Article (followed by discussions)

Thesis Eleven
2015, Vol. 127(1) 3–20
What is world-systems ª The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513615575324

theory from perspective the.sagepub.com

Salvatore Babones
University of Sydney, Australia

Abstract
World-systems analysis is a well-established but poorly-defined critical research tradi-
tion in the social sciences. Its undisputed progenitor, Immanuel Wallerstein, steadfastly
maintains that world-systems analysis is not a theory, yet it is widely referred to as such
by commentators, critics, and practitioners alike. The resolution to this conundrum is to
identify the defining elements of world-systems analysis as a perspective for under-
standing human society, then to evaluate propositions based on these defining elements
as theories that have been conceptualized from a world-systems perspective. In this
paper five defining elements of world-systems analysis are identified that together sup-
port a central theorem that the core-periphery hierarchy of the modern world-system
can best be understood in terms of state strength and cultural integration. A further
conjecture is made that the successor world-system to the current capitalist world-
economy is more likely to be an American world-empire than the socialist world-
government craved by many world-systems analysts.

Keywords
American empire, core-periphery hierarchy, hegemony, Immanuel Wallerstein, world-
systems analysis

World-systems analysis is a heterodox Marxian approach to understanding global pat-

terns of power and domination. It deviates from orthodox Marxian approaches in two
important ways. First, it backdates the origin of the current capitalist system from the
1800s to the 1500s. Second, it equates capitalism with the primacy of production for
monetary exchange, from which labor relations emerge as a consequence – turning on its

Corresponding author:
Salvatore Babones, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
Email: sbabones@sydney.edu.au
4 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

head the orthodox Marxian account of the emergence of capitalism as an economic

system. World-systems analysis is thus first and foremost a framework for interpreting
the modern world of the last 500 years as a social system driven by market exchange.
Variants of world-systems analysis can also be applied to the various pre-modern worlds
in which a market-based economic structure generally was not the predominant force in
society.
Orthodox Marxian accounts of the rise of capitalism usually identify the emergence of
capitalism and capitalist class relations with the emergence of a free market for labor in
Britain at the end of the 18th century. World-systems analysis severs this link. From a
world-systems perspective the late feudalism of Eastern Europe, the Atlantic slave trade,
Spanish silver mining in Peru, and early Dutch colonization in Asia were all funda-
mentally capitalist in character, long before British wage laborers began to toil in the
factories of the industrial revolution.
Of course, Marx is not always as unambiguous as Marxian accounts might lead one to
believe, and Marx himself often pointed to the 16th-century origins of capitalism in
rising global trade. To a large extent one’s answer to the question ‘when did capitalism
begin?’ depends on what one means by capitalism. Like most definitional arguments the
argument between world-systems analysts and mainstream Marxians about the definition
of capitalism is not in the end very interesting. Wallerstein (1974a: 348) described
capitalism as ‘an economic mode . . . based on the fact that the economic factors operate
within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control’. This is a
definition, not a theory, and as such it cannot be wrong. It can only be more or less useful
as an analytical proposition.
In an economic system like that described by Wallerstein production for monetary
exchange is inevitable, since by definition the economic system spans multiple political
systems and thus high-level economic exchange must occur between actors living under
different political systems. That the modern world has long been characterized by an
economic system ‘larger than that which any political entity can totally control’ is
obvious. Since more or less the middle of the 16th century all of the world’s polities have
been encompassed by a single global market economy.
What makes world-systems analysis ‘Marxian‘ is its characterization of both capi-
talist market exchange and capitalist class relations as being strongly shaped by power
differentials between participants. This is the distinctive fact that sets all Marxian
analysis in opposition to liberal and neoliberal analyses. Liberal economics theorizes that
power differentials cannot persist for long and thus concludes that power differentials
do not affect market exchange and class relations. Marxian analysts, by contrast, observe
that power differentials do in fact exist – as Marx himself documented at length for
19th-century Britain in Capital – and profoundly influence market exchange and class
relations.
World-systems analysis is one among many possible lenses through which social
scientists can study these power differentials, the power differentials that make capitalist
market exchange fundamentally unequal and capitalist class relations fundamentally
exploitative. As Wallerstein has consistently been at pains to emphasize, world-systems
analysis is not a theory. It is a framework or perspective or ‘knowledge movement’
(Wallerstein, 2012). The distinctiveness of the world-systems lens is that it focuses on
Babones 5

the transnational power relations that govern the global economic system. It is thus the
widest possible lens through which to view the exercise of power in society, though
obviously neither the only lens nor always the most appropriate lens.
Inevitably, over the last four decades world-systems analysis as such has come to be
conflated with whatever self-described world-systems analysts do, and especially with
the ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein, by far the most prominent founder of the field. As a
result, like any vibrant research tradition, the world-systems perspective has accumu-
lated extra baggage. Though world-systems analysis may not be a theory, many theories
have been promulgated by world-systems analysts, not least by Wallerstein, and it is easy
to mistake them for being part and parcel of world-systems analysis. This can make it
difficult for outsiders – and even insiders – to understand just what world-systems
analysis ‘is’.
This paper dissects world-systems analysis to separate the flesh from the bone: the
theoretical musculature that world-systems analysts use to interpret the world from the
structural skeleton of the world-systems perspective that supports it. This is not to
denigrate the former. Theories are necessary. But theories can be wrong. A way of
looking at the world can never really be wrong, just more or less useful. The goal here is
to identify the stripped-back, sine qua non aspects of what constitutes world-systems
analysis per se as distinct from the many other things that people who are themselves
world-systems analysts do in their research, which may be research done by world-
systems analysts but should not be equated with world-systems analysis as an analy-
tical strategy. My hope is that this will make world-systems analysis a more attractive
lens for people who may not have considered using it before.

World-culture, world-empire, world-economy

Like many social scientists, Wallerstein (1974a, 1974b) implicitly assumes the existence
of three major systems in society: cultural, political, and economic. These three systems
combine and interact to create the social systems in which humans live. Wallerstein
(2002: 361) claims to have drawn his division of social systems into cultural, political,
and economic systems directly from Polanyi’s concepts of reciprocity (cultural),
redistribution (political), and exchange (economic). Wallerstein (1974a: 347) explains
that ‘[w]hat characterizes a social system in my view is that it is largely self-contained,
and that the dynamics of its development are largely internal’.
Wallerstein goes on to claim – and this I identify as a (disprovable) theoretical
proposition – that ‘the only real social systems are, on the one hand, those relatively
small, highly autonomous subsistence economies not part of some regular tribute-
demanding system and, on the other hand, world-systems’ (Wallerstein, 1974a: 348).
He claims that in these ‘mini-systems’ (the term is to be found in Wallerstein, 1974b:
390) the division of labor is intensive (completely subsumed within a single cultural
system) while in the much larger ‘world-systems’ the division of labor is extensive
(spanning multiple cultural systems). The implicit tie to Polanyi and to anthropology
more generally is that mini-systems are predominantly characterized by reciprocity
while world-systems are characterized by redistribution (world-empires) and exchange
(world-economies).
6 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

The theory that cultural systems cannot encompass extensive divisions of labor is an
empirical claim for anthropologists and historians to debate. It is also questionable
whether or not it is entirely appropriate to equate a social system with an area over which
there exists a unitary division of labor, though this practice has long antecedents in
Smith, Marx, Durkheim, and others. In any case, Wallerstein’s work has been concerned
almost exclusively with the modern capitalist world-system, though his ideas about mini-
systems have been taken up by other scholars in the world-systems tradition (most
notably Chase-Dunn and Hall, 1997).
World-systems proper are divided by Wallerstein into world-empires based on
political redistribution and world-economies based on economic exchange. If one
accepts that the three basic components of entire social systems are cultural, political,
and economic systems, then one should at least admit the possibility of world-cultures
based on culturally-defined principles of reciprocity: world-cultures. Wallerstein
opens the window a crack here when he suggests the possibility of the emergence of a
‘socialist world government’ that ‘would involve the reintegration of the levels of
political and economic decision-making’ into the cultural system (Wallerstein, 1974a:
348). This seems again to be a theoretical proposition. One can easily imagine non-
socialist modes of cultural dominance over economic and political systems.
Wallerstein’s claim is not so much that world-cultures cannot exist as that world-
cultures (cultural systems larger than small subsistence economies) do not exist and
have not existed in historical memory. A proof that this is a debatable proposition is to be
found in the fact that it has been debated. Meyer et al.’s (1997) argument about the
cultural construction of the nation-state and the contemporary global economy boils
down to just this: an assertion that we currently live in a world-culture (though they label
it ‘world society’) based on ‘worldwide models constructed and propagated through
global cultural and associational processes’ (Meyer et al., 1997: 144–5; emphasis in
original). In Meyer et al.’s theory, the unifying global cultural principle is ‘rationalized
modernity’, not Wallersteinian socialist world government. Though explicitly for-
mulated in opposition to what they call ‘world-system theory’, Meyer et al.’s ‘world
society’ can easily be accommodated within a world-systems framework as a putative
form of world-culture.
A world-systems perspective with no theoretical preconditions would thus admit the
possibility of three types of large-scale social systems: world-cultures, world-empires,
and world-economies. The word ‘world’ in these hyphenated constructions does not
necessarily imply a global scale (for an intellectual history of this hyphen see Waller-
stein, 2002: 361). It is meant to signify a more or less bounded social system, one that is
bounded enough for practical analytical purposes. The archetypical case is Braudel’s
(1949) Mediterranean world, bounded by deserts on the south and east, mountains on the
north, and the Atlantic on the west. Since prehistoric times there has been trade across
these boundaries, but the relative ease of internal sea communication has always meant
that social ties within the Mediterranean world have been much more extensive and
intensive than those between the Mediterranean world and other worlds. Other classic
examples of ‘worlds’ in the Braudelian sense are the Indian subcontinent, the valley of
Mexico, and China. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) suggest an alternative approach based
on the place-centric identification of overlapping networks, but this has not been taken
Babones 7

up by world-systems analysts more broadly. Most would take the approach that when my
network overlaps with your network we are in fact living in the same system.
It is a theoretical and empirical question to what extent (if any) there have ever
been world-systems of less than global scale: theoretical, because it depends on how
much interaction across borders invalidates the concept of a border, and empirical,
because interaction borders may not exist in reality despite the fact that they can
conveniently be drawn on maps. It is also an empirical question whether or not the
modern world constitutes a world-system, but the empirical answer here seems
obvious, and abundant historical evidence suggests that today’s world-economy has
existed in recognizable form since sometime in the 16th century. It seems equally
obvious that the contemporary world-system has been for roughly 500 years a
world-economy, despite (or perhaps even confirmed by) the long-term persistence of
many anti-systemic social movements, challenges, and rebellions against the pri-
macy of the global market.
Thus the two foundational principles of world-systems analysis – that the global
capitalist system dates from the 1500s and that it has throughout been characterized by
the primacy of production for monetary exchange – follow immediately from the basic
categorization of large-scale social systems into world-cultures, world-empires, and
world-economies. The principles are, formally speaking, empirical conjectures, but
when the modern world-system is viewed through a lens that categorizes world-systems
along cultural, political, and economic lines, the conclusion that the modern world-
system is a world-economy is inevitable. Individual political and organizational units
within the world-system may operate according to their own non-market rationales, but
the operation of the world-system as a whole is dominated by the logic of the market.
Is it useful to see the world through a lens that admits the possibility of just three
organizing principles for social systems? Yes, if that viewpoint helps deepen our
understanding of social structures and social change. For example, something important
is gained by contextualizing modern (c.1500–1888) slavery in the Americas not as some
kind of survival or resurrection of a pre-capitalist mode of production but part and parcel
of the operation of the capitalist world-economy. Similarly, the specific trajectory of the
collapse of the Soviet Union makes much more sense when seen in light of the fact that,
despite its official communism, the Soviet Union was throughout its history located
within a larger capitalist world-economy.
Marxian sociology (unlike Marxian economics) is primarily concerned with under-
standing how power relations in society are shaped by embeddedness in this larger
capitalist economic system. Most sociologists do not concern themselves much with the
details of the labor theory of value or M-C-M’ circulations of capital. World-systems
analysis provides a macro-level framework for applying Marxian concepts to the
study of power in society. It is no coincidence that world-systems analysis remains
strongly rooted in conventional academic sociology despite Wallerstein’s best efforts
over four decades to expand world-systems analysis into a unified ‘historical social
science’ that integrates anthropology, political science, and economics with sociology
(Wallerstein, 2000: 34, 2002: 372, 2012: 515). World-systems analysis remains rooted in
sociology because fundamentally it is nothing more and nothing less than the Marxian
lens on society opened up to its widest possible angle.
8 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

Core, semiperiphery, periphery

World-systems analysts conventionally divide the modern world-system into core,
semiperipheral, and peripheral zones, although there is no consensus on the rationale for
this division or indeed on the units of analysis to be so categorized. Most of the world-
systems literature speaks of core, semiperipheral, and peripheral countries but, as
Wallerstein (1974a: 349–50) makes clear, these categories pre-date the modern crys-
tallization of the world into recognizable modern countries. He uses the terms ‘states’ for
core parts of the modern world-economy and ‘areas’ for peripheral parts, on the logic
that part of what makes an area peripheral is its lack of strong (indigenous) state
machinery, as in European states’ 19th-century colonies, or indeed in aid-dependent
countries today.
The core-periphery (or center-periphery or metropole-periphery) dichotomy was a
common motif of 1960s social science, in some respects culminating in Galtung’s (1971)
structural theory of imperialism. Most world-systems scholars follow Arrighi and
Drangel (1986) in equating ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ respectively with high and low value-
added nodes in commodity chains, and in fact commodity chain analysis has become a
major subfield of world-systems analysis. In this account of core-periphery structure, in
core countries most of the population works in high value-added nodes of global com-
modity chains, while in peripheral countries most of the population works in low value-
added nodes, with the explicit understanding that the high value-added nodes are
extracting surplus value from the low value-added nodes through various kinds of
monopoly rents. In semiperipheral countries there is supposedly an even mix of high and
low value-added activities.
This theory – and it is a theory – while simple and straightforward, is so obviously
empirically false that it cannot be taken seriously. The United States sits at the core of the
core of the contemporary world-economy, yet most working Americans are not located
in high value-added nodes of commodity chains that allow them to extract monopoly
rents from the less fortunate peoples of the world. And, contra Arrighi and Drangel,
countries do matter as units of analysis: a core country is not merely a country containing
many core nodes. It is, as a political unit, part of the core of the world-economy. All
Americans live in the core of the world-economy, no matter how peripheral their
employment. ‘The world consists of Center and Periphery nations; and each nation, in
turn, has its centers and periphery’ (Galtung, 1971: 81).
Wallerstein himself describes a structuring mechanism that is more definitional than
theoretical, and clearly political rather than economic: core states exhibit ‘strong state
machinery coupled with a national culture’ (Wallerstein, 1974: 349) while ‘a clear and
distinctive feature of a semiperipheral state’ is the fact that ‘[t]he direct and immediate
interest of the state as a political machinery in the control of the market (internal and
international) is greater than in either the core [or] the peripheral states’ (Wallerstein,
1979: 72). In peripheral areas ‘the indigenous state is weak, ranging from its non-
existence (that is, a colonial situation) to one with a low degree of autonomy (that is, a
neo-colonial situation)’ (Wallerstein, 1974: 349). This classification has been picked up
and elaborated by Babones (2012: 329), who suggests that ‘individuals participate in
‘‘core-type’’ or ‘‘peripheral-type’’ activities because of the systemic positions of the
Babones 9

countries in which they live, not the other way around’. Though world-systems theories
have often linked the core-periphery hierarchy to degrees of value added in commodity
chain nodes, this economic interpretation is not very useful in practice. The core-
periphery hierarchy is fundamentally political, not economic.
The classification of states (or areas) as core, semiperipheral, or peripheral is based on
the integral as opposed to the compositional characteristics of political units (Hopkins
and Wallerstein, 1967): it is the political unit that has strong or weak state machinery, not
the people who live in it. In this classificatory approach, the core of the world-system is
characterized by strong nation-states that exhibit relatively low levels of political control
of the market. The core state may have high taxes, strong government regulation, and
large state-owned enterprises, but state political control of the market sphere is at arm’s
length. The semiperiphery of the world-system is characterized by strong states (pre-
siding over countries with potentially low levels of cultural integration) that exhibit
relatively high levels of political control of the market. The semiperipheral state is a
meddling state, actively intervening to promote one group over another in the market
sphere; it is a state that transparently serves the interests of economic elites, often
characterized by conflict between warring elites who compete to control the allocative
apparatuses of the state machinery. The periphery of the world-system is characterized
by weak states (presiding over countries with potentially low levels of cultural inte-
gration) in which the state is not sufficiently powerful to effectively meddle in the
market.
As an analytical classification, this approach has the advantage that it can be used as
the basis for theory formation about income levels, growth rates, engagement in warfare,
levels of exploitation, social class formation, and other sociological attributes of coun-
tries and areas. For example, Wallerstein and Galtung both assert that semiperipheral
states perform a ‘go-between’ role in the world-system (Galtung, 1971: 104; Wallerstein,
1974a: 349–50; 1974b: 403–5), insulating core capitalists from peripheral rebellion by
‘partially deflect[ing] the political pressures which groups primarily located in periph-
eral areas might otherwise direct against core-states’ (Wallerstein, 1974a: 350). This is
an interesting theoretical proposition: does Mexico facilitate US domination of Central
America? Do the semiperipheral Gulf states keep the rest of the Arab world quiescent
with western domination? The answers may be yes or no, but the questions generated are
interesting.
The very strong correlation of core, semiperipheral, and peripheral status with
national income has led scholars to conflate world-system zone with national income
level. Babones (2005) uses this correlation as the basis for a classification, following the
method pioneered by Arrighi and Drangel (1986). Other scholars (e.g. Mahutga, 2006)
have used network analyses of international trade and investment flows, which closely
mirror national income levels. When empirical results follow so closely from analytical
definitions it can be easy to conflate the two. But the classification of core, semiper-
iphery, and periphery based on political (and cultural) attributes of the state is analyti-
cally much more closely integrated into the definition of world-systems in terms of their
economic, political, and cultural systems. The analytical definition is also more poten-
tially productive, and should be used as the root distinction underlying other approaches,
which stand in relation to the analytical definition as theories within a perspective.
10 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

In fact Wallerstein (1974a) arrives at the analytical categories of core, semiperiphery,

and periphery not from his analysis of the modern world-economy but from his analyses
of the failed world-empires that immediately preceded the formation of the modern
world. He emphatically maintains that the positions of core, semiperiphery, and per-
iphery pre-date the emergence of the modern world-economy and are characteristics of
all large-scale social systems. Thus he identifies the existence of core, semiperipheral,
and peripheral locations in pre-modern world-empires: for example, the semiperipher-
ality of the Venetian Republic as the entrepôt to the core of the failed world-empire of
Charles V. The Venetian Republic fits well Wallerstein’s notion that semiperipheries are
characterized by strong states (that need not be nation-states) in which the market sphere
is subject to high levels of political control. In the case of Venice, the state was run
initially for the benefit of a merchant elite, but as the entrepôt trade declined control
shifted to a landowner elite. Whether or not Venice’s semiperipheral status in Charles’s
empire accounts for its economic decline after the fall of the empire, as argued by
Wallerstein (1974a: 214–21), is an empirical question.
Finally, the classification of any world-system (or at least any world-economy)
into core, semiperipheral, and peripheral zones based on their political and cultural
features raises the question: what of areas that are not incorporated into the world-
system? Wallerstein (1974a: 301–44) identifies these as ‘external arenas’ of the
world-system. Contrary to the usual understanding of world-systems scholars, Wal-
lerstein very explicitly considers much of the world – including all of Asia, all of
Russia, and the Ottoman Empire – as having been external to the modern world-
economy until at least the middle of the 1700s. His logic is that Asia, and even
Russia, were not integrated into European bulk agriculture trading networks: Eur-
opeans did not consume Russian and (certainly not) Chinese grain, and thus Russia
and China were not necessary to the functioning of the Europe-centered world-
economy. He characterizes the Portuguese (and later Spanish and Dutch)
16th-century Asian trade as primarily a trade in luxuries. Thus Russia and China were
not organically integrated into the European division of labor.
This method of drawing the boundaries of a world-system – bulk commodities in,
luxury goods out – seems overly economistic, and is certainly rooted in the traditional
Marxian focus on the centrality of labor. But surely the distinguishing feature of
incorporation of a periphery into a world-system is not the importance of that periphery
to the division of labor of the core but the impact on the periphery of events in the core.
Africa is a periphery of Europe not because Europe needs Africa to feed itself but
because relatively minor changes in European policies (e.g. the rules for the granting of
offset credits in the European carbon market) can have outsized impacts on African
countries. Europe does not consider African needs in settling its internal affairs, but
Europe’s internal affairs can profoundly impact African economics, politics, and culture.
Africa is no less incorporated for its lack of influence on Europe.
By the same principle, Asia seems to have been integrated into the Europe-centered
global world-economy during the 16th century and was fully integrated (as a periphery)
by the end of it. By the end of the 16th century Spain was exporting hundreds of tons of
silver every year to China from the west coast of the Americas, supporting the mon-
etization of the Chinese economy; Portuguese ships carried nearly all trade between
Babones 11

China and Japan; southeast Asia was pock-marked with European trading posts and
(increasingly) plantations; the Ottoman Empire was continuously at war on various
fronts with Portugal, Russia, and Austria; Russia was turning east to colonize the Eur-
asian steppes under pressure from Poland and Sweden to the west. In the early 1600s
China’s Ming dynasty collapsed amid economic turmoil and Japan closed its borders to
prevent the Catholicization of its population. Asia may have been relatively unimportant
to the European economy of the 1600s, but incorporation into the Europe-centered
world-economy had a profound influence on Asia.
Even though the Chinese and Indian economies were almost certainly larger in total
size than the European economy of the 16th century, China and India were integrated
into the modern world-economy as peripheral areas governed by chronically weak states.
All areas of Asia were exposed to downward pressure in a new global hierarchy centered
on European countries that had previously been all but irrelevant to them. The polyglot
Ming Chinese empire may have initially been incorporated as a semiperipheral state but
it rapidly disintegrated into a periphery of the Europe-centered world-economy. In the
more culturally compact Japan the state took over complete control of international trade
in an attempt to avoid a similar fate. In similarly semiperipheral Russia the state was
made the absolute guarantor of an autarchic economy based on serfdom. The analytical
definition of core, semiperiphery, and periphery according to the strength of political and
cultural systems and direct state involvement in the economy seems to fit early modern
Asia very well indeed.

Hegemony
Wallerstein (1984: 38) defines hegemony as ‘that situation in which the ongoing rivalry
between the so-called ‘‘great powers’’ is so unbalanced that one power . . . can largely
impose its rules and its wishes (at the very least by effective veto power) in the economic,
political, military, diplomatic, and even cultural arenas’. A similar though more robust
definition is given in Wallerstein (2011 [1980]: xxii): ‘What does it mean to say that
there exists a hegemonic power? It means that one state is able to impose its set of rules
on the interstate system, and thereby create a world political order as it thinks wise.’
Going even further: ‘I mean hegemony only to refer to situations in which the edge is so
significant that allied major powers are de facto client states’ (Wallerstein, 1984: 39).
‘True’ or ‘real’ hegemony (2011 [1980]: xxvi) involves the acceptance by the world of
an ideological framework ‘offered’ by the hegemon and ‘welcomed’ by the world.
Wallerstein (1984: 40) gives three examples of hegemony in the modern world-
system: Dutch (1620–1672), British (1815–1873), and American (1945–1967). In
Wallerstein (2011 [1980]: xiii) the dates are even more restrictive: Dutch (1648–1660s),
British (1815–1848, and ‘perhaps a little longer’), and American (1945–1967/1973).
Arrighi (1994) adds a Genoese hegemony (exercised through Spanish power) over the
long 16th century of Wallerstein’s Volume I of the Modern World System, and other
authors have identified still more hegemonies, though usually further back in time.
Mid-20th-century America may have provided a template for true hegemony, or may
not: one might reasonably question whether or not China and the Soviet Union wel-
comed (or even grudgingly accepted) US leadership. The Berlin blockade and the
12 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

Korean War suggest not. The other cited examples of hegemony are problematic at best.
Was the United Kingdom at the height of the Pax Britannica a hegemon? Other European
powers probably did not accept it as such, as Mann (2012: 22) points out. By the
standards set down by Wallerstein, Dutch hegemony seems even more of a stretch (as
argued by Wilkinson, 2012), and Arrighi’s (1994) antecedent Genoese hegemony is
nothing short of fanciful.
Even accepting Wallerstein’s claims and dates, hegemony seems to have been a
relatively rare phenomenon (accounting for at most 138 of the last 500 years); ques-
tioning them, rarer still. Obviously, if hegemony is so rare it cannot be a necessary
feature of a world-economy. Is hegemony perhaps fundamental to the smooth opera-
tion of a world-economy or to consistent, sustained economic growth? That is an
empirical question, but given the relatively constant rate of growth in the national
incomes of core countries over the last two hundred years (only interrupted by his-
torically brief events like the Great Depression and the recent Global Financial Crisis)
it would seem not. Hegemony may have an impact on the character of the world-
economy, but core country economic growth seems to continue regardless of
whether or not there exists a global hegemon to benignly (or not so benignly) look after
the health of the global economy.
Moreover, the operationalization of hegemony is a thorny issue. Wallerstein’s defi-
nitions clearly call for a normative operationalization of the concept: hegemony should
be demonstrated using archival historical evidence showing that major powers ‘wel-
comed’ the ideological leadership of the hegemon. Anything less is tantamount to the
anthropomorphization of the country: France showed its acceptance of this, Germany
demonstrated its acquiescence in that. This is perhaps too high a bar. Yet the consensus
view (Chase-Dunn and Grimes, 1995: 413) of world-systems analysts that the rise and
fall of hegemons is closely tied to a Schumpeterian mechanism of economic dominance
in leading industrial sectors seems to have little to do with the concept of hegemony as
described by Wallerstein. Even less do operationalizations of hegemony based on
national income, trade dominance, military budgets, or sea power. Certainly a hege-
monic power would be expected to host some leading industries, have a large economy,
and be militarily strong. But such characteristics are not indicators of hegemony as
such – or at least not as defined by Wallerstein.
Though discussions of hegemony may be endemic in the post-1980 writings of world-
systems analysts, hegemony is best thought of as a phenomenon that can be seen through
a world-systems lens rather than as a necessary structural feature of any world-economy.
For example, Chase-Dunn et al. (2000) sketch a model of how hegemony can facilitate
international trade and then demonstrate the empirical fit of this model using two cen-
turies of trade data. What makes this model an example of world-systems analysis is not
the use of the concept of hegemony per se but the understanding that the volume of
international trade is driven by system-level attributes of the world-economy rather than
by national attributes of trading partners. These system-level attributes need not include
full unambiguous hegemony as conceptualized by Wallerstein to have important
observable outcomes in the world-economy. Hegemony for Chase-Dunn et al. (2000) is
simply an empirical fact about the world that has well-theorized empirical effects, when
it exists. This seems reasonable enough.
Babones 13

Where world-systems theories of hegemony become teleological is when they call

hegemony into existence in order to meet the supposed requirements of the capitalist
world-economy: cometh the hour, cometh the hegemon. This problem runs rampant in
all the current scholarship around who will be the next hegemon. Will it be China? An
integrated European Union? A resurgent United States? Some kind of new form of
diffuse global governance? Chase-Dunn et al. (2011) simply take it for granted that there
will be a next hegemon and, seeing no potential country on the horizon, anticipate a
scenario in which large semiperipheral countries come to be controlled by democratic
socialist regimes that govern the world in alliance with progressive global social
movements. Such speculative arguments (utopian or otherwise) implicitly or explicitly
assume that the world-economy must have a hegemon and that therefore there will be
one. But there is nothing in the world-systems lens that mandates hegemony. Hegemony
has been a transient historical fact to be incorporated into the modeling of the world-
economy, where relevant – if it has existed at all. It is not an organic and indis-
pensable element of world-systems analysis as a way of looking at the world.

Cycles, trends, and constants

Wallerstein (1974a) is primarily concerned with social change, but he describes this
change neither in evolutionary nor in cyclical terms. Wallerstein (1974b: 406) does write
of ‘the historical evolution of this capitalist world-economy’ and analyzes ‘the degree to
which it is fruitful to talk of distinct stages in its evolution as a system’: the emergence of
the capitalist world-economy in the 16th century, the consolidation of this new world-
economy after 1650, the transition from agriculture to industry, and the emergence of
the contemporary world after 1917. Wallerstein seems to present his four stages as
historical facts rather than analytical propositions, though there is a cyclicity of sorts
involving ‘the relative tightness or looseness of the world-system as an important
variable’ (Wallerstein, 1974b: 406): loose, tight, loose, tight, for stages 1, 2, 3, and
4 respectively. But what goes up must come down, and periods of relatively loose system
organization can only be followed by periods of relatively tight system integration.
Wallerstein gives no specific guidance as to the expected length of a period of looseness
or tightness and does not seem to consider the periods in anything other than historical
terms. Nor does he predict a new period of looseness to follow the current (as of 1974)
period of tightness, though he does sympathize with Marx and Mao on the ‘fundamental’
contradictions of capitalism and the hope for an eventual transition to a socialist world-
government (Wallerstein, 1974b: 414–15).
How times have changed. Whereas the original 1980 edition of Volume II of The
Modern World System goes only so far as to describe what Wallerstein sees as an eco-
nomic contraction lasting from 1600 to 1750 as a ‘B phase’, the preface to the 2011
edition presents a theoretical framework for understanding economic cycles and traces A
phases and B phases back to into the Middle Ages. Wallerstein’s sharpening focus on
cycles can presumably be traced to a late-1970s Braudel Center working group on
‘cyclical rhythms and secular trends’ that resulted in the publication of an issue of
Review (the Braudel Center journal) dedicated to the topic. This issue reprinted classic
articles by scholars including Kondratieff as well as summarizing Hopkins and
14 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

Wallerstein’s (1979) general analysis of cycles and trends in the modern world-system.
After reviewing the literature on Kondratieff waves and other economic cycles, Hopkins
and Wallerstein (1979: 495–9) map out an elaborate scheme by which hegemonic cycles
are constructed in four-step sequences of two Kondratieff waves per hegemony. It is
quite a just-so story.
Hopkins and Wallerstein (1979) explicitly trace world-system periodicity to the
Marxian falling rate of profit (again). In the 2010s it takes increasingly contortionist
intellectual legerdemain to find a tendency for rate of profit to fall in the capitalist world-
economy. Someday surely it will, but we have all been a long time waiting.
Chase-Dunn (1998 [1991]: 50–53) further develops Hopkins and Wallerstein’s list of
cycles and trends into four ‘systemic cycles’ and nine ‘systemic trends’ that together
characterize world-system change. Focusing on the cycles, Chase-Dunn enumerates long
business cycles (Kondratieff waves) of 40–60 years, hegemonic sequences (of uneven
periodicity) composed of three stages of rise and fall, war severity cycles of 40–60
years that sometimes (but not always) synchronize with long business cycles, and
cycles of trade and control (seemingly similar to Wallerstein’s alternating periods of
system tightness and looseness). There are also putative cycles of colonial expansion,
peripheral resistance to the core, the political regulation of trade, core/periphery terms
of trade, core capital exports to the periphery, and financial crisis (Chase-Dunn, 1998
[1991]: 279–293, attributed to various authors). Many more world-systems related
cycles could be cited.
Are cycles really so central to world-systems analysis? Mann (2012: 20) goes so far as
to say that hegemonic and Kondratieff cycles ‘have now become the twin cores of world
systems theory in general’. And there is the nub: theory, not perspective. There are many
theories of cycles in the world-system, many of them contradictory. They cannot
simultaneously all be right; therefore at least some must be wrong. The problem is that
with the limited number of historical cycles available to be studied using actual quan-
titative data it is generally impossible to tell which are which. What seems to have been
Wallerstein’s original historicist approach to such fluctuations seems the most produc-
tive route forward: to view the ups and downs of the world-economy (and the coming
and going of periods of warfare) as historical facts rather than evidence in support of one
or another model of world-system dynamics.
If cyclical analysis is likely to be an empirical dead-end due to a lack of sufficient data
with which to evaluate cyclical theories, what of trends? Trend analysis like cyclical
analysis is a theoretical and empirical endeavor that can potentially be intelligently
informed by viewing the world-economy from a world-systems perspective. Hopkins
and Wallerstein (1979: 483–5) identify five ‘dimensions’ of trend growth in the modern
world-economy: mechanization, contractualization, commodification, interdependence,
and proletarianization, noting that the last of these is controversial. Chase-Dunn (1998
[1991]: 51–3) adds to this list population growth, territorial expansion, state formation,
the increased size of companies, the transnationalization of capital, and growing
income inequality while dropping contractualization and interdependence. As with
cycles, there is nothing wrong with theorizing trends, but it is unavoidably difficult to
disentangle nine or more global trends empirically using data from the single world-
system for which we have data.
Babones 15

More tractable are Chase-Dunn’s (1998 [1991]: 49–50) four ‘systemic constants’: an
interstate system of unequally powerful states, core-periphery hierarchy, a continuum of
labor relations running from coerced labor to protected labor, and commodity production
for a global market. Constants are more amenable to world-systems analysis because
they are easier to verify empirically than are cycles or trends. The most interesting
feature of world-system constants is the suggestion that system-level features of the
world-system might remain constant while the constituent components of the system
are constantly changing. The constants suggested by Chase-Dunn, however, are more
descriptive than analytical.
In contrast to Chase-Dunn’s historicist approach, one might explicitly theorize world-
systems constants derived from the basic analytical structure of the world-systems
perspective. For example, are national incomes per person constantly higher in the
core of the world-system relative to the peripheries? The analytical classification of
states and areas as core, semiperipheral, and peripheral according to the power of their
state machinery and the integration of their national cultures does not preclude the
possibility that peripheral areas (so defined) might have high incomes, or that core states
might have low incomes. A study of the social structures of today’s petro-kingdoms
might be designed to investigate this. Similarly, does the overall core-periphery struc-
ture of the world-economy remain constant while the specific identities of the countries
and areas classified as core, semiperipheral, and peripheral change? Throughout his
work Wallerstein loudly proclaims that this is the case. Babones (2014) suggests that we
can operationalize measures of structure in order to test this proposition against the data,
at least for recent times.
It is easy to poke fun at the huge number of cycles and trends that are supposed by
theorists (in the aggregate) to be operating in our world at any one time, but it is probably
unfair to do so. These are legitimate, potentially meaningful theories despite the fact that
they cannot be empirically disentangled using the data that are currently available. The
problem arises when macro-level conjectures about cycles and trends are reified into
dogma by people who pronounce them with too rarefied an air of respect. The tendency
of theory to calcify into dogma seems to be a challenge faced by all Marxian social
science, including world-systems analysis. For world-systems analysts working at the
micro-level coalface of research on everyday exploitation and oppression, disputes over
cycles and trends are neither very meaningful nor very useful. This is not to say that
grand conjectures should not be made. They are fascinating and – to be honest – fun.
Nonetheless, assertions about cycles and trends should not be mistaken for the theore-
tical totality of world-systems analysis.

A summation, a theorem, and a theory

World-systems analysis as such is not a theory, but there has been much theorizing from
a world-systems perspective, and as a result there are many world-systems theories.
Putting these theories aside, what are the distinctive attributes of world-systems analysis
as a way of looking at the world? What makes world-systems analysis a perspective, and
what makes this perspective useful? Five defining elements stand out:
16 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

1. The logic of the incorporation of societies into macro-level world-systems has

important implications for the objective and subjective conditions of life in those
societies.
2. The world-system in which we live and the world-systems in which people have
lived can productively be described in terms of their economic, political, and
cultural systems.
3. The modern (post-1500) world-system is a world-economy in which the eco-
nomic system predominates because of its subsumption of multiple political and
cultural systems.
4. Other types of world-systems based on the primacy of political systems (world-
empires) or cultural systems (world-cultures) are possible, have existed in the
past, and may exist in the future.
5. The modern world-economy is characterized by core-periphery structures that
are defined by the political and cultural aspects of the societies that are incor-
porated into them.

To these axioms may be added the strong theorem that the core-periphery hier-
archy of the modern world-economy can best be understood in terms of state
strength and cultural integration: strong-state, well-integrated societies form the core
of the world-economy; strong-state, poorly-integrated societies form the semiperiph-
ery of the world-economy; and weak-state, poorly-integrated societies form the per-
iphery of the world-economy. It is presumably impossible for a society to have a
politically weak state and at the same time be culturally strongly integrated. The
core-periphery structure of the world-economy, so defined, has myriad implications
for economic development, democratic governance, and ethnic relations, not
explored here.
It is not an oversight that these principles are overwhelmingly focused on structure
and say nothing about dynamics. With only one modern world-system to study, it is
difficult to separate dynamics as such from simple history. Thus Wallerstein’s
repeated pleas for a ‘unified historical social science’. In principle it should be pos-
sible to compare world-systems, and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) do just that. But
data for the world before 1500 are shaky at best and not really amenable to strict
comparative analysis; one might question whether or not there are even any really
robust data for periods before 1970. There is a reason why history is an ideographic
discipline. World-systems analysis is not a theory precisely because there is only one
world-system that can effectively be studied in detail, the modern world-economy.
World-systems analysis thus becomes a perspective (pace Wallerstein, one among
many) through which the detailed facts of the modern world-economy can be studied.
The primary assertion of world-systems analysis, corresponding to point (1) above, is
that these facts are more clearly and completely understood when they are con-
textualized at the world-system level.
Dynamics, however, are a fact of life, and this essay would be incomplete without
some treatment of world-system dynamics. In my own – admittedly idiosyncratic –
view, the key to understanding world-system dynamics is to realize just how slowly
social systems change. Good Marxists that most of us are, world-systems analysts seem
Babones 17

prone to pronounce the final crisis of capitalism every time the world-economy falls
into recession. More recently, the final crisis of capitalism has been given an ecological
dimension (Moore, 2003, and many others). Similarly wars, revolutions, and even the
rise of new industries like chemicals, cars, and the internet seemingly change every-
thing every few decades. In contrast, what amazes me is that the modern world-
economy has been so stable since its consolidation around an Anglo-Dutch core,
dated by Wallerstein (2011 [1980]) to the period 1600–1750. Oil being the definitive
industrial commodity of our times and the United States being a settler colony offshoot
of the United Kingdom, it is surely no coincidence that several centuries later the
world’s three major oil companies are Exxon Mobil (US), BP (UK), and Royal Dutch
Shell (UK/Netherlands).
Nonetheless, change is afoot. Maybe for the first time in its history, the world-
system has a ‘true’ hegemon: the United States. The United States in the early
2000s is the first country to tick all the boxes of real hegemony as specified by
Wallerstein (again pace Wallerstein, for whom the United States has been in decline
since the 1970s). The evidence is clear for those who wish to see it. America’s
major NATO and Pacific allies truly are client states; they do not have foreign
policies independent of or contradictory to those of the United States. India has
largely fallen into line with the demands of US power. America’s great challengers,
China and Russia, both belatedly joined the US-sponsored World Trade Organiza-
tion. Russia is only able to exert meaningful influence over Ukraine, Belarus,
Moldova, the Caucasus, and central Asia – areas that were until recently incorpo-
rated as part of its sovereign territory. Aside from a few minor outposts it has
virtually zero influence even in its former colonies and client states. China is unable
to effectively challenge the United States in its own coastal waters, never mind
project power overseas. If today’s America does not exercise hegemonic power over
the world-system, no country ever has.
But the US is no longer merely ‘primus inter pares’ (Wallerstein, 1984: 38); it
now has no pares. The US is more than a hegemon. It is also more than the ruler
of the core of the contemporary world-economy and guardian of global capitalism
from inside this core (Gowan, 2006). What is it? While world-systems scholars
have long looked forward to the possibility of a future socialist world-
government, the US clearly is anything but that. In any case Wallerstein early
on admitted that the creation of a socialist world-government would involve ‘the
creation of a new kind of world-system’ (1974b: 415; emphasis removed). Why
create new kinds of world-system when existing kinds will do? Sticking with the
three kinds of world-system we already know about, the alternatives to a world-
economy are a world-culture and a world-empire. When historians look back from
the year 2500, they may identify the 2000s as the period that witnessed the
emergence of the American world-empire, just as we now identify the 1500s as
the period that witnessed the emergence of the modern world-economy. When
they look for a symbolic foundation date, September 11, 2001, will serve the
purpose well.
Perhaps illustrating the dangers of analyzing social system change on too short a
time frame, Galtung (2009) confidently predicts that the American empire will fall
18 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

by 2020. A world-systems perspective suggests that 2020 is more likely just the
beginning. If the trajectory of the 1500–2000 world-economy is anything to go by,
the American world-empire may not even be consolidated until the early 2100s.
Exactly what form it will take is anyone’s guess. But that political power in the New
York–London–Washington nexus will matter more for the global distribution of
resources than market transactions on international exchanges seems likely. Already
most financial instruments have moved off-market to opaque spheres where prof-
itability is determined more by politics than by economics. Markets and corporations
will not disappear under the American world-empire any more than independent
countries disappeared under the modern world-economy, but new forms of economic
governance will emerge as the economic sphere is increasingly dominated by power
politics.
From a wildly heterodox but still recognizably Marxian standpoint, the transition
from a world-economy to a world-empire changes the answers to the two critical
questions: who oppresses, and how? In a world-economy, the answers are ‘those
with capital’ and ‘through unequal exchange in politically-structured markets’,
respectively. In a world-empire, the answers may be ‘those with political power’
and ‘through unequal power in economically-structured polities’. Most observers
agree that the influence of money in politics in the United States has reached new
heights. The world-empire theory – and it is a theory – suggests that money will
increasingly buy influence over global trade and investment treaties, international
military interventions, and other exercises of global political power. This world-
empire theory does not follow automatically from the use of the world-systems
lens, but it is an obvious application of world-systems analysis to longue dure´e
current history. Empirical facts will (eventually) determine whether or not it is
correct.

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20 Thesis Eleven 127(1)

Author biography
Salvatore Babones is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Uni-
versity of Sydney, former chair of the Political Economy of the World-System section of
the American Sociological Association and co-editor of The Handbook of World-
Systems Analysis (Routledge, 2012). His research focuses on the macro-level structure
of the global economy. His most recent book is Methods for Quantitative Macro-
Comparative Research (SAGE, 2014).