THE WORLD SYSTEM

The world system and the relations among the countries within it are shaped by the capitalist world economy. A
huge increase in international trade during and after the 15th century led to the capitalist world economy
(Wallerstein 1982, 2004b), a single world system committed to production for sale or exchange, with the object of
maximizing profits rather than supplying domestic needs. Capital refers to wealth or resources invested in business,
with the intent of using the means of production to make a profit. World-system theory can be traced to the French
social historian Fernand Braudel. In his three-volume work Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (1981,
1982, 1992), Braudel argued that society consists of interrelated parts assembled into a system. Societies are
subsystems of larger systems, with the world system the largest. The key claim of world-system theory is that an
identifiable social system, based on wealth and power differentials, extends beyond individual countries. That
system is formed by a set of economic and political relations that has characterized much of the globe since the 16th
century, when the Old World established regular contact with the New World (see Bodley 2003). According to
Wallerstein (1982, 2004b), countries within the world system occupy three different positions of economic and
political power: core, periphery, and semiperiphery. The geographic center, or core, the dominant position in the
world system, includes the strongest and most powerful nations. In core nations, “the complexity of economic
activities and the level of capital accumulation is the greatest” (Thompson 1983, p. 12). With its sophisticated
technologies and mechanized production, the core churns out products that flow mainly to other core countries.
Some also go to the periphery and semiperiphery. According to Arrighi (1994), the core monopolizes the most
profitable activities, especially the control of world finance. Semiperiphery and periphery countries have less power,
wealth, and influence than the core does. The semiperiphery is intermediate between the core and the periphery.
Contemporary nations of the semiperiphery are industrialized. Like core nations, they export both industrial goods
and commodities, but they lack the power and economic dominance of core nations. Thus Brazil, a semiperiphery
nation, exports automobiles to Nigeria (a periphery nation) and auto engines, orange juice extract, coffee, and
shrimp to the United States (a core nation). The periphery includes the world’s least privileged and powerful
countries. Economic activities there are less mechanized than those in the semiperiphery, although some degree of
industrialization has reached even periphery nations. The periphery produces raw materials, agricultural
commodities, and, increasingly, human labor for export to the core and the semi periphery (Shannon 1996). In the
United States and Western Europe today, immigration—legal and illegal—from the periphery and semiperiphery
supplies cheap labor for agriculture in core countries. U.S. states as distant as California, Michigan, and South
Carolina make significant use of farm labor from Mexico. The availability of relatively cheap workers from
non-core nations such as Mexico (in the United States) and Turkey (in Germany) benefits farmers and business
owners in core countries, while also supplying remittances to families in the semiperiphery and periphery. As a
result of 21st-century telecommunications technology, cheap labor doesn’t even need to migrate to the United States.
Thousands of families in India are being supported as American companies “outsource” jobs—from telephone
assistance to software engineering— to nations outside the core. Consider recent moves by IBM, the world’s largest
information technology company. On June 24, 2005, the New York Times reported that IBM was planning to hire
more than 14,000 additional workers in India, while laying off some 13,000 workers in Europe and the United States
(Lohr, 2005). These figures illustrate the ongoing globalization of work and the migration of even skilled jobs to
low-wage countries. Its critics accuse IBM of shopping the globe for the cheapest labor, to enhance corporate profits
at the expense of wages, benefits, and job security in the United States and other developed countries. In explaining
the hiring in India, an IBM senior vice president (quoted in Lohr 2005) cited a surging demand for technology
services in India’s thriving economy and the opportunity to tap the many skilled Indian software engineers to work
on projects around the world. Skilled Western workers must compete now against well-educated workers in such
low wage countries as India, where an experienced software programmer earns one-fifth the average salary of a
comparable American worker—$15,000 versus $75,000 (Lohr 2005).

The Emergence of the World System

By the 15th century Europeans were profiting from a transoceanic trade-oriented economy, and people worldwide
entered Europe’s sphere of influence. What was new was the transatlantic component of a long history of Old World
sailing and commerce. As early as 600 b.c.e The Phoenicians/Carthaginians sailed around Britain on regular trade
routes and circumnavigated Africa. Likewise, Indonesia and Africa have been linked in Indian Ocean trade for at
least 2000 years. In the 15th century Europe established regular contact with Asia, Africa, and eventually the New
World (the Caribbean and the Americas). Christopher Columbus’s first voyage from Spain to the Bahamas and the
Caribbean in 1492 was soon followed by additional voyages. These journeys opened the way for a major exchange
of people, resources, products, ideas, and diseases, as the Old and New Worlds were forever linked (Crosby 2003;
Diamond 1997; Fagan 1998; Viola and Margolis 1991). Led by Spain and Portugal, Europeans extracted silver and
gold, conquered the natives (taking some as slaves), and colonized their lands. The frequency and nature of conflict,
violence, and warfare varies among the world’s cultures. This chapter’s “Appreciating Diversity” examines a debate
about the origin and characteristics of warfare among Native Americans. Did European contact play a role in
fostering increased violence? The Columbian exchange is the term for the spread of people, resources, products,
ideas, and diseases between eastern and western hemispheres after contact. As you read “Appreciating Diversity,”
consider the role of trade, disease, and slave raiding on Native Americans, including conflict and warfare. Previously
in Europe as throughout the world, rural people had produced mainly for their own needs, growing their own food
and making clothing, furniture, and tools from local products. Production beyond immediate needs was undertaken
to pay taxes and to purchase trade items such as salt and iron. As late as 1650 the English diet, like diets in most of
the world today, was based on locally grown starches (Mintz 1985). In the 200 years that followed, however, the
English became extraordinary consumers of imported goods. One of the earliest and most popular of those goods
was sugar (Mintz 1985). Sugarcane originally was domesticated in Papua New Guinea, and sugar was first
processed in India. Reaching Europe via the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, it was carried to the New
World by Columbus (Mintz 1985). The climate of Brazil and the Caribbean proved ideal for growing sugarcane, and
Europeans built plantations there to supply the growing demand for sugar. This led to the development in the 17th
century of a plantation economy based on a single cash crop—a system known as monocrop production. The
demand for sugar in a growing international market spurred the development of the transatlantic slave trade and
New World plantation economies based on slave labor. By the 18th century, an increased English demand for raw
cotton led to rapid settlement of what is now the southeastern United States and the emergence there of another
slave-based monocrop production system. Like sugar, cotton was a key trade item that fueled the growth of the
world system.

THE WORLD SYSTEM TODAY

The process of industrialization continues today, although nations have shifted their positions within the world
system. Recap 14.1 summarizes those shifts. By 1900, the United States had become a core nation within the world
system and had overtaken Great Britain in iron, coal, and cotton production. In a few decades (1868–1900), Japan
had changed from a medieval handicraft economy to an industrial one, joining the semiperiphery by 1900 and
moving to the core between 1945 and 1970. Figure 14.5 is a map showing the modern world system.
Twentieth-century industrialization added hundreds of new industries and millions of new jobs. Production
increased, often beyond immediate demand, spurring strategies, such as advertising, to sell everything industry
could churn out. Mass production gave rise to a culture of consumption, which valued acquisitiveness and
conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1934). Industrialization entailed a shift from reliance on renewable resources to
the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel energy, stored over millions of years, is being depleted rapidly to support a
previously unknown and probably unsustainable level of consumption (Bodley 1985). Table 14.1 compares energy
consumption in various types of cultures. Americans are the world’s foremost consumers of nonrenewable
resources. In terms of energy consumption, the average American is about 35 times more expensive than the average
forager or tribesperson. Since 1900, the United States has tripled its per capita energy use. It also has increased its
total energy consumption thirtyfold. Table 14.2 compares energy consumption, per capita and total, in the United
States and selected other countries. The United States represents 21.8 percent of the world’s annual energy
consumption, compared with China’s 14.5 percent, but the average American consumes 6.6 times the energy used by
the average Chinese, and 23 times the energy used by the average inhabitant of India.

Industrial Degradation
Industrialization and factory labor now characterize many societies in Latin America, Africa, the Pacific, and Asia.
One effect of the spread of industrialization has been the destruction of indigenous economies, ecologies, and
populations, as we see in this chapter’s “Appreciating Anthropology.” Two centuries ago, as industrialization was
developing, 50 million people still lived in politically independent bands, tribes, and chiefdoms. Occupying vast
areas, those nonstate societies, although not totally isolated, were only marginally affected by nation-states and the
world capitalist economy. In 1800 bands, tribes, and chiefdoms controlled half the globe and 20 percent of its
population (Bodley, ed. 1988). Industrialization tipped the balance in favor of states. As industrial states have
conquered, annexed, and “developed” nonstates, there has been genocide on a grand scale. Genocide refers to a
deliberate policy of exterminating a group through warfare or murder. Examples include the Holocaust, Rwanda in
1994, and Bosnia in the early 1990s. Bodley (1988) estimates that an average of 250,000 indigenous people perished
annually between 1800 and 1950. Besides war-fare, the causes included foreign diseases (to which natives lacked
resistance), slavery, land grabbing, and other forms of dispossession and impoverishment. Many native groups have
been incorporated within nation-states, in which they have become ethnic minorities. Some such groups have been
able to recoup their population. Many indigenous peoples survive and maintain their ethnic identity despite having
lost their ancestral cultures to varying degrees (partial ethnocide). And many descendants of tribespeople live on as
culturally distinct and self-conscious colonized peoples, many of whom aspire to autonomy. As the original
inhabitants of their territories, they are called indigenous peoples (see Maybury-Lewis 2002). Around the world
many contemporary nations are repeating—at an accelerated rate—the process of resource depletion that started in
Europe and the United States during the Industrial Revolution. Fortunately, however, today’s world has some
environmental watchdogs that did not exist during the first centuries of the Industrial Revolution. Given national and
international cooperation and sanctions, the modern world may benefit from the lessons of the past. This chapter’s
“Appreciating Anthropology” shows how anthropologists can help local people fight the environmental degradation,
in this case from mining, that often accompanies the spread of industrialization. Also raised in “Appreciating
Anthropology” is the question of whether a corporation whose operations endanger indigenous peoples is a proper
advisor for an institute devoted to ecological sustainability.