World-Systems Analysis: Wallerstein’s Theory of Hegemony

Immanuel Wallerstein and other practitioners of World-Systems Analysis gave an answer to why the West became the hegemonic power and a way to rationalize how the international economy functions. It’s useful but also so abstract that it may not be as reliable as scholars in the 1980s thought, as we shall see. The foundational idea of World-Systems Analysis is that there is a global division of labor. The core is composed of mostly skilled workers who are at liberty to change employment while the periphery has basic jobs that are unable to change. So the most powerful countries are those who dominate others. There is also an in-between state, a semiperiphery, who are rising in power and portray a bit of both being core and peripheral. The periphery provides cheap labor and raw materials for the core to process into more complex products to sell at an immense profit. This seemingly simplistic division of labor has an ability to morph to history, explaining the natural connection between imperialism and capitalism.
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Bibliography
Giovanni Arrighi, “Capitalism and the Modern World-System: Rethinking the Non-Debates of the 1970s,” Fernand Braudel Center Review 21, no. 1 (1998): 113-129.

Peter Gunn, History and Cultural Theory (Oxon, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2006). https://amzn.to/2uWmK9F

Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2002). https://amzn.to/2LhuzSf

Thomas R. Shannon, An Introduction to the World-system Perspective, 2nd ed. (1989; New York: Routledge, 2018). https://amzn.to/3rsyVfd

Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4. (October 1988): 829-872.

Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, N.Car.: Duke University Press, 2004). https://amzn.to/2JM3mRZ
Immanuel Wallerstein, Modern World-System, 4 vols. (Reprint with new prologue, 1974; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). https://amzn.to/44LjddO
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