To begin with, all view institutions as change
able but stable enough to provide continuity across time?an exten
sive structure within which economic systems evolve. Institutions are
viewed as relatively constant until they experience a critical point at
which reorganization comes about. This broadly similar view of histor
ical change is evident in the characterization of change within capital
ism. The regulatory context of capitalism is seen as having gone
through a series of plateaus?described sometimes as "phases" of capi
talist growth (or "regimes of accumulation" by Marxist institutionalists
such as Lipietz [1986])?punctuated by periods of rapid change. The
perspective admits a certain degree of open-endedness in this process,
since uncontrolled historical forces dictate the direction of change at
these critical conjunctures.15 Thus, many institutionalists distinguish a
period of early manufacture characterized by craft labor and batch pro
duction; a shift to Fordism (mass production) and the factory system;
and, in the current period, a further shift to a new pattern of capitalist
growth featuring flexible production and a reemergence of regional
ism. This characterization spans ideologically different positions. Li
pietz (1986), for example, identifies the view as Marxist; Sabel (1982),
Piore and Sabel (1984), and Best (1990) see it as a departure from
traditional views of both the left and the right; and Dunning (1994)
finds it consistent with neoclassical economics. The emphasis in each
case is slightly different: for Lipietz, it is the function of the regulatory
structure in enhancing accumulation; for Piore and Sabel, the shifting
15 In an terms this process of change

influential article, Krasner (1984) "punctuated
equilibrium," a term borrowed from evolutionary scientists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles
Eldridge. For a less formulaic approach that nevertheless also contrasts periods of regulatory
calm with reorganizing crises, see Sabel and Zeitlin (1985) and Piore and Sabel (1984).
Sabel and Zeitlin (forthcoming), in a thoughtful critique of their own and others' work,
note the need "to relax the distinction between periods of stability and periods of transi
tion."

worker-management relations that mark the transitions to new regula

tory contexts; and for Dunning, the "techno-economic" factors that
identify each capitalist phase. The degree of agreement on periodiza
tion in capitalist development is striking, however, as is the emphasis
on the regulatory context as capitalism's defining feature.16
This alternative view of historical change in capitalism is related to
more focused attempts to understand the processes through which reg
ulatory order is established. One set of broad concerns involves the
elements of social order?for example, the emergence of patterns of
cooperation in the absence of clear sanctions against noncooperative
behavior (note that a special urgency has been added to this debate by
those who view the current economic period as one in which coop
eration is a crucial component of competition; see North 1990). A
second, key interest is a corollary to the first: how do institutional
matrices promote"learning"? Stated more broadly, how does the regu
latory structure
create continuity (and discontinuity)? (See Sabel
1994; Thelen and Steinmo 1992.)
Both concerns are closely related to questions of development, or
the creation and maintenance of economic growth, and two implica
tions of this approach are especially relevant in this regard. One is that
it recognizes the state as a complex actor involved actively in structur
ing markets, establishing patterns for institutional "learning," and
building alliances that may provide order without harmful stability, to
sectors and firms.17
Second, the approach extends institutional analysis to the con
struction of cultural and social networks and, more broadly, the recog
nition of the "embeddedness" of economic behavior in culture in a
more general sense.18 Thus, while works departing from a world
systems perspective explain blocked development as a function of
16
North offers a different periodization, mainly because he has argued that the emer
gence of property rights in Europe well before the industrial revolution created the key con
ditions for capitalist growth (North and Thomas 1973). Yet, though North and Thomas
view the advent of property rights as more important than changes in relations of produc
tion, the approach is similar in its emphasis on the institutional context as the defining fea
ture of the capitalist economy.
17There some overlap here with
is clearly the strand of literature described above as
falling within the world-systems perspective and as seeking to correct it with special atten
tion to the complexity of the state. For a set of examples from squarely within the institu
tional perspective, see the literature on industrial districts, especially Pyke and Sengen
berger 1992; debates about the importance of state strength in directing Southeast Asian
development (for example, Doner 1992); and discussions of the role of alliances, especially
with business groups, in economic development (Sabel 1992, 1994).
18 -
See Granovetter (1985) for a clear exposition of different treatments of "embedded
ness" within institutional economics.

278 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL 1996
global structural relationships, institutional treatments of the problem

of underdevelopment emphasize the analysis of different configura
tions of state-business-labor relations as the keys to understanding
which economies succeed in overcoming international imbalances.
The question we must ask iswhether this approach offers a satisfy
ing alternative to the world-systems perspective. If not, can we im
prove the perspective by importing into it aspects of institutional anal
ysis to fortify some of its weaker elements? And if both these strategies
seem flawed?and I will argue that they are?can we propose a third
possibility for conceptualizing global economic change that would build
upon the important insights of each perspective?
The first question is easily answered. The institutionalist approach
does not offer an alternative to supplant world-systems analysis in part
because it is not a truly global perspective. Institutional analysis has
proven far more productive for complex regional and subnational
analysis than for global analysis. Even when institutionalists study the
state and its wider role in forming the regulatory structure, they are
far more attentive to its responses to internal challenges than to its
reaction to external pressures, except as these come in the form of
shifting international markets. Changing international markets are
themselves treated less as sociological and political constructs than as
shifting features of the economic landscape?much like environmen

tal changes prompting biological adjustments. Alternatively, "interna
tional regimes" are defined as composites of existing international
organizations, a focus that severely limits the power of international
analysis, given the arguably weak impact of these institutions in guid
ing changes in the international economy.
Most important, the phases of capitalist growth identified in the
institutionalist perspective?and this is true across a surprisingly di
verse ideological spectrum?are pinned largely to changes in the
nature of capitalism in the advanced industrial countries, with little
to the patterns of growth in other regions (except as
regard capitalist
these represent skewed versions of growth in the capitalist core as, for
example, with "peripheral Fordism").19 There appears at times to be

"almost a studied reluctance" to study industrial development in the
Third World or other phenomena that "bear none of the desired ideal
characteristics" of phases of growth in the European economies
typical
19 and Harvey for discussion of this concept. Note that

See Lipietz (1986) (1989)
North's argument about the crucial factor in rise of capitalism?the emergence of modern
property rights?though different from the periodization offered by other institutionalists
(see above and note 16) also focuses on the West and falls short of a global analysis.

(Blim 1994, p. 3). The institutionalist approach to development may

itself, be seen as a particularly
then, sophisticated form of "middle
ground" theorizing similar to the kind described as a response to weak
nesses of the world-systems perspective.20 The limitation, then, is also
similar: the approach cannot generate a different paradigm for world
economy structure because it has not embraced this as a goal.
It seems more promising to argue that aspects of the perspective
should be borrowed and built upon. But two cautionary flags go up
here. The more sophisticated versions of institutional analysis?those
that look for change in the regulatory context of capitalism by exam
ining the complex conflicts and alliances of social actors?offer a more
satisfying understanding of social change than the teleological expla
nations inWallerstein's accounts of the rise and fall of various mem
bers of the core or semiperiphery. Nonetheless, the representation of
social change in institutionalism is still problematic. While Waller
stein's world-systems approach is based upon a mechanical model of
the world economy and mechanical analogies about how change takes
place, the institutionalist focus is on an evolutionary process of
change, and the fundamental analogy is biological. For Wallerstein,
the categories of the world economy are pieces in an assembly that
changes as those pieces move and are fitted together differently: semi
peripheral countries "move up" to the core or "descend" to the periph
ery, new peripheral areas are added to the assemblage, and so on.21 The
topology is simple enough to allow this: the three categories?three
separate sets that do not overlap?can be and often are represented as
concentric rings on a single plane.
In contrast, institutional analyses represent change in organic
terms. Organizations and institutional matrices "adapt" and "learn,"
and they thrive or are winnowed out according to how well or badly
they do both; industries "mature" and grow less adaptive as they "age"
20 focus as a defining
Indeed, "historical institutionalists" emphasize this middle-ground
characteristic of their approach. See Thelen and Steinmo (1992).
21 is not to say that biological
This metaphors do not also find their way into the world
systems approach. Wallerstein's three volumes of The Capitalist World-System are full of lan
guage about core and semiperipheral areas "wanting" or "striving" or even "longing."
Change sometimes is described through biological metaphor, too, as when some core areas
"shrink" or new peripheries are "incorporated." More broadly, the functionalist quality of
the approach is reflected in analogies of the world system to an organic unit requiring cer
tain "doses" of cultural support to sustain it but heading resolutely for "death" anyway (see
Wallerstein 1991, pp. 209-10). Nevertheless, it is a mechanical model that describes the
relative positioning and "fit" of various pieces of the world system. Also, in contrast to the
disruption by periodic crises depicted by the institutionalists, the structure of the system is
changed little by periodic crises; it ismade of stronger stuff.

28o JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL I996
(see Nelson 1994; Rutherford 1994; Bates 1988). The analogy of bio
logical evolution has implications for how the larger system is imag
ined. It is structured, but highly variable within that structure;
magnification reveals enormous complexity, which cannot be captured
when the wholestructure is in view but which is fundamental to an
understanding of the properties of the whole; and change is to some
degree unpredictable. If one were to develop a biological rather than a
mechanistic analogy for the world system (a move I am happy to illus
trate but not to advocate), the world economy might be pictured as
having, say, the hierarchical structure but variability and spatial com
plexity of a leaf, or the volatility of an emulsion, in which the three
groups within the world system are suspended and border each other in
complex and somewhat unstable ways. But this sort of reimagining of
the structure does not address the central problems of functionalism
and determinism in the world economy; it may even exacerbate the
problems by emphasizing still more how systemic changes respond to
the "needs" of the organic whole.
This problem comes sharply into view when one surveys the way in
which "culture" is typically treated by institutionalists. On the one
hand, culture is often represented as something that changes less
quickly than institutional arrangements; the latter are constrained by
cultural patterns, which seem to act as a kind of gluey solution in
which institutional patterns are suspended (see North 1990). Sabel
describes the approach as "cultural mysticism": when other explana
tions fail, one can always point to culture as an inscrutable force affect
ing the outcome of change (Sabel 1994).22 To the extent that culture
can be known, it is represented either as a presence logically deduced
from the existence of certain sets of institutional arrangements (for
example, patterns of cooperation denote shared values) or as sepa
rately identifiable attributes that can then be preserved or eliminated
through evolutionary historical change (Granovetter 1985; Nelson
1994; Hishleifer and Coll 1988).23 On the other hand, these ways of
22 is evident in attempts to explain in newly

This approach the growth industrialized
countries of Southeast Asia as a function of Confucian culture. As Jones points out, propo
nents of this view point to the same cultural features once used to explain Asia's failure to
industrialize. Some economists, argues Jones, "seize on culture and values as if they were a
drowning profession's only straws"; yet Jones goes too far in the other direction, viewing
culture as essentially a background force that is always flexible in the face of economic
imperatives (Jones 1988, p. 100).
23This view comes
close to a sort of Social Darwinism. Consider Hayek's argument that
rules of conduct "have developed because the groups who practiced them were more suc
cessful and disciplined than others" (quoted in Rutherford 1984, p. 84). Rutherford notes
that Veblen also used the language of natural selection in describing institutions but did
not push the analogy very far (see Rutherford 1994).

representing culture may seem more appealing than they should

because they contrast with another tradition in political economy, pre
served in some strains of institutional analysis, in which culture is
viewed as more volatile?though also less important?than an under
lying economic structure that is seen as determinant. In this view, cul
tural narratives are easily exposed as discourse, but narratives about
economic change retain a curious authority.24 In both approaches, cul
ture is separated from economic behavior; an uncritical borrowing of
institutional analysis would reproduce one or the other version of this
mistake.
Institutionalists have
themselves noted the limitations in the per
spective of viewing culture as synonymous with norms and of failing to
address the origins of norm-guided behavior. Some rational-choice
theorists, unable to explain the strategic origins of norms, are reduced
to arguing for a "hyperrationality" that produces deviations from self
interested behavior in favor of very long-run (or even unattainable but
desirable) goals. North concludes an extended argument for institu
tional analysis by noting the crucial need "to know much more about
culturally derived norms of behavior and how they interact with for
mal rules" (North 1990, p. 140). The "historical institutionalists" have
perhaps dealt most resolutely with the problem, arguing that the evo
lutionary model of historical change favored by institutionalists is con
tradictory because it depicts politics (and culture) as being critically
influential only at moments of crisis and remaining subordinate to the
structuring power of institutions at all other moments, while offering
little to guide an understanding of this difference (Thelen and Stein
mo 1992). They have sought a subtler analysis of the interplay of ideas
and economic change, a project made more successful by limiting its
scope to the analysis of "ideas" rather than any broader notion of cul
ture (Weir 1992; Hall 1989).
On balance, institutional analysis offers some powerful insights
regarding the determinants of economic growth or stalled develop
ment, but it does not represent a convincing alternative to the world
systems approach, nor can simple borrowing of techniques and insights
respond to the world-systems critique. This perspective does poorly at
24 It is to note that the view that culture is relatively to change

interesting powerless
the trajectory of economic growth is sometimes shared by scholars with very different ideo
logical positions. Chase-Dunn (1989, chap. 5), for example, sees culture under capitalism
as mainly inconsequential; Jones argues that culture may brake change but will always yield
to it: "It is better to think of religions, and other values and institutions, as filters through
which action had to pass, to be slowed down or sanctified or winked at according to the
occasion, but not as unyielding obstacles" (Jones 1988, p. 98).

representing larger systemic shifts as other than the sum of national or

regional institutional adjustments. While Wallerstein overemphasizes
the determinacy of the larger structure, institutional analysis illumi
nates the dynamics of change internal to states and regions but leaves
the system's global structure out of focus. Both perspectives show diffi
culty in integrating complex understandings of culture. Culture is rep
resented as the medium of localities, a force that resides at the micro
scale; as a substratum that is slow to change and functions to constrain
adaptive behavior; or as a sphere of discourse that hovers above more
solid economic ground. Is it possible to move toward a theoretical ap
proach that can both illuminate patterns of global change and treat
the complexities of culture more clearly?
Some Directions
World-systems and institutional theorists are not alone in finding it

difficult to represent culture adequately within a global framework. In
cultural studies, recent work on colonial and postcolonial cultures has
addressed similar questions and can perhaps offer some clues about
how to move beyond a separation of culture from global structure.
Responding to a tendency in colonial history to view the history of
non-Western regions as being shaped largely by the actions of colonial
powers and local elites, a group of historians influenced by aspects of
Gramsci's and Foucault's work formed the Subaltern Studies Group to
examine the culture and history of nonelite groups in India (Prakash
1994). Subaltern studies also influenced other scholars of Asia and
Latin America and, to a lesser extent, Africa (Prakash 1994, 1995;
Mallon 1994*, Cooper 1994). Although the attention to nonelite groups
generated new research, the approach also invited criticism (and self
criticism from proponents) for two shortcomings. One was its ten
dency to represent the culture of subaltern groups as autonomous,
which often misrepresented the influence of the groups' interaction
with more powerful groups and of dominant ideologies. Another was
the replication of a dualist structure of "dominant" and "subordinate"
groups, where more complex social and cultural relations were clearly
present. The subalternists overlapped in their concerns?and difficul
ties?with two other (sometimes overlapping) schools: cultural critics
analyzing colonial and postcolonial discourse and historians of colo
nial and postcolonial social and political movements. The former group
has moved away from a focus on the discourse of dominance?as rep
resented in Said's Orientalism, a kind of founding document for many

students of colonial culture studies?and the latter has moved from a

somewhat romanticized focus on "resistance" (and its stark contrast
with "collaboration") to a more nuanced view of indigenous responses
to colonial rule and postcolonial power (see Prakash 1995; and on
resistance, Cooper 1994; Haynes and Prakash 1992).
The now rejected dualism of earlier colonial studies replicates,
though in a different form, the structuralism in world-systems and
institutionalist views of culture. That dualism positioned a dominant
culture (residing in colonial powers and affiliated elites) against a
subordinate (or subaltern) culture or cultures. The opposition recalls
the structural representation of an economic system with a distinctive
logic set against a sphere of cultural norms. It is also analogous to the
separation in some of global
analyses structural and local cultural
change. By examining proposals among cultural theorists for a way out
of the limiting dualism of colonial studies, we may find clues for new
directions in global theory more generally.
One set of responses has focused analysis on social agents, analyti
cal categories, or cultural forms that clearly arise out of the interaction
of dominant colonial and subordinate indigenous groups. Examples
include new studies of missionaries (social agents), recent works on
the reconfiguration of space (an analytical-cultural category), and a
perceptive analysis of cultural "mimicry" as an expression not of sub
servience but of ambivalence.25 Yet, as critics have noted, these works
still rely on a central opposition of colonizer and colonized (Thomas
1994; Cooper 1994), and of culture and economy (O'Hanlon and
Washbrook 1992). In a sense, they parallel the "middle ground" ana
lytical foci of world-systems reformers, who preserve the structural
framework while demonstrating where it is unstable, shadowy, or porous.
Remarking on these limitations, Thomas (1994) suggests an
approach to colonial cultures that would focus on "colonial projects."
By these he means endeavors that have both a directed dimension?
they come from the goals of particular historical groups?and a
dynamic existence that emerges in practice and takes on different pro
files in particular places. The "projects" are global, but they are simul
taneously "cultural" and "institutional." While the best developed
example in colonial cultural studies, and the one on which Thomas
also dwells most, is the "project" of Christianization outside the West,
other examples come quickly to mind.
25
See Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) on both conversion and space as socially con
structed in South African history, and Bhabha (1985) on mimicry and its significance.

284 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL I 996
It is worth pointing out that part of the reason that treatments of

culture have been flawed in both world-systems and institutional per
spectives is a persistent reliance on understandings of culture that are
now clearly rejected by most anthropologists. This sometimes is done
consciously: if culture can be characterized as something that people
carry in their heads, mere mental baggage, or even as habitual actions
that emerge from those symbolic, mental, and "inherited" ways of
viewing the world, then it can be viewed as separate from more con
crete, observable economic actions and relations, and as either much
less, or much more, subject to change.26 Significantly, both institution
alists and many world-systems theorists overlook more than a decade
of anthropological writings calling for an understanding of culture as
emerging out of, and consisting in, both interpretation and social prac
tice.27 Particularly important to the problems of global theory is the
work of Bourdieu, who argues that culture is not synonymous with
rules (or structures) but emerges in the practice of interpreting rules
and moving through them. Rather than identifying culture with a sub
jectivist understanding (a "native" perspective) that would contrast
with an objectivist view (rules as extrapolated from observed behav
ior), Bourdieu emphasizes how both subjectivist and objectivist ways
of knowing are produced and continually revised in practice. Further,
he distinguishes a third way of knowing that permits social agents to
act artfully and improvisationally in moving through rule matrices;
this understanding may require at times an implicit recognition, at
times almost a studied ignorance, of objectivist and subjectivist under
standings.28 Rather than assigning the label "culture" to any one of
26For Fox's view that culture is "a constellation

example, Chase-Dunn quotes Richard
of socially constructed practices," then rejects this definition in favor of a narrower focus on
"consciousness and symbolic sets of beliefs and knowledge" (Chase-Dunn 1989, p. 89). Had
he used Fox's definition, he would have been forced to arrive at different conclusions about
the relevance of culture under capitalism. In another example, Wallerstein quotes approv
ingly from Mintz, who describes as universal "our capacity to create cultural realities and
then to act in terms of them" (quoted inWallerstein 1991, p. 158). He then goes about cri
tiquing what he describes as a basic contention of anthropologists: the notion that culture
can be described as a bundle of traits. This is a view to which Mintz clearly does not sub
scribe and which he has elsewhere exposed as inadequate and dated (see Mintz and Price
1976).
27A overview in anthropological is provided
useful of this trend writings by Ortner
(1989).
281 hesitate to provide examples here because they are drawn out elaborately by Bour
dieu himself. Perhaps the easiest to grasp is the example of gift exchange, in which objec
tive accounts of the regularities of exchange leave out the element of timing that is so
crucial in subjectivist accounts, while both versions misrepresent practice and social agents'
"art" in improvising on the rules and creating or responding to shades of meaning in "end
lessly changing situations." See Bourdieu 1977, chap. 1; see also Taylor 1993.

these ways of knowing, Bourdieu stresses their interconnections and

their rootedness in practice.
Both Thomas's and Bourdieu's contributions indicate some clear
directions for global studies that will preserve some of the strengths of
both world-systems and institutionalist perspectives. I propose a schol
arly project of defining global institutions in a broad sense to include
patterned interactions (not limited to exchange relations or formal
organizations) and analyzing them in a way that recognizes their insep
arability from cultural practice. In a sense, this approach builds upon
the work of "middle ground" analyses described earlier. The idea is to
follow the logic of these middle-ground analyses resolutely, pushing
their analysis simultaneously out toward global and in toward local
phenomena. Yet, rather than a technique for shoring up earlier para
digms, this approach represents a path toward reimagining global
structure by bringing into the light institutions that are constructed
out of practice and do not exist at, or even merely bridge, separate
"levels," but themselves constitute elements of global structure.29
As the reliance on work done on middle-ground phenomena,
agents, and analytical categories suggests, such an enterprise of institu
tional world history builds upon recent work across a range of disci
plines. As I have argued, many institutional analyses focusing on
problems of growth and development offer a starting place in examin
ing national markets and national sectorsas politically contingent
social constructions (often viewing them as constrained by, and
responding to, international markets that are exogenous to the social
processes). We might now also view those global markets and organ
izational forces as the products of similarly fluid social networks and
relationships. This sort of analysis has already been demonstrated in
studies on, for example, the history of the international monetary
system (see, for example, Block 1977; Odell 1982; Kahler 1986). It
has also been illustrated in historical works, such as Curtin's study
of cross-cultural trade in world history, and some contributions in
Tracy's edited volume on the political economy of merchant empires
(Curtin 1984; Tracy 1991). Both works develop an understanding of
trade as culturally embedded (and, at the same time, market-driven)
29 in a preface to a book edited by Frank and Gills

McNeill, (1993), noted that though
he found merit in the work inspired by world-systems theorists, he preferred a perspective
that would emphasize communications and would draw historical boundaries around inter
communicating zones. McNeill did not specify how we should look for the structuring of
communications or what sorts of communications would matter most, but these are the
sorts o? questions that can be approached in institutional world history.

286 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL I 996
and as an important source of regional and global economic institution

building. But many less obvious structures and processes deserve atten
tion and recall a somewhat expanded notion of Thomas's "colonial
projects."30
An example is the creation, under varying historical conditions, of
legal regimes in which actors emerging from different legal systems
construct a shared understanding about expected behavior in economic
relationships that is not based on the presence of an overlapping
authority or a formal regulatory structure. It is possible to speak of
"order without law" as emerging at the international level, just as it
has been shown to do in small communities (Ellickson 1991) or in
business agreements not based on contracts (MacCaulay 1963). Legal
regimes may extend beyond the borders of particular legal systems and
establish repeatable routines for incorporating groups with separate
legal identities in production and trade and for accommodating (or
changing) culturally diverse ways of viewing property and labor.
Let me give an example of how such a treatment might be helpful
in responding specifically to problems within the world-systems per
spective. Stern has argued that labor systems in colonial Latin Amer
ica tended toward "voluntary share relations" that more closely re
sembled the "semi-coerced" labor forms of the semiperiphery than the
coerced labor forms of Wallerstein's periphery. Stern concluded that
global forces were only one factor, and a weaker factor than Waller
stein argues, in the construction of labor relations in Latin America.
But the analysis need not focus on the separation and relative impor
tance of local struggles over rights at work and global influences. Stern
has analyzed elsewhere how Spanish strategies to impose a particular
legal-bureaucratic structure?strategies that were themselves, as Borah
(1982) notes, ad hoc and responsive both to several different argu
ments about the imposition of law in the Americas and to new contin
gencies?elicited indigenous strategies, which in turn altered the
structure and function of colonial legal institutions.31 One could cer
tainly study legal institutions more broadly as institutions not merely
imposed "from above" but emerging out of interactions with culturally
30 I think, would be to recast the global history of technology

Particularly challenging,
in historical institutionalist terms. Rather than viewing technology as an exogenous feature
of the global system, this approach would analyze how the development and spread of tech
nology in different historical periods were organized by (and in turn influenced) global cul
tural, political, and economic situations.
31Stern is concerned with that Peruvian Indians' formal chal
specifically showing
lenges to Spanish prerogatives paradoxically served to draw them into a system that contin
ued to support their exploitation (Stern 1982; see also Borah 1982).

different peoples and setting precedents or routines for global interac

tions.32 Such an approach would, I think, lead to replacing structural
equivalences of diverse European "peripheries" with a more nuanced
view of their roles and might also suggest both different points of dis
continuity in global structuring and a more complex path for structural
change.
To take a different but related example, consider the institutional
ist argument that stalled development in Latin America directly
reflects the continuity of state-centrist institutions in Latin America
after independence. Despite the importation of North American-style
constitutions and other aspects of Anglo-American law, North argues,
Latin American institutions remained fundamentally resistant to
change and continued to provide a context inimical to the develop
ment of Anglo-style property rights and other economic institutions
that would have supported Western-style development (North 1990).
This argument illustrates nicely the institutionalist tendency to look
for explanations at the national level and to view international pres
sures as purely exogenous forces. Yet it is possible to argue that the cru
cial period for postindependence institution building was not in the
wake of the struggles over state control that followed independence;
here, indeed, "liberalism" emerges in the context of the political posi
tioning of elite factions and is bent by their admittedly practical and
partisan strategies for gaining and consolidating rule. Rather, signifi
cant institutional changes took place in the late nineteenth century as
a direct response to international investment and commerce.33 Many
of these institutional adjustments simultaneously accommodated those
interests while strengthening state structures that had been weakened
by continual warfare. A central example is the distribution of public
lands to private individuals and companies (with the simultaneous
binding of labor to the new estates), a widespread phenomenon that
both shored up the power of centralized institutions through patronage
and responded to pressures from international investors and commer
cial elites. In this sense, it was not the intractable nature of Latin
American institutions that determined the direction of development;
rather, institutional change here can be viewed as a local variant of a
global "project" to create an international legal regime to regularize
32See Benton
(1994) for a discussion of legal pluralism and the need to move beyond
structuralist representations of legal systems as comprising distinct "levels."
33This ismade forcefully by Glade, who
point is nevertheless cited by North in support
of the idea that state institutions in Latin America followed a narrowly path-dependent
course (North 1990; Glade 1969).

288 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, FALL 1996
private property, associational firm structures, and market distribution

mechanisms.34
How would such reorientations of familiar arguments recast our
treatment of "culture"? We would be moving toward a view of culture
as itself consisting in the institutional arrangements, or in the practice
of their construction. Like God and the devil, culture is in the details
of patterns of associations, notions of strategy, and collective knowl
edge, which together both shape and represent those institutions.35
Thus, global institutions are not to be viewed as structures set against,
and constrained by, cultural norms. As social phenomena, they do not
exist independently of ways of thinking about and (sometimes in con
trast) performing the routines they prescribe.
In viewing global institutions historically, it seems important to
reject periodizations offered by either the world-systems perspective in
any of its variants or by the institutionalists. Given the strength of cri
tiques on historical grounds, we must not accept Wallerstein's views on
the early world economy as definitive. Yet, having set it aside, we may
find that some elements analysis are more
of his early resilient than
those critiques imply. a global
For example, institutional analysis
would surely show the plantation complex of the South Atlantic to be
fully a part of a global institutional matrix controlled by Europe, while
the institutional ties to Asia would be thinner, though not, as one
variant of the world-systems perspective would have it, insignificant.
Similarly, our approach would lead us to reject the stagist notion of
successive institutional structures underpinning much of the writings
on development in institutional economics. It would introduce into
this framework a more complex spatial analysis of the presence and
reach of those regulatory systems, rather than characterizing whole
phases of global capitalist growth according to the predominant pat
terns of capitalism in the advanced economies.
It should be clear by now that the approach I am advocating
requires an abandonment of certain aspects of the "master narrative"
of world-systems study. It is likely that the strategies of research and
analysis outlined here will generate different, more complex under
34Glade noted some time ago that these institutional in late nineteenth-cen
changes
tury Latin America were understudied; with some exceptions (for example, land distribu
tion), they still are (Glade 1969).
35For a useful of how one can chart a middle course between
example game-theoretic
to economic strategizing and "cultural mysticism," see Sabel 1994. On the per
approaches
sistence of notions of culture as constituting a separate "level" of action within structural
ism in legal theory, see Benton 1994.

standings of the structure of the world economy. The exercise of

following the analysis of particular processes or sets of relationships is
different from the attempt to follow the perspective's leads in defining
new questions (or continuing to belabor old ones, such as the problem
of the moving semiperiphery). But I am not suggesting that we should
ignore the contributions of two decades of scholarship under this
banner. On the contrary, the qualified versions of world-systems
studies have led us to a far more subtle grasp of those "core" processes
that together may constitute the global institutional context. It is
clear, too, that other approaches, most notably institutional economics
and its offshoots, can benefit enormously from greater attention to the
central goals of world-systems analysis, in particular the goal of illumi
nating the structure of the whole. Pushing beyond what we have
now accomplished requires not just identifying key relationships that
link cultural and local practice, and structural and economic forms,
but actually understanding these aspects of social experience as con
gruent.
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From the World-Systems Perspective to Institutional World History: Culture and Economy in

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have undertaken the task in this paper of asking whether a world

Journal ofWorld History, Vol. 7, No. 2

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though neither set of writings provides a framework that can serve as a

Although the world-systems perspective surely antedates the contribu

This content downloaded from 187.65.243.220 on Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:41:38 AM

This content downloaded from 187.65.243.220 on Sat, 14 Sep 2013 10:41:38 AM

In the initial response toWallerstein, the challenges on the basis of

2See Markoff in more contemporary

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More recent works have continued to raise questions about these

for a brief period. . . the labor system is best described as a

A second strand of the early historical critiques questioned the

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gained "by treating the dynamics of development independently"

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the eighteenth century) are greatly exaggerated (Jones 1988). Frank,

4 in this way not to it; his

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The world-economy has developed certain systematic cul

Here again, culture is called into existence by the capitalist world

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areas fully incorporated into the world economy, of forms of labor ap

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1989; Wallerstein 1990). Scholars influenced by Wallerstein's work

8Merton uses the phrase "theories of the middle in a some

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ual workers and groups of workers attempting to redefine career trajec

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inequality. By definition, they also require attention to the involve

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are marred by a peculiar irony: studies designed to demonstrate how

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capitalist world economy as the central contrasting case, without tak

open-ended process; and that all economic behavior, including market

Do we need to be concerned the subtle but important flaws in

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more interesting, approach challenges the value of the perspective by

the economy. It is not uncommon to find, in the midst of an of the fragmenta

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selves "historical institutionalists." Like the proponents of the "old"

15 In an terms this process of change

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worker-management relations that mark the transitions to new regula

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global structural relationships, institutional treatments of the problem

shifting features of the economic landscape?much like environmen

example, with "peripheral Fordism").19 There appears at times to be

19 and Harvey for discussion of this concept. Note that

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(Blim 1994, p. 3). The institutionalist approach to development may

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22 is evident in attempts to explain in newly

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representing culture may seem more appealing than they should

24 It is to note that the view that culture is relatively to change

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representing larger systemic shifts as other than the sum of national or

World-systems and institutional theorists are not alone in finding it

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students of colonial culture studies?and the latter has moved from a