(Rethinking Globalizations 30) Barry K. Gills - Patrick Manning-Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development - Visions, Remembrances and Explorations-Routledge (2011) PDF

Andre Gunder Frank and Global
Development
This work focuses on the ideas and influence of Andre Gunder Frank, one of the
founding figures and leading analysts of political economy at the global level.
Through discussion of his work the contributors in this volume examine the shift-
ing currents of the world economy and the accompanying controversies, advances
and regressions in the understanding of global patterns in the present and past.
Frank’s publications from the 1960s to his death in 2005 enlivened and
advanced debates on every continent. He analysed Latin American dependency,
long-term accumulation of capital, world systems, shifting dominance in the
world economy and social movements. His style of wide-ranging scholarship,
shared by a growing number of analysts, demonstrated its relevance to the basic
causes and effects of economic and social change.
This collection provides a comprehensive overview of the legacy of Frank’s
work and takes stock of the recent and expected developments in global and his-
torical analysis of political economy. It will be of great interest to students and
scholars of international political economy, international relations and political
theory.
Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and Director

of the World History Center, University of Pittsburgh.
Barry K. Gills is Professor of Global Politics at Newcastle University and editor

of the journal Globalizations.
Rethinking Globalizations
Edited by Barry K. Gills, Newcastle University, UK
This series is designed to break new ground in the literature on globalization and
its academic and popular understanding. Rather than perpetuating or simply react-
ing to the economic understanding of globalization, this series seeks to capture the
term and broaden its meaning to encompass a wide range of issues and disciplines
and convey a sense of alternative possibilities for the future.
1. Whither Globalization?
The vortex of knowledge and globalization
James H. Mittelman
2. Globalization and Global History

Edited by Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson
3. Rethinking Civilization
Communication and terror in the global village
Majid Tehranian
4. Globalization and Contestation

The new great counter-movement
Ronaldo Munck
5. Global Activism
Ruth Reitan
6. Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia

Edited by Mike Douglass, K. C. Ho and Giok Ling Ooi
7. Challenging Euro-America’s Politics of Identity

The return of the native
Jorge Luis Andrade Fernandes
8. The Global Politics of Globalization

“Empire” vs “Cosmopolis”
Edited by Barry K. Gills
9. The Globalization of Environmental Crisis
Edited by Jan Oosthoek and Barry K. Gills
10. Globalization as Evolutionary Process

Modeling global change
Edited by George Modelski, Tessaleno Devezas and William R. Thompson
11. The Political Economy of Global Security

War, future crises and changes in global governance
Heikki Patomäki
12. Cultures of Globalization

Coherence, hybridity, contestation
Edited by Kevin Archer, M. Martin Bosman, M. Mark Amen and Ella Schmidt
13. Globalization and the Global Politics of Justice

14. Global Economy Contested

Power and conflict across the international division of labor
Edited by Marcus Taylor
15. Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence

Beyond savage globalization?
Edited by Damian Grenfell and Paul James
16. Recognition and Redistribution

Beyond international development
Edited by Heloise Weber and Mark T. Berger
17. The Social Economy

Working alternatives in a globalizing era
Edited by Hasmet M. Uluorta
18. The Global Governance of Food

Edited by Sara R. Curran, April Linton, Abigail Cooke and Andrew Schrank
19. Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights

The role of multilateral organisations
Desmond McNeill and Asunción Lera St. Clair
20. Globalization and Popular Sovereignty

Democracy’s transnational dilemma
Adam Lupel
21. Limits to Globalization
North–South divergence
William R. Thompson and Rafael Reuveny
22. Globalisation, Knowledge and Labour

Education for solidarity within spaces of resistance
Edited by Mario Novelli and Anibel Ferus-Comelo
23. Dying Empire

U.S. imperialism and global resistance
Francis Shor
24. Alternative Globalizations

An integrative approach to studying dissident knowledge in the global justice
movement
S. A. Hamed Hosseini
25. Global Restructuring, Labour and the Challenges for Transnational

Solidarity
Edited by Andreas Bieler and Ingemar Lindberg
26. Global South to the Rescue

Emerging humanitarian superpowers and globalizing rescue industries
Edited by Paul Amar
27. Global Ideologies and Urban Landscapes

Edited by Manfred B. Steger and Anne McNevin
28. Power and Transnational Activism

Edited by Thomas Olesen
29. Globalization in Crisis

30. Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development

Visions, remembrances and explorations
Edited by Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills
Andre Gunder
Frank and Global
Development
Visions, remembrances and
explorations
Edited by Patrick Manning and

Barry K. Gills
First published 2011
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2011 Patrick Manning and Barry K Gills, editorial selection and matter;
individual chapters, the contributors.
The right of Patrick Manning and Barry K Gills to be identified as Editors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Andre Gunder Frank and global development : visions, remembrances, and
explorations / edited by Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills.
p. cm.–(Rethinking globalizations ; 30)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Developing countries–Economic conditions. 2. Globalization. 3.
International economic relations. 4. Frank, Andre Gunder, 1929- I.
Manning, Patrick, 1941- II. Gills, Barry K., 1956-
HC59.7.A7937 2011
338.9009172’4–c22
2010046495
ISBN: 978-0-415-60273-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-81664-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman and Stone Sans ITC Pro by Prepress Projects
Ltd, Perth, UK
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Notes on contributors xi
Acknowledgementsxvii
Foreword by Immanuel Wallerstein xix
1 The world economy in theory and practice: the contributions

of Andre Gunder Frank in the era of underdevelopment and
“globalization” 1
Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills
Part I
Andre Gunder Frank’s critical vision 23
2 Frankian triangles 25
Albert J. Bergesen
3 ReOrient the Nineteenth Century: Andre Gunder Frank’s

unfinished manuscript 41
Robert A. Denemark
4 The modern world system under Asian hegemony: the silver

standard world economy 1450–1750 50
Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank
viii Contents
Part II
Continuing debates 81
5 Exiting the crisis of capitalism or capitalism in crisis? 83

Samir Amin
6 East and West in world-systems evolution 97

Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall
7 The paradoxes of colonial/modernity 120

Aníbal Quijano
8 Dependency theory and the aporias of modernity: lessons

from Latin America 142
John Beverley
9 Tides of hegemonic change: the atypical trajectory of the

1970s-to-present B-phase crisis 153
Jeffrey Sommers and Boris Kagarlitsky
Part III
Multidisciplinary developments 173
10 Connections, connections, connections! The Atlantic copper

market during the long twentieth century 175
Jan-Frederik Abbeloos
11 ReOrienting Iran: following Gunder Frank’s advice one decade

at a time 196
Kevan Harris
12 The Korean developmental state and its neoliberal transition

in the world system 211
Hae-Yung Song
13 Watershed management in the wake of transnational migration:

Honduras 232
Carylanna Taylor
14 Conclusion: preparing for future analysis 258

Patrick Manning
Index 269
Illustrations
Figures
2.1 Frankian triangles 26
6.1 East/West networks expand and merge 98
6.2 Largest empires in the East Asian region 103
6.3 Territorial sizes of largest states and empires in East Asia 103
6.4 Regional urban population as percent of the world’s largest cities 105
10.1 World and U.S. primary production compared 184
10.2 North America copper production 185
10.3 South America copper production 186
10.4 Europe copper production 186
10.5 Africa copper production 187
11.1 Poverty rates in Iran before and after the Revolution 204
Tables
11.1 GNI per capita: five-year averages for selected countries 202
11.2 Sectoral share in manufacturing in Iran (percent) 206
11.3 Iran’s exports and imports by region 207
Maps
4.1 Global commodity and monetary flows 1400–1800 70
4.2 Networks of Asian commerce 70
4.3 Intra-Asian commodity and bullion flows 71
4.4 Asia’s export commodities 71
4.5 Asia’s import commodities 72
x Illustrations
Appendix
4.1 Multilateral trade in the eighteenth century 80
Notes on contributors
Jan-Frederik Abbeloos is a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Modern

and Contemporary History at Ghent University, Belgium. As a member of the
Research Group for World History his field of interest is the process of interna-
tional economic integration and the role of states and enterprises in this process.
Samir Amin is President of the World Forum for Alternatives and Director (since
1980) of the Third World Forum, based in Dakar, Senegal. From 1957 to 1960
he worked as a research officer in the Egyptian government’s Institution for
Economic Management, and subsequently from 1960 to 1963 as an advisor to the
Ministry of Planning in Bamako, Mali. He has been a prolific author throughout
his long career as a scholar and activist, analysing capitalist development, impe-
rialism, globalization and many other topics of central theoretical and political
importance.
Albert J. Bergesen is Professor of Sociology and Department Head of the

Department of Sociology, University of Arizona. His research concentrates
on geopolitics, world-systems and the sociology of terrorism. He is author of
The Sayyid Qutb Reader: Selected Writings on Politics, Religion, and Society
(Routledge, 2008) and Terrorist Minds: How Nature Equipped Our Mind with a
Faculty of Violence (manuscript in preparation).
John Beverley is Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature

and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the pioneers of the
postcolonial turn in Latin American criticism, Beverley was a founding member
of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, which had a high-profile impact
on Latin American studies during the 1990s. His recent books include Essays on
the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America (Tamesis, 2008); Testimonio:
xii Notes on contributors
On the Politics of Truth (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Subalternidad

y representación: debates en teoría cultural, trans. Marlena Beiza and Sergio
Villalobos-Ruminott (Iberoamericana, 2004). He is also editor of From Cuba
(Duke University Press, 2002).
Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director

of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California,
Riverside. He is the author of Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems
(Westview, 1997; with Thomas D. Hall), The Wintu and Their Neighbors
(University of Arizona Press, 1998; with Kelly Mann) and The Spiral of Capitalism
and Socialism (Lynne Rienner, 2000; with Terry Boswell). He is the founder and
former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research. Chase-Dunn is currently
carrying out research on global party formation and anti-systemic social move-
ments. He also studies the rise and fall of great cities and empires since the Bronze
Age and global state formation.
Robert A. Denemark is on the faculty of the Department of Political Science and

International Relations at the University of Delaware. He is editing the drafts of
Andre Gunder Frank’s last manuscript entitled ReOrient the Nineteenth Century.
Denemark published ‘World System History, the Papacy, and the Transition from
Transitions’ in the January 2008 issue of the Journal of Developing Societies
devoted to the work of Gunder Frank, is co-editor (with George Modelski) of the
world-system history section of UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems
and is co-editor (with Jonathan Friedman, Barry Gills and George Modelski) of
World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change (Routledge,
2000). He is general editor of the International Studies Association Compendium
Project.
Barry K. Gills is currently Professor of Global Politics at Newcastle University,

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is the founding editor of the journal Globalizations
and the ‘Rethinking Globalizations’ book series (Routledge), a founding editor
of the Review of International Political Economy and co-founder of the ‘World
Historical Systems Theory’ subsection of the IPE Section of the International
Studies Association. He worked very closely in collaboration and co-authorship
with Professor Andre Gunder Frank from 1989 to 1995, during which time they
produced a series of joint articles and chapters and a co-edited book [The World
System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (Routledge, 1993)] outlining a
new theory and approach in world system analysis (without the hyphen). Barry
Gills is a former Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, and a Fellow
of the World Academy of Art and Science. He has published widely in the fields
of political economy of development, critical globalization studies, East Asian
(and especially Korean) political economy and democratisation, world system
theory, and global history. His recent works include Globalization and Global
Notes on contributors xiii
History (Routledge, 2006; with William R Thompson); The Globalization of

Environmental Crisis (Routledge, 2008; with Jan Oosthoek); Globalization and the
Global Politics of Justice (Routledge, 2008); The Global Politics of Globalization:
‘Empire’ versus ‘Cosmopolis’ (Routledge, 2008); and Globalization in Crisis
(Routledge, 2011).
Thomas D. Hall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and

Anthropology at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, where he received the
Edwin L. Minar Jr. Scholarship Award for 2009. He holds an MA in Anthropology
(University of Michigan) and a PhD in Sociology (University of Washington).
His interests also include indigenous peoples, pastoral nomads, ethnicity, world-
systems analysis, globalization, comparative frontiers, and long-term social,
economic, political and cultural change. His most recent book is Indigenous
Peoples and Globalization: Resistance and Revitalization, co-authored with
James V. Fenelon (Paradigm Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book on
the comparative study of frontiers. A recent article, ‘Puzzles in the Comparative
Study of Frontiers: Problems, Some Solutions, and Methodological Implications’,
describes his methodological approach [Journal of World-Systems Research,
15 (1), 25–47 (Special Issue: Methodological Issues on Macro Comparative
Research)]. He is also book review editor for Journal of World-Systems Research.
Kevan Harris is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Johns

Hopkins University. He has been travelling to Iran since 2006 and lived in Tehran
between June 2009 and May 2010. Kevan is currently completing his dissertation
on the historical sociology of the Iranian welfare state. This is part of a larger
project on Iran and surrounding states in the world economy over the long durée.
He spends his free time debating neoclassical economists in Iran and their bad
advice.
Boris Kagarlitsky is a well-known international commentator on Russian poli-

tics and society. Boris was imprisoned for two years for ‘anti-Soviet’ activities
and later was a deputy to the Moscow City Soviet between 1990 and 1993. In
1993 he was imprisoned again, this time by the Yeltsin regime, but released
after an international outcry. He subsequently worked for trade unions and as a
researcher for the Institute of Comparative Politics at the Russian Academy of
Sciences. Since 1999 he has been a fellow of the Transnational Institute (TNI). In
2007 he, with his circle of co-thinkers, established the Institute of Globalization
and Social Movements in Moscow (IGSO), where he serves as a director. Boris’
books include The Thinking Reed (Verso, 1988), for which he was awarded Isaak
Deutscher Memorial Prize, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System
(Pluto Press, 2008), Russia under Yeltsin And Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy
(TNI/Pluto 2002) and New Realism, New Barbarism: The Crisis of Capitalism
(Pluto 1999).
xiv Notes on contributors
Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and Director

of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. His recent books
include The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (Columbia University
Press, 2009); Migration in World History (Routledge, 2004); and Navigating
World History: Historians Create a Global Past (Palgrave, 2003).
Aníbal Quijano is Director of the Center of Social Research in Lima, Peru,

and Professor of the Department of Sociology of Binghamton University,
Binghamton, New York. He is the author of many publications on Latin American
and global social/historical processes, several of which have been translated into
European and non-European languages. His theoretical proposals on colonial-
ity of power and coloniality/modernity [among the most quoted, ‘Coloniality
of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla, 3, 2000, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, and ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural
Studies, 21 (2–3), March/May 2007] are now part of the international debate in
social theory. He is currently working on a book entitled The Crisis of the Global
Coloniality of Power and the Question of Coloniality.
Jeffrey Sommers is Associate Professor of Africology at the University of

Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of
Economics in Riga, where he serves as curator of the Andre Gunder Frank
Memorial Library. Andre Gunder Frank served on his dissertation committee,
along with Patrick Manning and Noam Chomsky. He has conducted research on
the ‘spatial fixes’ to crises of global capital accumulation. New research to this
end centres on the political economy of Africa’s (and its diaspora) accelerated
integration into new networks of accumulation. Along with Michael Hudson he
recently published ‘How the Neoliberals Bankrupted “New Europe”: Latvia in the
Global Credit Crisis’, in Martijn Konings (ed.), The Great Credit Crash (Verso,
2010). He has received two Fulbrights to Latvia and provides economic policy
counsel to members of the Latvian government at the prime minister and parlia-
ment levels.
Hae-Yung Song is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Studies,

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has studied
sociology (BA), European studies (MA) and international political economy
(MA), and is interested in theories of globalization, state theories and a cri-
tique of the concept of development. She has a journal article ‘Theorising the
Korean Developmental State beyond Institutionalism: Class Content and Form of
“National” Development’ forthcoming in New Political Economy.
Carylanna Taylor is completing a doctorate in Applied Anthropology at the

University of South Florida, Tampa. She has a BA in Latin American Studies
and Economics from Penn State and a Masters in Development Sociology
from Cornell, where she wrote a thesis on how water conservation discourse is
Notes on contributors xv
globalized. She has worked on conservation and development projects in Ecuador

and Chile and currently interns at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington,
DC. Carylanna’s National Science Foundation-funded dissertation on the role of
economic and social remittances in natural resource management among rural
Honduran households grew out of the chapter presented in this volume. She has
published dissertation findings as a Society for Conservation Biology, Social
Science Working Group paper, ‘Taking Emigration and Remittances into Account
in Conservation and Development Policy’, a version of which will be published
in a 2011 issue of International Migration on transnational labour migration and
policy.
Acknowledgements
The editors wish to express appreciation to the Global Studies Program at the
University of Pittsburgh for its award of a 2007 Global Academic Partnership
grant. This grant supported the holding of a conference on ‘Andre Gunder Frank’s
Legacy of Critical Social Science’, held on 11–13 April 2008 in David Lawrence
Hall at the University of Pittsburgh. Members of the conference committee
who organized the programme were Patrick Manning, Barry K. Gills, Salvatore
Babones, John Beverley, Thomas Rawski and Robert M. Fagley. Robert Fagley,
in addition, served with great effectiveness as conference coordinator; and Sean
Collins created the conference website (still online at http://www.worldhisto-
rynetwork.org/agfrank-details.php). We offer appreciation to all the participants
in the 2008 Pittsburgh conference: among them, we express our sadness at the
passing of the great world historical scholar, Giovanni Arrighi.
Robert M. Fagley served as editorial assistant for the early stages of prepa-
ration of the chapters in this book. Robin Cheung prepared the graphic art for
five chapters in the book. We offer thanks to Hannah Shakespeare and Harriet
Frammingham of Routledge for their guidance of the book to publication, with
additional thanks to the ‘Rethinking Globalizations’ book series editorial commit-
tee.We also express our appreciation to Heidi Bagtazo of Routledge, and to Nicola
Haig, Deborah Bennett and Alex Bromley of Prepress Projects. Joanne Hardy and
the Bridgeman Art Library kindly provided assistance in obtaining permission to
use the cover image, ‘The Burning of the Idols by Hernán Cortes’.
Most deeply, the editors offer their gratitude to Alison Candela, the widow of
Andre Gunder Frank, who cared so well for Gunder in his later years and who has
done so much to protect and sustain his legacy after his passing. She first encour-
aged the two of us to discuss the organizing of a commemorative conference on
Gunder’s work, life and legacy. (Our initial planning meeting took place in the
xviii Acknowledgements
course of a pleasant dinner in Georgetown in the course of a 2006 conference

of the Global Economic History Network, organized by Patrick K. O’Brien, at
George Mason University.) Alison was instrumental in identifying participants for
the 2008 conference; her gracious yet forceful address at the conference provided
inspiration and direction on how to carry on Gunder’s work.
Foreword
Andre Gunder Frank was a remarkable person, as anyone who knew him and
read his writings can attest. He combined endless energy, gargantuan curiosity
and amazing empirical knowledge with both intellectual daring and imagination
on the one hand and never-flagging commitment to a left vision of the world and
its prospects on the other. Furthermore, he was a ferocious debater, even with
his friends, but someone who always remained loyal to his fellow toilers in the
vineyard.
I knew him for a period of over thirty-five years. We were co-authors of two
books (along with Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi). He lavished enormous
praise on my work at one point and also launched a very strong intellectual attack
on this work at another point. It is perhaps fitting that our last joint endeavour was
at the very end of his life when we participated together in a major conference and
then in talks at universities in Brazil, a country dear to his heart, a sort of second
home.
His biography itself tells a story. He came to the United States as a young
child, a refugee from Hitler’s rule. His father was a well-known left journalist
and author, whose autobiography was entitled My Heart is on the Left. That’s
where Gunder’s heart always was. He grew up as a typical child of left intellectual
parents in the era of the New Deal.
He decided to carry out his graduate work in economics and attended the
University of Chicago, which had already become the heartland of neoclassical
economics. He almost immediately came into conflict with his mentors, first of
all because of what he considered the reactionary political conclusions they drew
from their theorizing. He was not shy about attacking them publicly and in writing.
He went off to Brazil and then Chile to carry out fieldwork on economic devel-
opment. There he came into contact with the growing circle of Latin American
anti-Establishment intellectuals. He became in Brazil a leading voice in what
xx Foreword
came to be called dependista analyses. He became indeed one of its major figures,
and his writings were a great influence on very many people, certainly on me.
The three essential features of his position were (1) a rejection of neoclas-
sical economics as both intellectually irrelevant and generative of false policy
prescriptions for the countries of the South; (2) a commitment to radical political
action as well as radical analyses; (3) a rejection of the Marxism of the ortho-
dox Communist parties for purveying inadequate and misleading modes both of
analysis and of praxis.
Gunder Frank launched the memorable slogan ‘the development of under
development’ as the dictum to encapsulate the programme of the dependistas.
It suggested that the situation in which Third World countries found themselves
today was not the result of some ‘traditional’ characteristics they had inherited
but was rather the consequence of their incorporation as dominated and therefore
exploited sectors in the modern world-system.
It was in the early 1970s that I met him and discovered how much overlap
there was in our views. In the years that followed, he, I, Samir Amin and Giovanni
Arrighi were in rather constant contact, and we then collaborated in two collective
works: The Dynamics of Global Crisis (1982) and Transforming the Revolution:
Social Movements and the World-System (1990). We came to be called the ‘Gang
of Four’. We agreed on at least 80 per cent of the analysis of the modern world.
As for those issues about which we disagreed, there was no pattern to the alliances
among us. But it was the areas of accord that were the most important to us.
In the 1990s, Gunder Frank moved into a new arena of work: the world system
over 5,000 years and the centrality of China to that world system. He saw his
analytic shift of emphasis as an essential mode of overcoming Eurocentrism. The
other three of us agreed with him that China’s role had long been neglected, but
disagreed that the 5,000-year ‘world system’ was the same kind of phenomenon as
the 500-year ‘modern world-system’ based on the capitalist mode of production.
Gunder Frank seemed now to be arguing that there was no such thing as capital-
ism, and that therefore there was nothing really new in the modern world.
Even as Gunder Frank came to reject the concept of capitalism, he never
ceased fighting the capitalists at the political level. Indeed, his constant militancy
to the very end, as well as his unflagging devotion to intellectual production (and
indeed to teaching and participation in international colloquia), was all the more
remarkable in that he fought serious illness for the last ten years of his life.
Gunder Frank was notoriously considered to be ‘difficult’ in his interpersonal
relations. But he managed despite this, or perhaps because of this, to be loved by
his friends, no matter what he did or said. This is because he was not merely a
warm human being, but a deeply honest and committed intellectual, who gave at
least as much as he took in all his social and scholarly encounters. He was a rare
bird. The eagle flew high.
Immanuel Wallerstein
New Haven, Connecticut
August 2010
1
The world economy in theory
and practice
The contributions of Andre Gunder Frank in the
era of underdevelopment and “globalization”
Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills
Andre Gunder Frank once said about his work, and about his perspective on
“tradition,” that his analysis was neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist, it was just his
analysis. This attitude encapsulates the uncompromisingly radical, iconoclastic,
and independent thinking that characterized the life and work of the late Andre(as)
“Gunder” Frank. He belonged to a generation that lived through revolutionary,
violent, and truly tumultuous times. Like all great thinkers in history, Gunder
was part of his own times, and contributed directly to them as they unfolded. His
lifetime included the Great Depression, the Second World War, anti-colonial and
revolutionary struggles, counter-revolutionary actions (including the September
1973 coup in Chile), the onset of the “world crises” of the capitalist system, and
recurring war, oppression, poverty, and social upheaval on a world scale – all
despite economic growth and (in Frank’s radical analysis) because of it as well.
To Frank, the central insight, both theoretically and historically, would be that the
negative aspects of the so-called “development” process could never be separated
from the positive aspects, as they were profoundly two sides of the same coin.
Above all Frank was a rebel and an intellectual activist. He was never afraid
to be unconventional, and indeed to directly and ferociously attack conventional
wisdom, whether of the “left” or of the “right.” He was an economist who attacked
Economics as a discipline (especially as practiced in the mainstream tradition),
a development theorist who denounced Development. He was a “Marxist” who
broke with Marx, especially on the understanding of world history in relation to
the history of “capital” and “the capitalist mode of production.” Moreover, he
never stood still, and was willing to be critical even of his own (former) posi-
tions, and move constantly forward. It was this intellectual openness, courage, and
honesty that most provoked his enemies and opponents, and which endeared him
to his many friends and to his close collaborators.
2 Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills
This book commemorates the life and work of Andre Gunder Frank – and its
continued influence and relevance in both theory and practice. For nearly fifty years
Frank was a forceful voice in many of the key debates of his time on economy,
society, politics, development, and history. He was ever critical of the established
order, and relished identifying and exposing its endemic and persistent problems
and failures. He employed new analytical frameworks that address the long-term
temporal and the large-scale spatial dimensions of “development” and history,
while emphasizing multiple structural linkages between economy and society. On
that basis, he expressed a powerful critique of the oppression and inequality brought
about by the celebrated historical path of “capitalist development.” Moreover, he
articulated a social critique of the elites, while providing support for the (often-
revolutionary) social and political movements by which the oppressed defend their
own interests and challenge the existing order and elite. His analytical instinct and
his formal reasoning were always both multidisciplinary and thoroughly historical,
indeed creating and practicing a new (world) historical mode of analysis, by which
the passage of topical ideas and policies is ultimately superseded by the persistence
of deeply embedded and continuing historical structures and forces. He advanced
and defended his ideas passionately, wittily, and with memorable turns of phrase,
most famously in his early formulation, “the development of underdevelopment,”
with which his name is probably most commonly associated even to the present
day. The evolution of his perspectives, along with the debates in which he strategi-
cally engaged, helped to bring about the emergence of new critical approaches to
the study of the world economy and world history as a whole.
Frank famously began his career by analyzing underdevelopment and depend-
ency in Latin America. Thereafter he progressed to address “world accumulation”
and the dynamics and structure of the world-system focused on the Atlantic. He
was led eventually to analyze capital accumulation in the very long term and
its relation to shifting patterns of hegemony and rivalry in the world economy
and world-system. In parallel, he conducted a critique of global financial and
monetary systems and assessed the continued and historical role of radical social
movements and the possibilities of historical resistance and transformation. His
intellectual interests and his wide-ranging style of scholarship were and remain
highly relevant to a host of social science disciplines, theoretical controversies,
and empirical research agendas. In his last period of work, he began more explic-
itly to be identified with the field of world or global history and was in regular
and serious contact and correspondence with leading scholars developing new
approaches and analysis throughout the world, with the aim of achieving a com-
prehensive revised account of global historical processes “beyond Eurocentrism”
and “beyond Development.” He was a pivotal figure and a pioneering intellect in
this historic endeavor, to which this book, and Gunder’s lasting legacy, are truly
dedicated. The remainder of this introductory chapter and several of the chapters
to follow explore the main lines and principal implications of his work.
In addition, this introduction and the following chapters recount the life experi-
ence of Andre Gunder Frank – the friendships, encounters, joys, and combats
The world economy in theory and practice 3
of life that were deeply entangled in his evolving analysis.1 Frank lived long
enough, and in enough different places, to be known by different names at suc-
ceeding stages of his life. “Andre” as a young person and later “Andres” in Latin
America, he also collected the middle name “Gunder” during his schooling – it
was a deformation of “Gunnar” in “Gunnar Haag,” an ironic comparison with the
Swedish Olympian expressed by his schoolmates in response to his shortcom-
ings as a runner. For those who came to know him in his later years – ourselves
included – it was “Gunder” that became his prénom. Gunder was a citizen of the
world but also of many places within the world. After a childhood in Europe, he
grew up and was educated in North America; completed economic dissertation
work on agriculture in Soviet Ukraine; moved to Latin America, where he started
his family and conducted years of work on topics in economics, sociology, and
anthropology; escaped to Europe with the establishment of the Pinochet dicta-
torship in Chile; left Europe with the death of his wife Marta Fuentes and his
retirement from the University of Amsterdam; moved to North America for years
of work on Asia in the world economy; married Alison Candela as he fought both
illness and analytical struggles; and ended his life in Europe.
Further, this chapter and the book as a whole document the shifting currents of
the world economy and the accompanying controversies, advances, and regres-
sions in the understanding of global patterns in the present and past. Overall, one
may identify a dramatic advance in understanding of the world economy over the
past half-century, achieved through the work of scholars who remain poised, as
the following chapters show, to expand and deepen that knowledge. Among the
recent achievements of studies on the global economy are a revised historical
analysis of Asia’s place in the world economy, growing historical detail on the
complex global flows of silver and its role in monetary systems, analyses of inter-
regional migrations of labor and types of labor regime, reconsiderations of the
significance of states and state policy in structuring and restructuring the world
economy, and studies of textiles and other commodities at the global level. In gen-
eral these studies document changing patterns of world trade, social change, the
expansion and implications of capitalist economic organization, and the interplay
of local economic systems and global networks. We can now assess the world
economy both as it has existed for the past five centuries and, from Frank’s per-
spective, for a much longer period of time. In the wake of the worldwide financial
and economic crisis from 2008 to the present, the significance and value of this
expanded historical and historicized understanding has come to be recognized
more widely. That is, the legacy of Gunder Frank’s analysis may be expected to
continue unfolding productively in the time to come.
Andre Gunder Frank and the world economy

In 1945 the world emerged from an extraordinary historical cycle of imperial
expansion, depression, war, and rebellion to enter a brief period of relative peace
and recovery – and in that year Andre Gunder Frank reached the age of sixteen,
a high-school student in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sixty years later, when he passed
away in Luxembourg, the world had been reconfigured in many ways. Decades
of conflict and transformation had left the planet with a greatly shifted balance
of forces, unprecedented economic inequality, a population that had expanded
nearly threefold, and a situation seemingly posed for yet another historical cycle
of crisis and transformation. In this section we trace – within four periods during
those sixty years – the interplay of contemporary transformations in the world
economy, the evolution and debates within economic scholarship and ideology,
and the analysis and influence of Gunder Frank at successive periods in his life.
Andreas Frank was born a German citizen in Berlin in 1929 – the year of the
great financial crash, between the two world wars. His birth in the cauldron of
global conflict started him off on a path as a peripatetic and cosmopolitan per-
sonality. From ages four to twelve he lived alternately in the French-, Italian-,
and German-speaking parts of Switzerland, attending boarding school, while his
parents fled from Nazi-controlled Germany to seek a new life in the West. He
entered the English-speaking world in 1941, arriving in Hollywood, California,
to join his father.2
From 1945 to 1960

From 1945 to 1960, global recovery from the war’s devastation led in contradic-
tory directions. The rapid split among great powers led internationally to the
threat of nuclear war and domestically (in many countries) to political paranoia.
At the same time, the principal change in the postwar world was the advance in
the conditions of common people. Workers everywhere demanded better condi-
tions at the end of the war, whether led by communists, business unionists, or
nationalist leaders. Political independence in Asia brought expanded programs
for health and education, as did the expansion of social insurance programs in
Europe and North America. For both these regions and for the expanding groups
of states labeled “socialist” and governed by communist parties, local and national
government delivered expanded social services. In 1945 the victorious powers
had sought to organize a new world order while energetic social movements
sought to expand and redefine the subordinate spaces that they inhabited. The
USSR, United States, and United Kingdom joined to form the United Nations;
the last two powers led in establishing the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank. The complex, overall result was Anglo-American hegemony, the
Marshall Plan, Asian independence, consolidation of a socialist bloc of nations,
the Cold War, Keynesian economic policies in the capitalist center, economic
growth (industrial growth in the most influential regions and agricultural growth
elsewhere), creation of a welfare state in regions where labor was well organ-
ized, expanded health and education expenditures in poor countries and colonies,
and colonial reform through forced investment. The economy grew for almost
twenty years in most parts of the world. Afro-Asian nations met in Bandung
in 1955 to form what became the nonaligned movement; within the next two
years the Soviet and Chinese communist parties had split. At the end of 1958
revolutionary forces seized power in Cuba, overthrowing a government beholden
to U.S.-dominated sugar interests.
Postwar academic debate over economic life paralleled the changing eco-
nomic conditions and conflicts. In the United States, Paul Samuelson (1947) led
in presenting an analytically sophisticated Keynesian analysis as a “neoclassi-
cal synthesis.” Talcott Parsons, who in prewar years had enunciated a complex
sociological analysis that emphasized elite initiative, expanded that approach in
Economy and Society (Parsons and Smelser 1956). This elite-focused analysis
became the groundwork for modernization theory, for which W. W. Rostow
(1953, 1960) became a leading spokesman among economists. It was in this era
that Milton Friedman (1953, 1962) turned from Keynesian to monetarist thinking,
emphasizing both analytical critique and social conservatism. In contrast, longer-
term views of the economy arose in postwar Europe, where Fernand Braudel’s
(1949) history of the Mediterranean traced regional dynamics through varying
temporal dynamics, and where Maurice Dobb (1946) explored the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. Braudel’s co-workers produced volumes on early-modern
seaborne empires appearing from 1955 to 1975, and the long-delayed publica-
tion of Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft came in 1956 (Weber 1956).
Formation of the United Nations provided a platform enabling Raúl Prebisch
(1956) and other Latin American economists, through the Economic Commission
for Latin America, to explore the causes for growth and stagnation in their region.
In the United States Paul Sweezy, editor of Monthly Review, challenged Dobb’s
view of the rise of capitalism as too focused on class and not enough on market
(Sweezy et al. 1954); his colleague Paul Baran published a 1957 volume arguing
that currently poor countries faced limits on their growth because of the existence
of rich countries. Overall, in this era of economic growth, academics focused on
growth theory (for developed countries) and on development theory (for the rest),
from various points of view.
When Gunder finished high school, he traveled and worked in various trades
for a brief time, and then took up undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College.
He went on to graduate study in economics at the University of Chicago. Gunder
maintained his independent mind and at one point was officially advised by the
Department of Economics to leave the university, as he said “because of my
unsuitability or our incompatibility.” While at Chicago he spent much time at
courses and seminars in anthropology, which, he later said, was a disciplinary
environment where he felt more comfortable than amongst the economists. In
the end he eventually completed his PhD at Chicago, writing on a comparison
of productivity growth between agriculture and industry in the Soviet Ukraine. It
was at Chicago, however, where he became initially associated with the field of
economic development, and where he developed his central insight that “social
change . . . seemed the key to both social and economic development.”
From 1960 to 1975

Changes in the world economy from 1960 to 1975, as in the previous fifteen years,
balanced developments among the common people against the strategies of great
powers and great corporations. Outstanding in this era were the achievement of
national independence for most of Africa, anti-racism movements in other parts
of the world, and the launching of women’s campaigns for social and economic
equality. Countries of the South continued to invest in health and education. The
claims of these social and national groups and the cost of meeting them cut into
corporate profit and brought a corporate search for responses that would enable
profits to rise again: the Keynesian policies that supported social welfare and con-
struction of infrastructure came under question. Still, postwar economic recovery
continued, as Japan became active in international trade. The new global influence
of ex-colonial countries became evident with the formation of the Group of 77
nations for trade negotiations within the United Nations.
Yet the limits of these developments elicited conflicts among groups through-
out the world. In the Vietnam War, a mix of anti-colonialism, Cold War conflict,
and class conflicts devastated Vietnam and brought division within the United
States. China became transfixed by the Cultural Revolution from 1967 to 1976;
the Revolutionary Offensive diverted Cuba for a shorter time. Independent gov-
ernments in ex-colonial countries fell into corruption and dictatorship; in 1968
critical social movements broke out in Eastern and Western Europe, in North
America, and elsewhere. A socialist government came to power in Chile in 1970
as a continuation of the social movements of 1968, but in 1973 it was overthrown
by its military, which had plotted with encouragement from the U.S. government.
In large measure these conflicts correlated with the slowing of economic growth
and increasingly bitter disputes over the shares of capital and labor. The 1944
Bretton Woods agreement on exchange rates fell apart from 1971 to 1973 and was
replaced by floating exchange rates. The wave of decolonization and revolution
through mass mobilization gave way to bitter struggles of national liberation wars,
as in Vietnam to 1975 and Angola thereafter. The October 1973 war, in which
Egypt and Syria sought to regain lands lost to Israel in 1967, led to worldwide
confrontation, kicking off spikes in oil prices, in interest rates, and in indebtedness
for many poor countries.
Academic debate on socio-economic affairs in the years from 1960 to 1975
included the full flowering of hegemonic thinking within the elite-focused mod-
ernization framework, the germination of a right-wing reaction against Keynesian
policies, and the emergence of New Left thinking. Despite the influence of
modernization theory in this era, its draconian contrast of traditional and modern
behavior broke down regularly under examination. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy
summarized their economic critique in Monopoly Capital (1966); it had global
implications but was largely national in its scope. Paul Bairoch (1967, 1971) and
Pierre Jalée (1965, 1968) gathered and estimated historical economic data, espe-
cially for colonial regions. The monetary shifts of the early 1970s added to the
social conflicts symbolized by 1968, and by the mid-1970s an important series of

works had appeared in print. Weber’s Economy and Society (first published in the
original German in 1956) appeared in English in 1968: its emphasis on processes
of bureaucratization occasioned widespread study of bureaucracy in society and
history. Samir Amin, who had earlier published studies on economic growth in
North Africa and West Africa, published a two-volume study of global economic
accumulation in 1970. Karl Marx’s Grundrisse appeared in English in 1973 and
occasioned expanded study of alienation. At the same time, Milton Friedman’s
Chilean students, who had worked with him since the 1950s, became well placed
to implement his neoliberal approach from 1973 into the 1980s. Immanuel
Wallerstein’s Modern World-System (1974), an analysis of the early-modern
emergence of capitalism (written in an atmosphere governed by the conflicts of
1968 in Paris and at Columbia University), provided an attractive paradigm for
analyzing the rise of capitalism in transnational and transimperial terms.3 In the
same year appeared the most prominent and controversial of the quantitative stud-
ies within the “new economic history” – Time on the Cross by Robert W. Fogel
and Stanley L. Engerman (1974) – emphasizing the profitability and viability of
slavery in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.
Andre Gunder Frank became an influential figure in the economic debates of
these years. After completing his PhD degree in 1957, he had moved among vari-
ous postdoctoral positions in the United States. Then in 1962, newly married to
Marta Fuentes, he relied on support from the anthropologist Eric Wolf to move to
a position in the recently established city and University of Brasilia in the era of
President João Goulart. There Gunder seems instantly to have become involved
in the discussions that made him a leading figure in the study of Latin American
economic dependence. With the military overthrow of Goulart in 1964, Gunder
moved to Mexico, Montreal, and then Chile, where he lived from 1968 to 1973.
This was Latin America in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, up to the rise and
subsequent destruction of the Allende government in Chile.
Gunder wrote vigorously from the moment of his arrival in Latin America, first
circulating articles in Spanish and Portuguese. From 1966 his works came out
in major publications. The books on what he came to call “dependence theory”
appeared in English as Capitalism and Underdevelopment (Frank 1967); Latin
America: Underdevelopment or Revolution (Frank 1969); and Lumpenbourgeoisie,
Lumpendevelopment (Frank 1972). New editions in additional languages contin-
ued to appear. His was a historical argument, emphasizing that underdevelopment
would end only if forcibly displaced by social movements – a sharp contrast to the
Rostovian vision of smooth growth led by a benevolent elite that was articulated
through the U.S.-sponsored Alliance for Progress. Gunder turned to historical
economic analysis, led partly by the internal logic of his vision of economic
dependence and partly by the sharpening global transformations.
His work was full of revolutionary enthusiasm, and his analysis gained wide
resonance and detailed commentary, especially throughout Latin America. He
was a theorist and propagandist for revolution in Latin America. This work had
initial success and lasting results: for a time Gunder rode the wave of the move-
ments for decolonization and social justice that characterized the continuing
economic growth through the 1960s. He showed the historical place of Latin
America in the global economy, and at the same time demonstrated the global
connections in socio-economic relations. This work added an essential element
to revealing the flaws in the oversimplified, essentialized vision of modernization
theory. Further consideration of his initial economic observations revealed the
value of extending the theory of dependence to issues in society, politics, and
culture.4 In articulating this outlook, Gunder linked intellectuals and activists in
social movements throughout Latin America with each other and with intellectu-
als in North America and Europe. Most of these developments took place in the
postwar era of growth that continued to the late 1960s. But the excitement of
articulating the connected nature of the world economy and the connected nature
of Latin America’s history was soon followed by difficult times: the resurgence
of contradictions among Latin Americans and the effects of retaliation from the
forces of capital.
From 1975 to 1990

In the world economy from 1975 to 1990, difficult times showed up on every
front; contradictions became evident in the program of every collective contender
for global social influence. The World Economic Forum, meeting in Switzerland,
took form by stages as a meeting of major corporate interests to discuss their
common problems. The ideology that became known as neoliberalism took shape
from a mix of new and old ideas: among its policy planks were deregulation of
private economic activities and privatization of government economic activities.
Corruption arose in many post-independence states, as in other states and busi-
ness firms. As fluctuations in money supplies and interest rates brought expanded
national debts, international financial institutions imposed “structural adjustment”
programs on many ex-colonial countries to ensure that they would place payment
of international debt obligations ahead of domestic economic needs. Meanwhile,
the needs of industry and government combined with the long-term success of
education and health programs to bring forth growing numbers of professionals.
These professionals became a new force in the social equation and a debate arose
as to whether they constituted a “new class.” The postwar history of social invest-
ments in health and literacy around the world was bearing fruit in rich countries and
poor; economic investment in Asia, much of it via “state-led” or “developmental”
means, brought the so-called “Asian Tigers” into prominence. Social movements
occasionally displaced unrepresentative rulers, as with the 1979 overthrow of the
Shah in Iran and the 1986 displacement of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines
through “People Power.” On the other hand, the expanded exploitation and
transformation of natural resources brought severe environmental and ecological
changes and dangers to the fore. Everywhere, the global economic transitions
made themselves felt through declining growth, monetary disarray, and the great
prominence of the petroleum industry. Costs of social and educational programs

were rising, causing alarm in the circles that became the neoliberals. Margaret
Thatcher came to power in Britain in 1979; Ronald Reagan come to power in
the United States in 1981: both highlighted their links to Milton Friedman and
Friedrich von Hayek and their calls for reduction in government. Deregulation
began moving ahead, industry by industry.
Academic debate on socio-economic affairs on the global left became less
influential as the right gained in intellectual, cultural, and political strength. In
a symbolic statement for the age, Friedrich von Hayek received the 1974 Nobel
prize in economic science (but shared it with Gunnar Myrdal); in 1976 the same
prize went to Milton Friedman. Friedman retired in 1977, took up an appoint-
ment at the Hoover Institution in California, and devoted over fifteen years to an
influential campaign for monetarist economics, privatization of government func-
tions (especially social insurance), and deregulation of private firms. The World
Bank and International Monetary Fund, after encouraging ex-colonial countries
to assume large debts then pressing them to repay at high interest rates, con-
firmed this approach with the 1981 Berg Report on Africa and the formalization
of “structural adjustment” policies.
For scholars interested in the world as a system, growing interest in the economic
history of regions outside the North Atlantic brought efforts at the application and
generalization of Marx’s notion of “mode of production,” combining the forces of
production with the social and technical relations of production in a given context.
Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst published an influential 1975 volume, Pre-capitalist
Modes of Production; Samir Amin, among others, adopted a similar framework in
his analyses of economic history and theory published in 1973. In another reflec-
tion of growing historical interest on the left, the articles from the Dobb–Sweezy
controversy on the origins of capitalism were republished under the editorship of
Rodney Hilton (Sweezy et al. 1976). Wallerstein’s vision of the modern world-
system gained wide attention: the Fernand Braudel Center and its journal, Review,
applied and debated the framework broadly.5
Out of the 1970s – a moment of global crisis in economy and society – devel-
oped the second great phase of Gunder’s work: global analysis of the economy,
focusing on cyclical change, at first historical and then contemporary.6 In turn-
ing to historical studies of the global economy, he published his 1978 book,
World Accumulation, 1492–1789, an empirical review of cyclical economic
expansion and decline drawn from secondary works but organized into a global
framework. It was followed in the next year by the more interpretive Dependent
Accumulation and Underdevelopment (1979b), based on essays he had written in
the years up to 1973. The overall framework of the two works emphasized three
periods of capital accumulation: mercantilist (1500–1700), industrial capitalist
(1770–1870), and imperialist (1870–1930). In these studies, Gunder expressed
little interest in analyzing through the device of modes of production: he later
argued that such an approach undermined recognition of global economic links.7
Immediately after these works, Gunder undertook substantial research on the
unfolding contemporary crisis and published his results in two books: Crisis in
the World Economy (1980) and Crisis in the Third World (1981a). Most of this
work was completed while he was at various positions in Germany (1973–1978)
and at the University of East Anglia (1978–1983). Gunder’s big studies on long-
term accumulation and on crisis in the 1970s, rather than gaining wide attention,
remained on library shelves as mute monuments to his energy.
From 1983 he moved to the University of Amsterdam where he remained
until his retirement in 1993. In Reflections (1981b) and especially Critique and
Anti-critique (1984), he reviewed the academic and political debates and defeats
of the previous decade.8 In an appendix to the latter volume he presented a
“Requiem for a Reader,” the table of contents for a three-volume reader of clas-
sical essays relevant to global political economy on which he had worked for
years, but which publishers ultimately declined to bring out. In this era one sees
increasing evidence of the sharp edge to Gunder’s arguments that remained in his
later years – especially as expressed in his disputes with the communist parties
of Latin America, which he found to be too reluctant to break with the power
structure. At the same time, one sees a growth in his readiness to acknowledge
his own errors and shift his perspective from that in earlier work. Gunder bucked
ideological trends in that era of rising neoliberalism. He expressed agony over the
losses of social movements, he turned back to history to explore the antecedents
and long-term patterns of economic change, and he focused on immediate and
short-term change. This steady reformulation led Gunder to open up, toward the
end of the 1980s, new interests in cross-disciplinary, historically long-term, and
geographically wide-ranging studies. That is, he began to ask himself the question
of whether the world-system might go back in history before 1600 or even before
“1492.”
Since 1989
World events from 1989 brought a resurgence of social and intellectual contes-
tation. From 1989 social movements arose in a wave of extraordinary size and
persistence that brought down many governments and challenged others. Such
movements, led especially by professionals and students and workers, brought the
collapse of European communist regimes, the fall of white-led regimes in south-
ern Africa, and expanding claims for democracy in Africa, Latin America, and
Asia. In the midst of this social upheaval, Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait, in
an apparent attempt to incorporate it into Iraq, enabled the United States govern-
ment to assemble a broad coalition and exercise its military might to expand its
control of oil resources. In a further consequence of global turmoil, the USSR
collapsed in 1991 and was rapidly though chaotically absorbed into the capitalist
world. The resulting end of the Cold War brought a continued expansion and con-
centration of military strength in the hands of the United States, yet the exercise
of U.S. military power in Iraq in 1991 (and again from 2003) was ambiguous in
its impact. Under these circumstances, formation of the European Union in 1993
led within a decade to its expansion to a continental scale. Japan, after decades
of growth, entered economic stagnation; in contrast, the Chinese state recovered
from its 1989 social confrontation and achieved accelerating economic growth,
followed by the substantial growth of India, Brazil, and other countries of the
South. Dramatic expansion of computer production and geographic shifts in the
factory production of electronic and other consumer goods underlay the labeling
of this era as that of “globalization.” Neoliberal influences in the finance industry
opened stock markets worldwide. Neoliberals reached their peak power at the end
of the twentieth century, achieving near-complete deregulation of financial firms.
In response, Keynesian economists spoke up again to debate with the neoliber-
als on matters of policy. On the left and after a delay, the World Social Forum
took form in 2000 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in effect as an alternative to the World
Economic Forum. Ironically, the economic inequality within nations and among
nations had grown to an unprecedented level in the very era in which racism and
colonial subjugation were effectively discredited and in which notions of democ-
racy came to be espoused universally. The September 11, 2001 destruction of the
New York World Trade Center by passenger aircraft hijacked by al-Qaida opera-
tives heightened tensions and hatreds, and led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As
the wars died down, the problems of economic, financial, and monetary instability
arose again for attention, and were highlighted especially by a near-meltdown of
global financial markets in late 2008.
Scholars concerned with the global economy concentrated, in the 1990s, on
historical questions of the long-term continuity of the economic system, and
only gradually turned back to contemporary issues. In a 1989 volume that at
once adopted and contested the world-system framework, Janet Abu-Lughod’s
Before European Hegemony portrayed a thirteenth-century world-system
centered in the Middle East. Meanwhile, for those thinking in systemic terms
about contemporary times, interest arose in the study of empires and imperial-
ism. The critique of Eurocentrism in historical interpretation became a subject of
debate from 1990, within economics, sociology, and history. An interdisciplinary
World-Historical Systems Theory Group formed in 1989 within the International
Studies Association.9 World history took shape as an organized field of study, and
began to include the world economy within its purview.10 Historical studies of the
environment expanded, particularly as recurring environmental crises revealed
their links to the global economy. Within economic history, interest returned to
large-scale analysis: Jeffrey Williamson (1997) led in expanding microeconomic
analysis of international trade and migration, while Angus Maddison (1995)
prepared estimates of historical statistics on nations and regions worldwide,
working steadily further back in time.11 Various regional economic-historical
studies showed themselves to have global implications: outstanding among them
were The Great Divergence, a study by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) comparing the
eighteenth-century economies of regions of China and Europe, and the work of
Kaoru Sugihara and Osamu Saito documenting Japanese growth and making the
case for a labor-intensive path to industrialization (Sugihara 2005). Wrapping up
this phase of analysis, Patrick O’Brien led the Global Economic History Network
(GEHN; n.d.), a worldwide set of seminars from 2005 through 2007.
As the dramatic social movements of 1989 unfolded, Gunder moved quickly to
analyze these historic uprisings in a volume co-edited with Samir Amin, Giovanni
Arrighi, and Immanuel Wallerstein (1990). In these same circumstances, the third
major stage in Gunder’s career opened up. In this era he came to see the world eco-
nomic system as having had an existence extending far back in time. Based on this
revised framework, he then moved to articulate a new and Asian-centered inter-
pretation of the world economy from 1500 to 1800, and turned finally to seeking
out the outlines of the great restructuring of the world economy in the nineteenth
century. Inspired in part by Abu-Lughod, Gunder began envisioning a long-term
“world system” in the period before 1600, in work with international political
economist and East Asianist Barry Gills.12 The two met and began collaborating in
the spring of 1989, and produced a series of jointly authored articles and chapters
from 1989 to 1992, beginning with work on “The Cumulation of Accumulation,”
in which they challenged the distinctiveness of modern capitalism, arguing that
accumulation of capital could be shown to be a long-term historical practice
(Gills and Frank 1990).13 This work expanded Gunder’s contacts with scholars in
a wide range of disciplines and reaffirmed his early vision of a multidisciplinary
social science: in 1990 he published an argument for a 5,000-year world system in
Review; in 1991 he wrote a “Plea for World System History” in an early issue of
the Journal of World History; and in 1992 he published The Centrality of Central
Asia, highlighting the silk roads.14 The principal summary of the Frank–Gills
collaboration was a co-edited 1993 volume, The World System: Five Hundred
Years or Five Thousand? (Frank and Gills 1993a). This collection was an explicit
attempt to show continuity in accumulation and systemic behavior over the long
term. In the extensive introduction to the volume, Frank and Gills (1993b) laid
out a problematic for the exploration of the world economy across a wide range
of time, space, and topical and disciplinary spaces, with a list of disciplines and
approaches relevant to its study.15 The volume included debate with critics of the
new perspective, notably Wallerstein and Amin.
Gunder’s life then underwent some big changes: Marta died in 1993 after suf-
fering a long illness; Gunder, who had also suffered serious illnesses, was her
primary care provider in her last months. In the same year Gunder had to retire
from the University of Amsterdam at age 65.16 Gunder moved to the United States
and lived there and in Canada from 1994 to 2003. Yet even as his life took new
directions, Gunder held steady on historical study of the world economy. On
arriving in the United States he struck up regular connections with world histori-
ans, becoming a research associate of the world history program at Northeastern
University from 1995; there he mentored several graduate students and served on
the dissertation committee of one of them, Jeffrey Sommers. Also in 1995 Gunder
married sociologist Nancy Howell, whom he had known many years earlier, and
moved to join her in Toronto; within three years the relationship had broken up
leading to a difficult divorce. During these years Gunder wrote ReOrient: Global
Economy in the Asian Age (Frank 1998). With a concentration on the era from
1600 to 1800, Gunder focused his geographical vision of the world economy on
the central role of Asia. Working in association with specialists on the global silver
trade and on Asian economies, Gunder developed an argument for continued
Asian economic leadership in the world economy through the eighteenth century
and on monetary flows as both the cause and reflection of growth and transforma-
tion in the global economy.17 The book gained wide attention, broad debate from
many perspectives, and a 1999 prize from the World History Association.18 The
new audience of world historians remained close to his work.
Gunder moved to a visiting position at Florida International University in 1999
and it was then that he met Alison Candela, the English-born nurse who became
his cheerful companion from that time forth. They went to Nebraska for a year,
then to Boston. Gunder and Alison married in 2003 and Gunder plunged – to the
degree that fluctuating health allowed him – into investigation of the nineteenth-
century sequel to ReOrient, asking when and how the Great Divergence came
about. He also wrote critiques of economic and military policies of U.S. President
George W. Bush and predicted the collapse of the U.S.-led monetary and financial
system as China’s growth continued. Gunder worked on each of these topics right
up to the moment of his death.
From the vantage point of 2010, we can say that understanding of the world
economy has advanced greatly since 1945. Although there exist plenty of business
practitioners and academic economists who think there is no need to look back
beyond the past ten years and no need to gaze more broadly than toward the near-
est stock exchange, there has developed a clear consensus among well-informed
scholars on the outlines of the world economy. Geographically it includes the
whole world, virtually without exception. Temporally it goes back centuries and
perhaps millennia. It includes the full range of economic issues at micro and
macro levels, including money and finance, and not just international trade. It is
a global system in which influences reverberate throughout its extent; the dynam-
ics of social class and the recognition of social discrimination are aspects of the
global economy; and it is recognized that long-term factors are significant in
the functioning of the world economic system. These long-term factors include
variations in capital stock, cycles in monetary behavior, the social organization
of production and income distribution, the nature of economic and governmental
institutions, technological change, changes in social values, and the interplay of
the economy and the natural environment. Of these factors, capital accumulation
seemed even more important to analysts in 2005 than it had in 1945, as it had
become possible to create assets out of financial manipulations alone and use
them to buy up material properties. Nevertheless, if the world economy is far
better understood today than six decades ago, recent developments have shown
that a great deal remains unknown. The extent, the complexity, and the risks of
the economy had been compounded over time. The potential for conflict and
catastrophe is now understood to incorporate ecological, financial, and social
catastrophe.
How do we evaluate the contributions of Gunder Frank to the study of the

world economy? Many voices could be raised in answer to this question, and
many answers are possible. We have chosen to identify five achievements in his
scholarship. Gunder’s first success was in the dual contribution of clarifying the
historical and systemic nature of Latin American underdevelopment and provid-
ing a convincing example of global interaction in the world economic system.
His notion of historical system stimulated wide discussion in Latin American
circles and strengthened the position of Latin American scholars in worldwide
economic debates; his attention to global interaction was a crucial conceptual
step beyond national essentialism in economic thinking. Second, he undertook
repeated explorations of economic accumulation, arguing that it is a recurring and
indeed consistent human pattern. The implication of his argument, articulated in
the 1970s and then in the 1990s, is neither that “capitalism” began 5,000 years
ago (though “capital” existed over this period and so did “capital accumula-
tion”), nor that “capitalism” does not exist, but rather that a coherent definition of
“capitalism” as a modern economic order must be more specific than the focus on
“ceaseless accumulation” of capital. Third, Gunder focused considerable energy
on identifying the early 1970s as a major cyclical shift, and seems to have been
correct in significant regard. His work is thus a significant contribution to prob-
lematizing cycles of various types in the world economy. Fourth, in ReOrient he
was especially influential in conveying the argument that Asian economies were
the most productive elements of the global economy from the fifteenth century
through the eighteenth century, and in drawing attention to the role of silver in
creating the first global currency. He assembled this argument from the research
of many colleagues: here it was his work as synthesizer of a global economic
argument that was most effective. Fifth and finally, Gunder’s multidisciplinary
approach provides a lesson of fundamental importance for continuing studies of
the global economy. At each stage of his career, he has demonstrated the value of
social science disciplines in providing varying perspectives and new documents.
No coherent body of study, no single theory encompasses the world economy.
But the interplay among regional scholars working across time periods, across
fields of economic and social study, has grown far tighter. The range of issues
involved in grappling with the world economy surely exceeds the capability of
any single individual: it requires collaborative work. But Gunder was at his best
in highlighting the number of different types of issues and types of disciplinary
background necessary to address them.
The 2008 Pittsburgh Conference

The passing of Andre Gunder Frank in 2005, after a long struggle against cancer,
brought widespread reflection on his life and legacy, and several meetings at
which scholars and friends gave presentations in his memory. Yet there remained
an interest in a larger-scale academic memorial, in response to which the authors
of this introduction found a way to propose a conference. With the support of
a Global Academic Partnership grant from the Global Studies Program at the
University of Pittsburgh, and also with the support of the fledgling World History
Center at the same university, it was possible to bring practical realization to our
joint proposal of an intercontinental meeting gathering many of the main figures
in critical socio-economic studies. From April 11 to 13, 2008, most of a hundred
scholars, students, and friends came together at the David Lawrence Conference
Center on the Pitt campus, and for over two days discussed and debated major
questions in critical socio-economic studies, with attention to the legacy of Andre
Gunder Frank. The call for papers requested proposals in each of six themes that
had characterized Frank’s work: underdevelopment and dependency in Latin
America; world accumulation and world system; 5,000-year world system; East
Asia in the world economy; social movements; and contemporary political and
economic analysis. Nearly 100 proposals arrived; sixty-five presentations were
made, several of them collaborative, in the course of the conference.
A conference committee planned and organized from start to finish.19 The
committee’s first objective was to arrange for the participation of major speakers,
whose participation would be announced with the call for papers, thus confirming
for potential participants that the conference would bring high-level debate on the
issues and a large-scale commemoration of Frank’s life and work. Fortunately,
almost all of those invited as major speakers were able to participate. Featured
speakers were Giovanni Arrighi, John Beverley, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Robert
Denemark, Barry K. Gills, Thomas D. Hall, Kenneth Pomeranz, Aníbal Quijano,
Kaoru Sugihara, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Samir Amin was unable to come to
the United States from Senegal, but his work was cited frequently by those in
attendance. Alison Candela, the widow of Gunder Frank, who kept him going
through devoted care and through her lively good humor, was an honored guest
at the conference and gave a moving set of remarks on Gunder, his work, and the
evident continuation of studies pursuing his lead.
Participants in the conference, in addition to the main figures just mentioned,
included scholars from all over the world. The conference website, including
biographies and abstracts for each participant as well as the conference program,
confirms the variety of origins and perspectives of the participants.20 Their attend-
ance showed that it is increasingly possible to sustain a worldwide dialogue on
issues in the global economy. Participating scholars came from multiple disci-
plines, at all ages and all stages of their careers, in particular, graduate students
who are opening up the next stage of research and debate. Twenty presentations
by graduate students were included on the program, although not all were able to
attend the conference. Four papers by graduate students were selected for inclu-
sion in this volume.21 The final conference plenary session reviewed and discussed
the work of graduate students, in an attempt to draw out of their work a sense of
the directions in which critical socio-economic studies are headed.
Some of the major presentations at the conference do not appear in this volume.
Giovanni Arrighi gave a very lively presentation on “The Regional Foundations
of Development Theories,” but learned immediately after the conference of his
serious illness and was unable to complete a publication version; he died on June
8, 2009. Immanuel Wallerstein’s presentation on “A Left Agenda for the Next 25
Years” was published soon after the conference in Monthly Review (2008). Kaoru
Sugihara and Kenneth Pomeranz, whose presentations, along with that of Giovanni
Arrighi, gave special attention to East Asian economic change, were unable for
personal reasons to submit publications. On the other hand Samir Amin, who was
unable to attend the conference and was greatly missed, was able to provide a
valuable contribution to this volume on the current global economic crisis.
Contributions in this volume

The contributions to this volume address a wide range of space and time. One
study is situated in migration and economic struggle at the present moment; four
more center on the era since the Second World War; three focus on the nineteenth
century; two concern themselves with the early modern period; and one ranges
over several millennia. In regional focus, two studies center on Asian nations;
four more focus more broadly on Asia and the Indian Ocean; three address Latin
America; and three are global in scope. Although none of the chapters focuses
explicitly on Western Europe or the United States, details of the economies and
economic relations of these regions appear in most of the studies.
Aside from this introduction, the chapters to follow are presented in three parts.
The first part, “Andre Gunder Frank’s Critical Vision,” focuses tightly on the
work of Gunder himself. Albert Bergesen’s presentation on “Frankian triangles”
opened the conference and provided a broad and instructive view of an essential
point in Frank’s thinking; that is, Frank’s attention to sets of triangular relations
added a dimension to his understanding of regional interactions in commerce and
indeed to social inter-relations generally. Robert Denemark follows with a com-
mentary on Frank’s unfinished manuscript, ReOrient the Nineteenth Century. The
chapter is not a summary of the book to come but a set of reflections of the editor
on the problems of selecting from a complex set of notes for publication. Further,
the chapter relates Denemark’s interactions with Frank and with those who have
commented on the manuscript in preparation, as a sort of gathering of an old clan
for one more set of interpretive debates. The third chapter in this section, unique
in a different fashion, is an edited and slightly updated version of an unpublished
1994 article by Barry Gills and Andre Gunder Frank. Publication of this prescient
piece helps to convey how the team of Gills and Frank moved from their previous
study of the 5,000-year world system to a focus on silver and Asian leadership in
the early-modern world economy. In this version, Gills adds updated comments
to the original co-authored text.
The second part, including four chapters, traces the continuing reflections on
a range of issues in critical socio-economic studies. Samir Amin offers his per-
spective on the current economic crisis. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas
Hall, who have authored numerous studies on long-term and large-scale analysis,
provide an overview of their current understanding of evolution and shifting
hegemonies in economic and political systems. This sociological analysis, while

giving attention to the uniqueness of current policy dilemmas, emphasizes the
periodic recurrence of major transformations in the context of overall growth in the
scale of human organization. Aníbal Quijano, addressing Latin American issues
from a sociological standpoint, traces the evolution of the notion of “coloniality
of power” out of inspiration from dependency theory. John Beverley, writing from
a position in cultural and literary studies, emphasizes that dependency theory and
critical socio-economic studies have brought important resonances in cultural
studies, particularly in Latin American assessments of regional culture in the
global context. Jeffrey Sommers and Boris Kagarlitsky collaborate to apply the
analysis of Kondratieff waves, including their social dimensions, to the period
since 1970.
The concluding part highlights the multidisciplinary analyses in new scholar-
ship on political economy. Each of the authors, while formally based in a single
discipline, draws on a wide range of method and theory to provide clear yet
nuanced analyses. Jan-Frederik Abbeloos centers on the world copper market
of “the long twentieth century,” tracing its spatial transformation. Kevan Harris
presents a national study of Iran, identifying a logic in Iranian economic policy
over several decades. In another national study, Hae-Yung Song argues that the
analytical dichotomy between state-directed and market-directed policies for
national development fails to explain the nature of the South Korean success of
recent decades. Carylanna Taylor, an anthropologist, reports on field study of emi-
gration both in a Honduran region of departure and in North American regions
of settlement, contrasting the short-run benefits of overseas remittances with the
longer-term degradation of national resources in the homeland that result from
this economic reorganization. Altogether, these studies open new ground yet may
remind readers of Gunder’s early and continuing study of commodity histories,
state policy in economic growth, and anthropological study in Latin American
problems of community development.
Directions in critical analyses of the world economy

We cannot resist commenting speculatively on how Gunder might have responded
to the present ongoing global crisis – not least with a wise and humorous “I told
you so”; that he would have been justified in pronouncing about all that has hap-
pened – and why. We also believe that Gunder would have wanted to see further
development in the fields of global history and world history, in part through a
decisive break from Eurocentrism and a parallel break from social theories of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries derived from Eurocentric premises.
The wide-ranging coverage and debate, both in the conference and in this col-
lection of major papers from the conference, may appear from a certain angle to
be academic eclecticism. Yet there are numerous threads that can readily be drawn
from virtually any one of these chapters to each of the others. Critical socio-
economic studies have evolved since the mid-twentieth century from studies of
monolithic national units in collision to a multi-leveled analysis of factors within

nations, factors at continental levels, and patterns of the entire global system.
The chapters in this book address monetary issues, state policy and action, and
the changes in social structures. The current direction of work in this broad field
is best seen as the posing of many of the same questions at varying temporal and
spatial scales. The heritage of this work, and the legacy of Andre Gunder Frank in
particular, is that it provides us with secure protection against the uncritical reflex
of treating the latest global development as a completely new phase.
We now face a serious period of economic dislocation, with effects at every
level and in every region. The continuing tradition of critical socio-economic stud-
ies – ranging widely across regions, time periods, and theoretical frameworks – is
now far better placed to assist in analysis of the nature of global socio-economic
change than it was when Andre Gunder Frank first entered this field of study.
Although most of Gunder’s scholarship focused on the past, he was deeply inter-
ested in the present and the future. To punctuate that point it is relevant to conclude
this introduction by invoking his 2005 essay, circulated online, predicting a fiscal
and monetary crisis based on the surplus of U.S. Treasury bonds held in China
and elsewhere outside the United States. Gunder did not anticipate precisely the
mechanism or the timing of the crisis that unfolded from an overheated hous-
ing market, but he skillfully used his sense of historical dynamics in economic
systems to lay out a global scenario of economic crisis that confirms the type of
critical historical socio-economic studies that characterizes his life’s work and his
lasting legacy in the social sciences.
Notes
1 We are tempted to recount many of our personal experiences with Gunder and personal
details of his colorful life. We do in fact tell some of these stories. Yet we thought it
best to restrain ourselves, knowing that many other people – hundreds, at least – had
personal encounters with Gunder of equal interest and importance.
2 His parents had already separated, his mother becoming a UN translator, living
in upstate New York. His father was a renowned humanist and novelist in prewar
Germany, a close friend of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, who like other German intel-
lectuals had escaped Nazi control to write scripts for the American movie business
and socialize with the likes of Greta Garbo, another family friend of the time. So
Gunder received a very early introduction to the limelight and the life of the rich and
famous.
3 Subsequent volumes were published; see Wallerstein (1980, 1989). On the contempo-
rary situation in which Wallerstein began this work, see Wallerstein and Starr (1971).
4 See Chapter 8 in this volume, by John Beverley, for development of this theme.
5 Other influential publications of that moment were Anderson (1974a,b) and Taylor
(1979). The Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems,
and Civilizations was established at Binghamton University in 1976, under the leader-
ship of Immanuel Wallerstein.
6 He did continue his work within the dependence framework, publishing his book on
early colonial Mexican agriculture in Spanish in 1976. The English version appeared
as Mexican Agriculture 1521–1630: Transformation of the Mode of Production
(Frank 1979a).
7 He used the term “modes of production” in the 1970s, including in titles, but did not
carry out specific analysis within the framework of modes of production. His 1979
edition of Mexican Agriculture 1521–1630 has as its subtitle “Transformation of the
Mode of Production,” but his analysis there is in terms of the economic system as a
whole rather than emphasizing more specific modes of production (p. 79). Chapter
6 of Dependent Accumulation is entitled “Imperialism and the Transformation of
Modes of Production in Asia, Africa and Latin America, 1870–1930.”
8 Reflections consists of lectures presented from 1972 to 1979. In Critique and
Anti-Critique see his critique of the “Chicago Boys,” who came from the Catholic
University of Chile and who worked in Chicago, especially with Arnold Harberger
but also with Milton Friedman. See the two “Open Letters” on Chile and “economic
genocide,” written to Arnold Harberger (1974) and Milton Friedman (1976); Gunder
parallels the “Chicago Boys” with the “Berkeley Mafia” who took over the economic
reins in Indonesia after the Suharto coup of 1965 (p. 128).
9 The World-Historical Systems Theory Group is a subsection of the International
Political Economy Section of the International Studies Association. It was co-
founded in 1989 by Barry Gills and David Wilkinson, but joined immediately by
Frank, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Thomas Hall, Jonathan Friedman, George Modelski,
William R. Thompson, and Robert Denemark, among others. It has organized a
large number of panels and sessions since its inception and its work continues to
the present. Several collections and edited volumes showcase work by members and
related scholars from many disciplines, for example World System History: The Social
Science of Long-Term Change (Denemark et al. 2000). This volume contains papers
from a major international conference held by the World-Historical Systems Theory
Group at the University of Lund several years earlier.
10 The Journal of World History began publication in 1990, edited by Jerry H. Bentley.
11 Maddison’s estimates drew on the earlier statistical compilations of B. R. Mitchell
(1975, 1982).
12 From this time a new convention become clear: the hyphenated term “world-system,”
as used by Immanuel Wallerstein, came to be restricted to “the modern world-system”
arising in capitalist early-modern Europe; the unhyphenated “world system” came to
apply to more general applications of the notion of world system, sometimes applied
to several millennia of history.
13 An expanded version was published in 1991 and an additional version in 1993. See
also Gills and Frank (1992) and Frank and Gills (1992).
14 Frank and Gills were already aware of the work of Christopher Chase-Dunn and
Thomas Hall, and indeed regarded them as being closest to their own new research
agenda. See also Frank (1993).
15 In order, the categories explored are world system theory, Eurocentrism and its
alternatives, world historiography, civilizationism, archaeology, classicism in ancient
history, medievalism, from early modern to modern history, economic history,
(macro) historical sociology, political geography, international relations and interna-
tional political economy, development studies, ecology, anthropology, ethnic and race
relations/studies, and gender relations.
16 His formal retirement and a party to honour the occasion took place at Barry and
Dong-Sook Gills’ home in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, where Gunder lived for
two months in February–March 1994, working with Gills on the next phase of the
project to assess “The Modern World System Under Asian Hegemony: The Silver
Standard World Economy 1450–1750” (1994, 2011), which appears in this edited
collection (Chapter 4).
17 See also Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank (1994, 2011) “The Modern World
System Under Asian Hegemony: The Silver Standard World Economy 1450–1750,”
Chapter 4 of this volume.
18 Gunder was aware that his global economic analysis included few connections with
the African continent. Wallerstein, Amin, and Arrighi too found it difficult to articulate
African roles in the world economy, although they had each conducted their initial
studies on African topics.
19 Co-chairs were Patrick Manning and Barry Gills (the latter working by e-mail from
Newcastle in England). Other committee members were Thomas Rawski (Department
of Economics), John Beverley (Department of Hispanic Languages), and Salvatore
Babones (Department of Sociology), all of the University of Pittsburgh, and Robert
Fagley, a doctoral student in French Language and Literature at Pitt who served as the
conference staff person and as a member of the committee.
20 http://www.worldhistorynetwork.org/agfrank-details.php.
21 Those are the chapters by Abbeloos, Harris, Song, and Taylor.
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Part I
Andre Gunder Frank’s
critical vision
2
Frankian triangles
Albert J. Bergesen
I think it is fair to say that Andre Gunder Frank rethought social science three
times. We are more familiar with the first two. I wish to discuss the third. Rethink
One: Development at the edges of the world economy was not because of internal
class (Marx) or value (Weber) factors, but because of lateral linkages to the devel-
oped parts of the world. The development of underdevelopment idea. Rethink
Two: Global development didn’t start in Europe and spread to Asia, but had been
in China for centuries up till roughly 1850 and now was going back there again.
World history, then, was better conceived as cycles or pulsations than as unilin-
ear development and underdevelopment. The ReOrient the world economy idea.
Rethink Three: The systemness of a world system lies in its multilateral trade
and balance of payments triangles (or sets of triangles, or even more complex
structures). I call these Frankian triangles.1
Frankian triangles
Frank was, I think, on the verge of turning over yet another theoretical apple cart.
The procedure is much the same as his earlier paradigm challenges by inverting
the received direction of causal reasoning: In essence underdevelopment wasn’t
lagging behind but was produced by the very development of others, and the rise
of the West was preceded by the rise of Asia. This time he suggests it isn’t national
development in production that leads to advantages in trade, but trade triangles
that produce the wealth and poverty of nations. Concretely he is concerned with
the various trade and balance of payment triangles of the nineteenth-century world
economy and the importance of being at the apex of two or more such triangles, as
was the case with Britain. “The long existing ‘triangular trade’ – [was] in reality
itself already composed of several sets of intersecting triangles – [and] was joined
by the China–India–Britain opium based triangle at the end of the eighteenth
26 Albert J. Bergesen
Britain
e
merchandise trad
North
payments
America NEW
OPIUM
TRIANGLE
OLD merchandise trad
e:
de
TRIANGLE tea + silk
tra
ade
se
TRADES
di
an
e tr
merchandis
ch
ndis
er
e:
merchandiseintrad
a
cotton + gra
rch
+ payments
me
e trade
China
ent
s e:
me m trad
slav rchand pay ise n
and tto
es ise + ver rch co
trad
e: sil me ium +
Caribbean op
Africa India
Figure 2.1 Frankian triangles.
century, [and] . . . soon complemented by a China–United States–Britain triangle”

(Frank 2001: 3) (Figure 2.1).
Britain, he notes, occupied a position in both of these two triangles, and it had
important economic consequences.
Britain was the one that was at an angle of each of the following ‘regional’
triangles: the infamous opium based China–India–Britain, the variously
already interlinked Atlantic ‘triangular trade’ ones, the Britain–Continental
Europe–Americas ones, the incipient United States–China–Britain one, etc.
(Frank 2001: 2)
Further such a position involves the “place and role of . . . ‘national’ economies
. . . in the increasingly multilateral . . . world economic system” (Frank 2001: 16),
which means, then, that “location, location, location in an expanding and deepen-
ing multilateral world system contributed to, if not determined, the absolute and
relative wealth and poverty of nations” (Frank 2001: 15).
Here then is Frank’s theoretical provocation: If location in the apex of a number
of trade/payment triangles generated the wealth of the nation that was hegemonic
within the nineteenth-century world-system, does that not suggest that positions
in such Frankian triangles might be the determinant of the wealth of nations in
general? And are positions within triangles also determinative of hegemony as
well, which has traditionally been conceived of as global productive advantage,
again usually thought to be a function of advantageous domestic class relations.
But he seems to be suggesting that class structures, which are largely societal,
are embedded and determined by overlapping Frankian triangles of trade, which
suggests that such exchange relations precede and determine production relations.
And doesn’t that turn received causal thinking on its head? The answer, I think,
Frankian triangles 27
is yes; that is, if the implications of Frank’s analysis are taken seriously. Are we,
though, just saying that Adam Smith trumps Karl Marx. I don’t think so, for what
Frank implies is more a merger or synthesis of important elements in both the
Smithian and the Marxian sense of economic relations to yield a new conception
of the essence of the economic structures that comprise the global economy.
Such a synthesis involves a radical rethinking of what is meant by exchange
and production, that is, trade and class relations. First, contra Smith, trade rela-
tions need not be conceived only as exchange relations, and, contra Marx, class
relations are not the only form of an economic power relation. What has happened
in received theory is that the natural practice of trade has been fused with the
Smithian notion of exchange, which seems on the surface obvious enough. But the
concept of exchange carries with it the assumption of more participant acquies-
cence (the free choice to exchange goods) than the Marxian idea of class relations
in production, for which the economic relation is not one of acquiescence but one
of power and domination, as one class owns/controls the means of production and
the other class must sell their labor power. In some sense Marx was turning Smith
on his head: it isn’t buying and selling (exchange) that produces capitalism, but
capitalism (class relations in production) that leads to buying and selling. That
aphorism is repeated daily in sociology theory classes on the ideas of Marx and
Smith. It is a taken-for-granted truth that Frank’s analysis implicitly challenges.
This idea of exchange, once generalized across n economic actors, yields the
famed Smithian division of labor, which was then rewritten as the world-system’s
central global economic relation, the famed core–periphery division of labor.
You can see the problem already. No one acquiesces in producing their own
poverty, so a core–periphery division of labor does not have the power and domi-
nation assumption implicit in class relations. Somehow, global exchange has to
yield underdevelopment, global poverty, and other economic distortions implied
in critical world-system theory. But if it is global exchange, and exchange implies
some degree of free choice/participant acquiescence, then who ever chose their
own underdevelopment? A theoretical solution soon arose to try and solve this
problem, the idea of “unequal exchange.” Besides being something of a contradic-
tion in terms, reminiscent of Marcuse’s repressive tolerance, the concept never got
off the ground. Much ink was spilt; but little understanding was had, and although
the term is still in use it is of little theoretic value/validity.
One could, in principle, speak of a world-class system, or a world mode of pro-
duction, but this too never really got off the ground. Somehow the act of owning
and controlling the means of production remained inherently a social, not a global,
relation. There has never been a successful theory of a global mode of production,
and for all the talk about the “capitalist” nature of the world economy there has
been no serious discussion of how, say, the core as a global class actor could hire
the periphery as global wage labor. Core and periphery have a relation, but it isn’t
the wage one, and if it is as a division of labor, even with unequal exchange, it
is always open to Brennerite (Brenner 1997) nationalists who pull world-system
analysis down to domestic relations within territorial units, for example class
relations within a societal mode of production here, there, and everywhere in the
world economy. So, for instance, there are endless discussions of the reality of
British capitalism and antebellum American slavery as different modes of pro-
duction that somehow are articulated (the “articulation of modes of production”
thesis). But how the hands that picked cotton and the hands that wove it into
cotton were not a single mode of global production but instead the articulation of
the slave and capitalist modes was never satisfactorily explained. Like unequal
exchange, the idea of the articulation of modes of production came and went with
little lasting effect.
Today’s world-system theory, then, is in a bind. To avoid such Smithian free
choice and mutual agreement to exchange, the theory would seemingly have to
drop down from the international level (world trade formation) to the national and
societal level (class formations). But at that point coercion in economic relations
is lost in the distinctly world-system. From a modes of production perspective the
world economy is not a singularity but aggregated sets of national class relations.
The Smithian notion of a core–periphery division of labor certainly grasped the
global, but, again, it loses the coercive element, and to call such a world eco-
nomic system “capitalist,” as did Wallerstein, while an exchange relation lay at its
theoretic heart, admitted such a contradiction, and nationalist class analysts soon
jumped all over that formulation, most famously in Robert Brenner’s characteri-
zation of this as nothing but “neo-Smithian Marxism” (Brenner 1997).2 It is, and
remains to this day, the great world-system theoretical problem.
The question facing world-system theory today, then, is how do we theo-
rize a world economy that is both transnational and has a power component?
The answer, as mentioned earlier, is to separate the idea of trade from that of
exchange; that is, liberate the concept of trade from its Smithian imprisonment as
an acquiescent exchange relation, and at the same time free class relations from
their Marxian entitlement as the sole domain of power/domination in economic
life. In effect, combine power and trade, yielding a post-Smith/Marx concept of
“trade/power,” which is precisely what the notion of overlapping Frankian trian-
gles accomplishes.3
In so doing a number of things follow. If we assume, from a globological
perspective, the primacy of the global over the national in process/causal deter-
mination terms, and if the global is now conceived of as Frankian triangles, then
we have turned the “production precedes and determines exchange” paradigm
on its head. Actually, that is not quite technically correct, for it is no longer trade
as exchange that is doing the determining, but trade as a new form of economic
power relation – the overlapping trade triangle idea. Trade is the movement of
goods from place to place and the structures of said movement represent a level
of order above any one of their angular locales, and further, and most important,
an overlapping apex of triangles acts as an economic multiplier, whose result is
the wealth of some at the expense of the non-overlapped, whose fate slides toward
poverty and underdevelopment. Overlapping triangular apexes have a structural
effect upon the social class formation that occupies that apex niche. It aids,
enhances, and, perhaps even in ways not as yet fully understood and certainly to
be the object of future research, fully determines said local sets of class relations.
The interdependence of societal development and resultant hegemony now
changes. No longer is it a matter of the historical evolution of class relations, going
from hunter gatherer to slave to feudal to capitalist modes of societal production,
that enables a social formation to attain a degree of domination over its neighbors,
which we have heretofore designated hegemony, and therefore said intrasocietal
transformations no longer allow a country to dominate the trade relations between
it and other sets of class relations. No longer, then, does the societally bound class
formation determine the internationally bound trade formation. That paradigm
is now inverted, for it is the global trade formation, in the form of overlapping
apexes of Frankian triangles, which determines the class quality of the societal
formation that occupies the overlapped apex and the non-overlapped other angles
of trade.
Such a possible paradigm shift also affects the centrality of class analysis, for
it would now seem that there is nothing sacred about class analysis per se. It is
neither a more inherently progressive point of view nor a more dynamic social
science tool than the Frankian triangle, nor, finally, is it the naturally a priori eco-
nomic relation, particularly on the global level of analysis. Class relations are still
those of power (in the owns/controls means of production sense), but power now
also resides in effects of common apexed triangles upon their angular societal
nodes.
From a sociology of knowledge perspective it makes some sense to see Adam
Smith as reflective of a larger British world of growing overseas empire, naval
power, and world trade dominance, as is thinking about Marx’s origins in a more
landlocked central European land resentful of British power and global colonial
encirclement. What I am suggesting is this. The class analysis focus of Marx may
reflect the geopolitics of the age: a German resentment of British sea power and
trade advantage translated into vast colonial holdings that, as a land power, could
not be attained by Germany no matter how developed her industrial infrastructure.
Marx, then, in a nationalistic reaction to Smith, glorified production, production,
production. Marx produced a theory with a Ratzelian emphasis upon class lebens
raum; that is, the expansion of class relations and struggle as the lebensraumic
driving force of historical development (Ratzel 1969 [1892]). Marx’s theory of
history is in fact an internalist (societalist, mode of productionist) theory of within
social formation tensions driving the historical process forward, whereas Smith’s
theory has an externalist emphasis upon trade relations between, not class relations
within, social formations. For Marx, history is one of class relations, conflict, and
revolution, all importantly taking place on the ground, within a social formation,
and not requiring global trade, exchange, or naval power to supplement them.
The nightwatchman for Marx is the state, as power and domination domestically,
in favor of one national class over another and not, externally, across the seas,
dominating colonial holdings or keeping trade lanes open, a role that the German
Navy could not play.
Marx plays the only theoretical card that nineteenth-century geopolitics will
allow him: he eulogizes the domestic, the societal, the national. It is a theory
of der volk, but the structured volk portrayed in their natural nineteenth-century
habitat of industrial factories engaged in industrial production. There is no choice
– it’s what the Germans can, and do, do well – and he makes such land-based
class relations the centerpiece of this theoretical framework, not the world market
of Smith reflecting in turn the world view of the British overseas trade-based and
overlapping apexed Frankian triangled national position of the soon to be British
hegemony.
At the end of the day, though, Marxism is a societal analysis that can’t be
exported to a globological analysis on a world scale. Smith, though, could, and
did, for his socio-economic environment was one of overseas empire and trade,
and so making a primacy of trade was the natural choice. Marx, though, had
identified the element of coercion but was trapped in societal formations at the
national level. Smith too was stuck. He got the global part right, and trade too, but
he saw it as more open and freely acquiescent. Smith’s error is that he made trade
into exchange, and at that moment trade lost any element of power/domination as
an economic relation.
The societal self-conception as a class society did become though, naturally
enough considering what we have just discussed, the official ideology of a number
of largely landlocked, often continental powers such as Germany (National
Socialism), Russia (Union of Socialist Soviet Republics), and twentieth-century
China (People’s Republic). It is not an accident that those polities that did not
dominate global trade, did not have overseas empires, or did not colonially encir-
cle others would naturally be the ones to develop a view of themselves as a variety
of domestic groups, that is, a variety of class formations. On the other side of the
coin, unofficially, class analysis lived on as the ideology of oppositional groups
within overseas empired, trade-triangled countries, from ancient Athens to Britain
and the United States.
Geopolitics
The fact that world trade triangles invariably cross oceans to connect land areas
goes on to raise other questions than just determinants of national development
and internalist versus externalist explanations of hegemony. Trade, involving as
it does land and sea, also raises questions about land and sea power, and their
place within the world-system. At present, though, the geographical plays little
role in the theoretical edifice that is world-system theory. Core, periphery, semi-
periphery, unequal exchange, division of labor, and so forth are all relations of
humans above, or independent of, their geographical habit, as if such sociological
processes were contained within hermetically sealed societal bubbles. Along with
the absence of the geographical in extant world-system theoretical frames, they
also tend to focus only on the economic, as in the Wallersteinian (1974) political
economy of the world-system perspective (Wallerstein 1974), and the cultural, as
in world polity or world society theory associated with John Meyer (Meyer et al.
2007). From a broader perspective we have uploaded the sense of the economic
(Marx, Smith) and the cultural (Durkheim, Weber) from distinctly social to glo-
bological processes (Bergesen, 1980, 1990). I would like to suggest, though, that
there is a third world-system paradigm, centering on a distinctly geopolitical point
of view. There are, then, three world-system models: the economic world-system
(PEWS), the cultural world-system (world society theory), and the geopolitical
world-system.
There is something of a ripple effect of the triangle turn. First, global trade raises
the question of land and water (overseas trade), which in turn raises the question
of inclusion of geography as the base in a newly reformulated base–superstructure
model. In the old model economic structure is the base, the primal determinant, and
polity and culture/ideology the superstructure. But in a new geopolitical model,
land, sea, air/space constitute the base and economy/polity/culture the superstruc-
ture. In such a geopolitical base–superstructure model, PEWS and world society
theory are moved upstairs to constitute the global superstructure while land/sea/
air constitutes the new base. What this does is to shatter the present hermetically
sealed social science world of only human relations (economic, political, cultural,
social, etc.) by bringing the true material base (geography) into the equation. For a
long time there has been a fear about geographical determinism, but if in fact there
are variable economic, political, and cultural outcomes predicted from geographic
independent variables then the fear is probably unfounded.
There is another theoretical change implied by a geopolitical perspective.
Along with global Darwinian selection pressures that we have theorized as social
Darwinism, class struggle, social evolution, and so forth, there may very well
also be something like global Mendelian, or discrete combinatorial, processes
that produce the variation in world-system forms upon which selection processes
acts. That is, the modern evolutionary synthesis has two components, and only
Darwinian selection processes have yet had a big impact on social science
(Bergesen 2004a,b, 2005). What has yet to impact world-system thinking are more
discrete combinatorial models, in which finite resources are capable of yielding
an infinite number of outcomes. The processes here, variously referred to as finite
infinity or rule-bound creativity, are prevalent in genetics, language, and number
systems (allowing a finite range of numbers, 1–9, + 0, to yield the possibility of an
infinite numerosity), and might be applicable to Frank’s suspicion that world his-
tory represents the cycling or pulsating of some set of world historical constants.
In this regard, Frankian triangles seem particularly susceptible to such a discrete
combinatorial model.
Triangle transition wars

As noted earlier, largely land-bound economies cannot take advantage of favora-
ble positions with Frankian triangles. Their economic niche becomes largely
limited to domestic industrial mobilization and development, which attains none
of the triangle multiplier effects afforded to trade-oriented countries. It would

appear that hegemony passes from sea power to sea power; from, in the modern
world-system in Wallersteinian terms, from Spain to Britain to the United States.4
And if, as suggested earlier, hegemony is more a product of nodal position within
Frankian triangles and not domestically driven national development, then
succession struggles may not be between contending future industrial powers.
Hegemonic transition wars, though, do appear at the end of periods of hegemony,
raising the question of who initiates them and for what reason.
Let us begin to outline an answer by suggesting that hegemony passes from
one triangle-nested sea/trade power to the next. Given that 70 percent of the
earth’s surface is ocean, the old geopolitical maxim, he who controls the heart-
land controls the world, should be reformulated as he who controls the oceans
controls the world.5 It isn’t, therefore, about a decline in the industrial capacity
of one state and the rise of other domestically powered industrial states, chal-
lenging either each other, or the hegemon, for the next position as hegemon.
That is, for example, the Napoleonic Wars were not the final struggle between
England and France over who would follow Spanish hegemony, nor were World
Wars I and II about Germany versus the United States to see who would succeed
Britain. These conflicts, and all other hegemonic power transition wars, were,
from a geopolitical of view, about triangularly excluded land powers who, in a
defensive fashion, attempted to interrupt the transition of global dominance from
one triangulated sea/trade power to another. Hegemony does not shift from one
societally based productive advantaged area to another, that is, from the internal
development of Spain to Britain to the United States and next, perhaps, to China,
but may instead be a matter of shifting apex nodes of the world economy’s trade
triangles.
Social science is on the verge of a new storyline. The older line, since Marx,
has been that it was, say, the internal development of the United States versus
that of Germany that transformed the United States, and not Germany, into the
hegemon that succeeded Britain. Two internal growth patterns, two sets of class
structures, two outcomes, with the larger, or greater, or more successful one
becoming the next hegemon. It is something of a mix of Weber and Marx on
national development, yielding the larger and more dynamic national economy,
that is, the next hegemony. Perhaps. But it may also be the case that Germany was
never really in the race at all, and that hegemonic succession wars are mistitled,
for the battle isn’t over who will succeed, but is a military effort by industrially
mobilized land powers to halt the trade triangle-determined shift in geographical
advantage from one to the next Frankian triangled apex overlap. And, as trade-
favoured sea powers are the ones who have the triangled advantage, there isn’t,
really, any succession struggle at all. It is never in doubt. There is war, and it
involves the past and the future hegemon, but it isn’t initiated by them.
Spain’s overseas trade/colonial empires dominated, and then Britain’s, and
then those of the United States. Great power wars appear at the transition point
between succeeding hegemonies; but it isn’t a struggle between the contenders,
except in the sense that the land-bound powers realize that they have no chance
for succession and engage in a spoiler operation to try and stop the succession
process. So-called power transition wars, or hegemonic succession wars, are
but defensive reactions of land powers, themselves devoid of triangle multiplier
effects, who in turn react to try and prevent the new triangle overlap from crown-
ing a new area as the next hegemon.
It was always going to be Britain following Spain (of if you will the Dutch);
Germany never had the trade, colonies, navy, in short the triangular overlap posi-
tion to seriously rival Britain. World Wars I and II, then, were defensive blocking
strategies, not serious contender strategies. What this in turn suggests is that
the foundations of hegemony, overlapping triangle apexes, don’t change, but
only the historically contingent geographical centers where they overlap: Spain
to Britain to the United States and perhaps China (given, agreed, further Chinese
trade and naval development, and no doubt air and space power to come). It is
always sea power to sea power. It is apex in triangle to apex in triangle, and naval
power to naval power. The transition to air and now space military power is cer-
tainly the decisive factor on the military side, but not for the transport of goods on
the economic side, and so, for now, sea-based trade triangles remain paramount.
In the traditional Western story of shifting power centers it was from the Eastern
Mediterranean (Athenian Empire) to the Mediterranean (Roman Empire), to the
Atlantic and partial Pacific (Spanish and British Empires), to the Atlantic and
Pacific and Indian, and now to all the oceans (American Empire). All hegemons;
all sea powers; all well placed in Frankian triangles. And, most interestingly, all
attacked by defensive land powers at the transition point of hegemony to hegem-
ony. The bottom economic line is that land powers are, inherently, economically
limited. Here we see a place for the new base–superstructure model contributing
to explanations of comparative economic development. Without controlling the
oceans, there is no control of trade, and no positions in trade triangles, and hence
no chance at global economic, nor military, hegemony. Therefore, land powers
are geographically transformed into “spoiler powers,” initiators of wars to thwart
the geo-shift of overlapping sea trade triangle power from one geographical locale
to another. The land power France tries to halt the transfer of interlocked trian-
gle apexes from their geographical locale in Spain to Britain (Seven Years War;
Napoleonic Wars). Then the land power Germany tries to halt the geographical
shift of triangle apex overlap from Britain to the United States (World Wars I and
II), and, next, the European/Russian bloc will try and halt the shift of triangled
centrality from North America to East Asia/China (World War III).
Historical examples
The Peloponnesian War

The classic defensive, or spoiler, reaction of a land power to the transition pro-
cess from sea power to sea power can be seen in the Peloponnesian War. During
the earlier Persian Wars the Spartans and Athenians were on the same side, and,
although Athens and Sparta shared power in the defeat of the Persians, a power
differential arose afterward (479–431 bc) when the Athenians moved ahead and
established a sea-based empire throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.
For the Eastern Mediterranean there was a fifth-century shift in sea-based
hegemony from the Persian Empire (which during the Persian Wars had a larger
navy) to that of Athens and her allies. The left-out power was that of Sparta and
her allies, who, in Thucydides classic words, “feared the Athenians lest they might
grow still more powerful, seeing most of Greece was already subject to them”
(Hanson 2005: 12). That is, Sparta, the land power, invaded Attica and initiated
the conflict, and, contrary to predictions, also won the war, although with sea
power obtained with Persian support at war’s end.
The Napoleonic Wars

This jumps ahead quite a bit, and for many the comparison of pre-capitalist ancient
Greece with the early nineteenth century is inappropriate. But this also helps
support the repetitive aspects of the geopolitical world-system that transcend the
linearity of societal developmental theory.
These wars can be viewed as a last-ditch pre-emptive effort to thwart sea/trade
triangle power being passed from the Spanish Galleon to the British Navy through
the use of the Grand Army of the Republic and Napoleon’s clear advantage in
land power. Earlier, in the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, the
Netherlands was eliminated from serious consideration as Spain’s successor, leav-
ing, other than Britain, only France. The Seven Years War, with fighting between
France and England in the Americas and India, might also be included here, but
the final showdown was the Napoleonic Wars.
Like the Athenian Empire, the British imperium rested upon sea power, and
in terms of navy and trade the French couldn’t compete. If the triangle transition
process were to complete itself, the hegemonic succession baton would be passed
from Spanish sea/triangle power to British sea/triangle power, bypassing the
French and their land power strength. Like Sparta earlier, they reacted. Although
Bonaparte realized great success on the continent, the mix of defeat by Nelson at
Trafalgar and the Russian over-reach resulted in the French failing in their effort
to unseat the passage of global power to Britain.
World Wars I and II

The dynamic, in general outline, repeats at the next hegemonic succession point.
Again, it is not a conflict between contenders; it is not that German industry lost out
to American to succeed British industry, but that a land power reacted defensively
with a pre-emptive war to try and interrupt the geographical shift of Frankian trian-
gle power across the Atlantic to North America. The German Empire was a Spartan
land power all over again: with strength in its army, autocratic politically, deeply
nationalistic, and resentful of Britain’s Athenian-like sea-based trade and colonial

holdings, which were protected and enforced by the British Navy. To paraphrase
Thucydides: “the Germans feared the British lest they might grow still more pow-
erful, seeing that most of the colonial world was already subject to them.”
World War III?

Given what we have hypothesized, let us try and extrapolate some of these
dynamics into the future. This is a speculative exercise, of course. First, what will
be involved in the shift from the United States to, let us assume, China? To begin
with China will have to become a major sea power. This seems inevitable given
Chinese reliance on trade and the necessity to protect sea lanes through which raw
materials arrive and from which Chinese exports depart. As many experts seem to
agree, a twenty-first-century Chinese blue-water navy seems inevitable.
Given, then, growing Chinese trade, coupled with American decline, the next
triangle transition would most reasonably seem to be from North America to East
Asia. Again, the struggle will not be between, say, Japan, China, and Europe over
who will follow the United States. What is involved instead is the defensive reac-
tion of the leading land power trying to prevent the inevitable shift from one
sea/trade triangle node to another, that is, from the United States to China. For
the Persian Empire to the Athenian Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean the
landed resented was Sparta; for the Spanish Empire to the British Empire it was
Germany; and now for the transition from America to China it will be the land
block of Europe/Russia.
Contrary to prevalent thinking that Americans are from Mars and Europeans
from Venus, the opposite is probably closer to the truth. Extant hegemons, even in
decline, do not initiate triangle transition wars (previously called power transition
and hegemonic succession, wars). Instead it will be the left-out land power. Why
will that be the EU and Russia? Think for a moment about the present repeat of
the nineteenth-century scramble for Africa and competition over global spheres
of influence. For the United States the Americas remain within its sphere as does,
even though challenged, the Middle East. For China and East Asia, Southeast Asia
remains a sphere of influence, and in Africa in the early twenty-first century it is
the Chinese who are making the most dramatic headway with a newer form of sur-
gical colonial relation (see Bergesen, forthcoming). What, then, is the European
sphere of influence or that of Russia outside the Euro/Russian land mass? There
are still European interests in Africa, of course, but they seem to be losing ground
to the Chinese, and Russia perennially tries to extend its influence down through
Central Asia.
Therefore, when you think about it, the left-out zone of the twenty-first cen-
tury’s new colonial scramble for resources would appear to be Europe and Russia.
What was once a distinctly German complaint about British sea power, colonies,
and global presence is today generalized to Europe as a whole and most clearly
articulated by Russia.
Europe and Russia. Allies to be, sharing in common no neo-colonial influences,

or at least few; no navy, or at least little, and no global reach, or at least little.
And, most importantly, no prospects to overcome this difference. What are their
alternatives? Accept a dependent position? Perhaps. Let the age-old geopolitical
maxim of whoever controls the oceans controls the world stand? Perhaps. But
history suggests that left-out land powers don’t take such a stance. Instead there
is the pre-emptive moment when the resenting land power reacts and engages the
sea power encirclement.
Conclusion and summary

The transition from sociological to globological theory comes in bits and pieces.
There was the core–periphery idea of dependency theory, which originated in
Latin America for which it was designed, but in principle applicable to any number
of other regions of the global South. Immanuel Wallerstein seems to have realized
that and generalized the dependency dynamic back to the sixteenth century and
added a middle strata, the semi-periphery. Core, semi-periphery, periphery were, to
some degree, mirrors of the three hierarchical divisions of national societies – the
upper, middle, and lower classes. But although these entities conceptually fit into
something like a mode of production and had a relation of power and domination
linking them and contributing to their reproduction, none of that was transferable
to the world-system level, no matter how much it was called the “capitalist world
economy.” The societal dynamics of capitalism, in essence the uniquely societal
mode of production, just couldn’t make the journey to the realm of the global; it
remained, and to some proudly (Brenner 1997), within the societal domain.
But the world economy, considered as a global totality, had to have its categori-
cal relations characterized somehow, and so the Smithian exchange relation, the
division of labor, was pressed into service as the core–periphery division of labor.
It became the defining global relation of the analytical capitalist world economy.
However, exchange is exchange, even if so-called uneven exchange, and the
societalists soon pounced, claiming the so-called capitalist world economy was
nothing but neo-Smithian Marxism (Brenner 1997).
Time passed. Little was done to resolve the dilemma. It just sat there. Attention
then shifted to when the system began, and here progress was made. It seemed
somewhat arbitrary that such international connections would have started only in
the sixteenth century, and so Abu-Lughod, Chase-Dunn and Hall, Frank and Gills,
and others pushed the start date back in time as far as one could go. The time shift
was fine, and made sense, as earlier versions of core–periphery relations could be
found along with shifting hegemonies. So for many the distinctly capitalist and
the distinctly world part of the notion of capitalist world economy came to be
detached. There was, or had been, a world (meaning intersocietal networks) for
as long as one wanted to consider, and the world economy did turn “capitalist” in
varying degrees since the sixteenth century.
Frank too shifted his analysis back in time. It was the reasonable move to
make, and I think he realized that, for those who didn’t were left behind for all
intents and purposes. But where others clung to the old Darwinian evolutionary
dynamic of mode after mode of production, Frank pondered the possibility that
the world economy, and world system, was a singularity that pulsated or cycled
over time and that we had confused this with evolutionary development and the
appearance of new and unique forms of economic life, such as capitalism. Toward
the end he thought the concept of “capitalism” along with “mode of production”
was more a theoretical hindrance than a help.
He also inserted China into the world-system story. China was coming on line
economically by the end of the twentieth century and certainly during the early
decades of the twenty-first century, and it was inevitable that someone would
make the decision to move Chinese development into a more central theoretical
place. Certainly, as the twenty-first century unfolds, Chinese and Asian scholar-
ship will begin a general revision of the social science canon. Sitting on top of the
system they will play out the hegemon’s role to define the system in their terms.
At first, Frank’s various new ideas about China and a singular pulsating world
system were resisted by established world-system scholars. Later there was some
grudging acceptance; one even became something of a convert, at least on the role
of China (Arrighi 2007).
Still, all was not well with the basic conception of the world-system. Trade
was far too confined in its bilateral form as advantage to core and disadvantage
to periphery. The more Frank looked at economic history the more he realized
that it was, and had always been, multilateral in essence. Trade triangles, and
perhaps other geometric configurations as well, were not an, but the, economic
life at the distinctly world level of analysis. Triangles of trade and balance of
payments were the essence of what was both global and economic. It was they,
and particularly the multiplier effect they had on the growth of countries nested in
a common apex across triangles, that produced the wealth and poverty of nations.
It was a bold theoretical assertion. Some thought it was just a return to Smith. It
was, of course, in the sense of an emphasis upon the world market/trade, but it was
more because the mutuality of benefit of “free trade” was now gone, along with
the implied mutuality of freely choosing to enter such an “exchange.” Frank real-
ized that trade could be more than mere exchange; it was one of his great insights.
World trade/balance of payments when put in triangular form yielded a new global
economic formation, the Frankian triangle. Apex position had advantageous, if
not determining, effects upon those nations at that nodal position. Conceptually,
production, and with it class relations, were now demoted to a secondary effect,
a dependent variable, determined by the new, global independent variable: the
intersecting apexes of Frankian triangles.
Hegemony might now be considered an outcome, not the precursor of global
structure. Old model: given national productive advantage we get world trade
advantage. New model: given world trade triangle advantage we get national pro-
duction advantage. Adam Smith (trade and exchange make capitalism) was turned
on his head by Marx (capitalism makes for trade and exchange), and now Frank
suggests a further head turning (trade triangles make for capitalism). We have,
then, since 1776 gone from trade being at the center with Smith, to production
being at the center in the nineteenth century with Marx, back to trade again in the
twenty-first century with the Frankian trade triangle.
This move to the post Smith/Marx trade versus production paradigm raises a
global geography question as well. World trade triangles connect land by water,
placing the importance of geography at the heart of a new base–superstructure
model, for at present social science models remain hermeneutically sealed within
that societal, or global bubble, of relations only between humans. Geography is
out. But a new base–superstructure model would make land and sea (and, to be
worked out, air and space) the new base of all human types of societal, political,
cultural, and economic activity. The economy would then be kicked up into the
new superstructure. Such geographical determinism has long been out of favor,
but with differences between land and sea powers and the different economic
forms that arise upon them there is a new place for geopolitical and/or geo-
economic analysis.
Such a role for the geographic is most clearly seen as the foundation for triangle
transition wars. Previously termed power transition (political science) and hegem-
onic succession (sociology, world-system theory) wars, these are, in fact, spoiler
reactions by expansive land powers who cannot translate all their advances into
global power. Such wars are the result of the frustration of land powers and the
power of oceans. From the Spartans to Napoleon and the Germans, the complaint
is the same. The sea/triangular-advantaged maritime power has more colonies
and greater naval strength, and encircles the landed. No matter how much they
industrialize, even transform their internal class relations (Marx), or self-mobilize
and self-discipline (Weber), land powers come to realize that they cannot catch
the sea power/triangle apexed power that is next in line for hegemonic succession.
And so they act; and usually on their terms, with their land power. Sparta, on land,
not with triremes, invades the Attic peninsula; Napoleon with the Grande Armée
invades; and, of course, from Hindenburg to Hitler the Germans invade. All of
them act against sea powers. All of them flex their land power. All of them initiate
what we have until now called hegemonic succession wars, as all of them try and
stop the center to center shift dictated by triangle apex realignment. All of them
(save Sparta) fail.
Which brings us to the present and my last comment on the state of world-
system theory/research. It remains focused upon the global South, and for good
reason. But things are happening in the North as well, and I don’t mean just in
terms of economics, but in geopolitical shifts. During the past century, classic
nineteenth-century geopolitical thinking took a back seat to viewing international
events as ideological contests, such as communism versus capitalism. But now
things have come full circle, and we are once again preoccupied with new ver-
sions of the old geostrategic scenarios. We have “The Great Game” for empire
in Central Asia being played out by Iraq, Iran, and the United States. We also
have new great powers (India and China) and declining older powers (seemingly
Europe), all of which are contending with a prevailing empire (the United States)
that is intent upon conserving, if not extending, its dominant position vis-à-vis all
other players. It feels like 1885. It is as if the twentieth century never happened.
But of this geopolitical universe present-day world-system theory/research
offers little understanding. There is nothing wrong with looking South. There is
also nothing wrong with looking North, for we are in the midst of another great
trade triangle transition, and if the events of the past are any guide to the future we
have much to be concerned about, hence much to study and think about.
Notes
1 Andre Gunder Frank (2001) wrote about such trade triangles in his article, “Location,
Location, Location,” which was to be part of his unfinished book, ReOrient the
Nineteenth Century.
2 For a discussion of this issue see Bergesen (1984).
3 Having asserted the importance of trade and balance of payment triangles as the key
aspect of the world economy, it must also be acknowledged that little is known as to
how they work their effect upon the countries sitting at the advantaged and disad-
vantaged angles or nodes or apexes of said triangles. A number of possibilities seem
reasonable and their validity will be established or not by future empirical research.
It would seem to be a matter of both form and substance. Form would include apex
position for any number of triangles, and substance would center on what is traded.
Raw materials from place to place may differ from remittances or profits, and there
might be a mix of both the substance of triangular trade and the angular formality of
positional location.
4 Some argue that the seventeenth-century Dutch exercised hegemony. This has always
seemed doubtful given that the period is co-terminus with the Thirty Years War
(1618–1648), raising the question of how a country exercises hegemony when the
other core powers are involved in general warfare. If it is a hegemony it is one in the
narrowest of economic terms.
5 Space, on the other hand, at 100 percent of the world, will constitute something of an
astro- rather than a geopolitical age; the focus here, though, is on land and sea power.
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3
ReOrient the Nineteenth
Century: Andre Gunder Frank’s
unfinished manuscript
Robert A. Denemark
When Andre Gunder Frank passed away in Luxembourg at the age of seventy-six
he brought to a close a most remarkable intellectual career, and one that was far
from complete. Having made significant contributions to half a dozen disciplines
and causes, Frank had most recently set his analytical and political sights on con-
temporary social theory. He was not after just one or two of the western canon’s
sacred cows; he had targeted the entire sacred herd. Frank argued that Marx,
Weber, and their intellectual progeny, including early Gunder Frank, had followed
an errant path. To correct the resulting errors, scholars would have to return to the
earliest periods and begin the process of analyzing society over again. This was
not sentimental antiquarianism. To get social theory right we had to get history
right. And once we did, we could then begin to move forward in our analysis.
Frank’s life ended in the midst of this process.
Frank’s unfinished manuscript, which I am in the process of editing for publica-
tion, is entitled ReOrient the Nineteenth Century. Why the nineteenth century?
The book suggests that this is a century that we supposedly know enough about,
and hence the period tends to be ignored. Telling Frank that “we already knew
enough” about anything was rather like waving a red flag in front of a bull. But the
choice of the nineteenth century for serious re-analysis goes deeper than Frank’s
antipathy to intellectual complacency. Frank became interested in world system
history sometime in the late 1980s. He was inspired by the work of Chase-Dunn
and Hall on historical systems, and Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony
(1989) on the thirteenth-century world system. He had already started to work with
Barry Gills, whose own interest in both Asian and world system history would
provide for a long and fruitful collaboration. Frank worked his way back, writing
on the Bronze Age and looking for a way to work on the Iron Age as well, though
he lamented a lack of sources on that period. He turned instead to following up
Abu-Lughod’s work, and in 1998 he published ReOrient: Political Economy in the
42 Robert A. Denemark
Asian Age. This book took us through the eighteenth century, and argued that our
previous social theory was Eurocentric in nature, leading to any number of errors.
Frank argued that the European developmental model was not and never had been
a model of pristine world system dynamics. Europe was part of a global politi-
cal economy, and that global system drove the European political economy. Not
surprisingly, the European developmental model was the (narrow) focus of early
European scholars, and was then written backward onto the rest of world history,
and forward (via social theory) into the future. To escape this trap, scholars would
have to rethink world history and use what had been learned to develop a sound,
humanocentric, social theory.
To explain what he was up to, Gunder liked to repeat the parable of the drunk
who lost his keys. Passers-by notice a drunk searching the ground under a street
light. When asked what he is doing he replies that he is searching for his keys.
Others join the search, but nobody finds the keys. At last the drunk is asked where
he lost the keys and he notes that it was somewhere else, but only here, under the
street light, would there be sufficient illumination to find them.
What western scholars had found under the street light were local social
processes. These were taken to be pristine, they were reified and turned into the
“model” of what others would inevitably have to do. Hence the whole nature
of “capitalism” as a “mode of production” that emerged sometime in the six-
teenth century, that followed from earlier modes, and that would give way to later
modes, is just simply all wrong. This is not to say that there was no capitalism,
or that there were never any modes of production or contradictions, but if such
phenomena existed they were likely ephemeral, and if real they were likely local
in nature. More importantly, and more perniciously, our focus on these matters
helped to hide the broader world system history and the processes that drove it.
If European political, social, and economic processes were not pristine, then a
number of other problematic conclusions would follow. The alleged unique nature
of Europe was likely to be a fallacy as well, and Frank shows this to be the case
by taking on such myths as the idea that Europe’s abundance of small warring
states helps explain the fiercely and successfully competitive nation-state model.
Such conditions were in evidence in several regions of the world – but with dif-
ferent outcomes. This is not an historical configuration unique to Europe, but its
outcome would differ given the role that Europe played in the world system in
which it was embedded.
Likewise the “backward” nature of Asia was a myth, which Frank strips to the
core – taking special interest in the market-driven nature of phenomena such as
tribute-trade systems. This analysis places us in the midst of a very unfamiliar
Sinocentric world where great social, economic, and political powers, including
Indian states, Chinese polities, and even Japan rise, flourish, and then decline not
because of Europe, but because of a series of global-level processes that Frank
elucidates. We find a Europe struggling to buy a cheap ticket to ride on the Asian
train, and managing to do so only by virtue of the conquest of silver-producing
areas of Latin America. Having bought its way in, Europe then rises on the back of
ReOrient the Nineteenth Century: Andre Gunder Frank’s unfinished manuscript 43
various global-level processes. For Europeans, however, this rise is interpreted as

a function of the inherent superiority of their race, their religions, and their socio-
economic processes. What we understand as complex and sophisticated western
social theory is unfortunately little more than a set of ideological abstractions
built, if unwittingly, upon a foundation of early triumphalism.
The cure for this intellectual malady rests with a healthy dose of reality in the
form of horizontally integrated macrohistory. (“World system history” is what the
group of scholars involved in this study came to call it, and Frank helped found
and support a subsection of the International Political Economy Section of the
International Studies Association by that name.) This critical school counsels the
abandoning of various traditional texts, rants, and mantras regarding European
exceptionalism, modes of production (including the “Asiatic mode”), capitalism,
western hegemony, the industrial revolution, and the like. Instead, Frank suggests
a focus on the simultaneity of events and the search for their linkages. Among the
early models of such analysis Frank notes Frederick Teggart’s Rome and China
(1939). Teggart helps explain a number of events that long puzzled historians. But
to understand these puzzles, scholars had to recognize the important (though long
ignored) connections between these distant societies, and the key to their resolu-
tion emerges only when viewed in the light of their contemporaneous timing.
Frank’s focus on Asia is a central part of the cure he proposes. Historians of
the relevant areas and periods provide us with a wealth of evidence for alter-
native views of Asia’s alleged “backwardness” and suggest that Asia was likely
far stronger, for far longer, than is recognized by Eurocentric historical analysis.
Hence our need to ReOrient.
ReOrient: Political Economy in the Asian Age ends with the nineteenth cen-
tury, and that is the most reasonable place to take up the struggle again. Frank’s
manuscript, which he entitled ReOrient the Nineteenth Century, was never com-
pleted. Gunder relocated to Europe, and was quite ill as he worked. He distributed
several of its key chapters to relevant scholars for comment, but he was not able
to distribute all of them, nor to integrate as many of the suggestions he received
as was his usual practice. There were some 120 relevant files on his various hard
drives; fully half of them were chapters of various lengths and pedigrees, while
the rest included citations, communications, and other notes. It was not difficult to
find the chapters that had last been backed up, but these were not always the most
recent versions, and they were not mutually exclusive. Frank would experiment
with different groupings of material, and left no indications of which he liked best.
Altering the order of the chapters, or sections within chapters, poses something
of a problem, but Frank would also alter the placement of key paragraphs, and
even important sentences and phrases. The original version of the unified manu-
script was some 225,000 words, about 30 per cent of which was repetitious. And
as his illness progressed, his writing became more labored as well.
ReOrient the Nineteenth Century begins with a discussion of the nature of
historiography in the nineteenth century, especially regarding the nature of eco-
nomic development and industrialization. When presented together these might
well be referred to as “the standard model of western development” and can be

summarized as follows:
The western world altered its fundamental economic structure, advancing

and distancing itself from the rest of the world between 1750 and 1800. As
a result it dominated world markets and opened previously closed areas by
industrializing and “taking off” through an abrupt acceleration of capital for-
mation. As a result, per capita income was higher there, among all sectors of
the population, than anywhere else. This dominance was based on a unique
form of governance, laissez faire, which minimized the role of the state, freed
labor to work in the factories, freed trade, harnessed science and technology
to the economy and increased efficient intercontinental migration. The UK
adopted the gold standard, a vital tool for stabilizing the economy and estab-
lishing British dominance. As a result, the UK’s strong economy developed
especially in the areas of textiles, coal, steam, railroads and steamships. This
economic strength led to military strength as well, with the UK following
the Netherlands as the hegemonic power whose military allowed them to
dominate the east and south. Following the UK, the US would emerge as the
dominant power based on its own set of unique characteristics.
(Denemark, draft editorial note for ReOrient the Nineteenth Century)
There are some two dozen myths here, and evidence is marshaled to illustrate the
length and depth of their shortcomings. This helps set the stage for the reconsid-
eration that must follow.
Following his long review of the myths of western development, Frank seeks
to deploy four analytical tools that are to be used to drive the remainder of the
work. The first has to do with continuity and horizontally integrated macrohistory.
Instead of obsessing about change, we should focus on some of the things that
have stayed the same over the long historical term. Instead of looking at develop-
ments in allegedly separate areas of the global system, we should look at the
nature of relationships and their impacts among those areas. This is the core of his
methodology as expressed at length in ReOrient: Political Economy in the Asian
Age, and so he does not belabor this discussion.
The second tool that Frank unfurls is his inveterate empiricism. He is interested
in deconstructing ideas, but only as a mechanism to get us to open our eyes and
re-construct global analysis on a more sound empirical footing. There is extensive
review of the standard historical/statistical works of W. A. Lewis, Folke Hilgerdt,
Paul Bairoch, Albert Imlah, Wiladamir and Emma Woytinsky, and Lamartine Yates.
Newer compilations are also considered, including those of Angus Maddison, of
whom Frank remains wary. Maddison’s data are problematic with regard to Asia,
and no better evidence of this exists than Maddison’s continued dependence upon
assumptions that are contrary to the latest work. Maddison dismisses the careful
research included in The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) because
his work does not abide by the old Eurocentric “common knowledge” regarding
the relative wealth of Asia and Europe. For Maddison, Eurocentrism appears as a
solution, not a problem. If scholarship is the careful product of a search conducted
under the European street light, it may be accepted. If scholarly work focuses
elsewhere, and finds other things, it is not to be accepted. Not surprisingly, Frank
heaps considerable scorn on those who proceed in such a manner.
There are two kinds of truths that Frank finds in these empirical considerations.
First, and contrary to the conclusions of many of the data gatherers, the under
lying strength of non-European areas, and the persistence of that strength, belies
standard conclusions. Second, it is possible to put together a far more complex
picture of global economic interaction than the usual bilateral analyses that func-
tion to constrain our picture of how the world actually works.
This leads directly to the third analytic that Frank employs. The formal term he
used was “multi-angular multi-linearity” and it is often referenced in the manu-
script in terms of “trade triangles” but Frank’s shorthand for this entire issue was
derived from the American real-estate saying “location, location, location.” In the
U.S. real-estate market the value of a property does not derive so much from the
quality of construction, its size, or its internal features. Instead, value is derived
from the location of the property relative to other desirable properties. Hence the
value of any given piece of real estate cannot be derived from an analysis of its
own attributes, but must instead be viewed as a matter of its position within a
broader system.
The suggestion that “location location location” is what counts masks a far
more serious debate in the study of the global political economy. Frank never
accepted the legitimacy of assessing the “value” of colonies to an imperialist
country by analyzing formal bilateral flows of goods and services. Britain, he
notes, did not fail to gain from its relationship with colonial India because the
official bilateral trade data appears “balanced.” Britain organized a set of interact-
ing relationships directly with India that were far more advantageous than the
official data suggested. Britain charged India for its administration, forcing it to
pay the direct costs of its military and political subjugation, as well as whatever
“overhead” was deemed appropriate. While Britain was urging other nations to
adopt the gold standard, it refused to allow India to do the same. This forced
India to generate more revenues, sell more goods to Britain at cheaper prices, use
more British banking services, and purchase gold (often from British sources) at
increasing rates (in terms of silver) as time went by.
Britain also organized a set of relationships between India and other areas that
were more advantageous than the official data reveal. Britain fought wars to open
China to opium exports; British nationals then grew opium in India (where its use
was illegal) and shipped it to China in British bottoms. British insurgents, drug
cartels, and narco-terrorist enforcers were able to generate significant profits that
show up on the books as a trade deficit between China and India. This deficit
was then used to help offset (“balance”) China’s trade surplus with Britain. Such
relationships were in no way rare and make a mockery out of efforts to draw
conclusions about the profitability of colonial holdings by reviewing bilateral
relations. More broadly, they reveal the dynamics of “location” in the global
system. Britain situated itself in the most profitable parts of relationships between
itself, China, and India, and did the same with the participants of the Atlantic trade
triangle. Britain’s “location” in these systems is a far more relevant indicator of
the reasons for its wealth than any given set of internal attributes.
Finally, Frank looks to the concept of entropy to help understand relations
among various areas. Entropy embodies the process by which energy is lost from
mechanical devices, which can never run with perfect efficiency. The more devices,
the greater the energy use, and the greater the complexity, the more potential
we have for the generation of entropy. This means more waste and higher costs.
Entropy is also referred to as disorder. There are a number of places in which
the physical and social worlds interact, which makes entropy an important social
process as well. As Robert Clark (1997: 10) suggests,
[We] lose sight of the fact that every system in the social order must be paid
for by someone, somewhere, sometime. This essential reality is hidden from
our view because human beings are very skillful at exporting the costs of
their own behavior to others via dissipative structures.
Dissipative structures are those that displace entropy, and Frank argues that
such displacement tends to take place between empire and colony, or core and
periphery. This is an important and often overlooked socio-economic and political
process. Following Hornborg’s (2001) analysis, Frank argues that the greater the
level of wealth generated, the greater the level of waste and upheaval generated.
Instead of absorbing this disorder, it is passed along from rich areas that enjoy the
benefits to poor areas that must suffer the costs.
These four analytical tools are deployed to make sense of the world, and the
first lesson that emerges is that Frank’s original 1998 volume of ReOrient did not
go far enough in its claims. Asia declines, which is obvious by mid-century, but
that decline is not truly significant until as late as the 1870s. And its decline may
be more apparent than real. Vicious though the rigors of colonialism were, Frank
argues that they failed to instill themselves into the fabric of society as deeply as
we had thought. Here we enter dangerous political waters, and Gunder knew that.
I had to remove four iterations of the following statement from the manuscript,
leaving only the original in its prominent place:
The time has come indeed to review and where appropriate to revise the
substantially ideological dogma of Western triumphalism over alleged
“traditionalism” elsewhere and simultaneously of much of the nationalist
appeal to the “defenses” of “traditional” values and also its exaggeration
of the deformation of the “Third World” economies. To do so in no way
negates the critique of ideologically inspired classical, neo-classical and
Keynesian “scientific” analysis and political propaganda by dependence and
world-system theory and their alternative analyses. The re-examination of
reality and its still other alternative analysis proposed below may also paral-
lel the denunciation of the received wisdom of both now “traditional” and
the new dependence as well as world-system theory . . . They have already
been denunciated by recent post-modernist, post-colonial, and sub-altern
textural “analysis” as far as the latter go, which is not much, even if some
of their critiques of Eurocentrism are well taken. For they offer no examina-
tion and much less any analysis of political economic reality and its history.
Most importantly they have and offer no global perspective, examination,
nor political economic history and analysis of the one world economy and
system whose own whole globe-encompassing structure and dynamic is so
determinant of the possibilities, options and therefore successes and failures
of its ever-changing geographic, political economic, social and cultural parts.
They do not understand or convey how they themselves are responses to a
systemic crisis.
As a result of his work in world system history, which culminated in the first
volume of ReOrient, Frank was criticized for allegedly denying that capitalism
existed. This was a misunderstanding and an exaggeration of his analysis, but
made an easy target. In the second volume of ReOrient he will doubtlessly be
criticized for suggesting that there was no imperialism, and that will also be a
misunderstanding and an exaggeration, though it is again an easy target. Frank
does not deny the existence of imperialism or its pernicious nature, but argues
instead that the process is less fundamental than many had thought because (1)
colonial and imperial policies did not extend as deeply into the economy as we
might think; and, perhaps more importantly, (2) the nemesis of the colonial world,
the advanced industrial world, was not all that advanced, industrial, or as devel-
oped as we might think either. Asia will rise again, as it does not have as much to
overcome internally, or as much to catch up with externally, as many had thought.
Its fetters were not so fundamental, while its reserve of human power and ingenu-
ity, as well as its “industrious revolution,” ease the way forward.
Not far below the surface lurks the argument that just as the east declined under
the weight of various globally problematic and locally inspired phenomena, and
gave way to the west, the west will eventually decline under the weight of various
globally problematic and locally inspired phenomena, of which Frank would no
doubt have argued that the sub-prime credit debacle is a harbinger. Some 100
years from now one can picture the social commentators of a triumphalist east
touting various elements of “eastern culture” as the reason for Asian dominance.
The relevant authors will likely add that the unfortunately violent western inter-
lude of the nineteenth through the middle of the twenty-first centuries is really
inconsequential given the irrationality of the occidentals, whose “backwardness”
will likely be identified as a contemporary source of instability and concern. The
irony of such arguments would doubtlessly have amused Gunder, though in short
order he would have been busy making himself unpopular by pointing out the
Sinocentric error in such a perspective, and arguing for a broader, more humano-
centric analysis.
Frank’s work required a re-periodization of the nineteenth century. He decides
to look to the period 1750–1810 in terms of continuity, and not change, in the
global system. Frank builds on the work of Pomeranz and the California School
in general to suggest that China is particularly well integrated into a pan-Asian
economy of great strength, vitality, and productivity during this period. The same,
rather surprisingly, can be said for the economies of Latin America and Africa.
The period from 1810 to 1870 includes the stirrings of real change. China starts
its decline, which is hastened by a series of environmental triggers, and is clearly
underway at the time of the Taiping Rebellion in 1854. India’s fate was sealed as it
became central to the China/Britain/India triangle. Central Asia remains “central”
to the region, and Britain enters the “Great Game” for control of key routes to
India. Frank touches on Africa during this period, and notes significant growth.
Latin American statistics are reviewed and we find more of the same. Everywhere
in the periphery there is more growth, more production, and more development,
not less, as we have been taught to expect.
The period from 1870 to 1919 finds real changes in the nature of the global
system. Humanity was reorganized by mass popular migrations from traditional
population centers in Europe and Asia to newer regions. The so-called “Second
Industrial Revolution” drove significant industry and science into Europe, as well
as into parts of the periphery. The Great Divergence that subjugated Asia to Europe
takes full flower, as do the “multi-angular multi-linear” (that is – “triangular”)
trade relations that moved goods and concentrated wealth. Finally, the generation
of physical and social entropy on a nearly unprecedented scale emerges, and its
dissipation would help establish and then solidify the gap between the advan-
taged and the disadvantaged. Frank concludes that in about 1880 the world really
did change. Europe widened the gap, and the growth and further integration of
global trade led to new concentrations of wealth and new mechanisms for its
accumulation.
Frank is quick to note that the British, who were able to profit so success-
fully, did not really produce all that much, nor export much either. Instead, Britain
imported more and more, and did so on the strength of its ability to manipulate
the content and direction of the production and trade of its colonies, dependencies,
and other partners. Here we see the workings of the multi-angular, multi-lateral
systems that emerged. Britain produced less, exported less, and earned more,
allowing increasing wages at home, and growing inequality in the world.
If there is a single source of Britain’s success it is India, which stood at the
base of the system in terms of both production and finance. The “Home Charges,”
the silver standard, control of banking, and export triangles all advanced British
interests. Understood from this perspective, the periphery was not peripheral
because it did not produce, lacked productivity, mishandled finance, lacked indus-
triousness, resources, or ingenuity. There was precious little “traditionalism” that
had to be overcome, and precious little “modernization” that had to be emulated.
The relevant dynamics are to be found outside these much vaunted categories. In
reality, the periphery was not as fundamentally weak, and the core not as funda-
mentally strong, as we thought. And as a result, conditions might alter, perhaps
dramatically, because the processes that actually served to maintain the inequali-
ties of the global system are not all that well integrated into the societies that
participated.
Frank passed away before he could write a conclusion to this work. All he
left us were seven pages of general comments on how this analysis would help
ReOrient the twentieth century as well. There is enough information in the manu-
script for us to follow all of Frank’s analytical advances, save perhaps that of
entropy. We can also admire his incorporation of relatively new concerns such
as global migration and environmental crises into the mix. The entire manuscript
has gone through a series of edits, and my hope is to complete the remainder of
the work in 2011 so that it might be published in 2012. Once generally available
I believe ReOrient the Nineteenth Century will provide a great deal of fodder for
academic mills. It offers a series of interesting tools and insights. With Frank’s
passing, it falls to others to build on this novel and important re-conceptualization
of the global political economy.
References
Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250–1350.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Clark, Robert. 1997. The Global Imperative: An Interpretive History of the Spread of
Humankind. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReOrient: Political Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA:
Hornborg, Alf. 2001. The Power of the Machine. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Teggart, Frederick. 1939. Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
4
The modern world system under
Asian hegemony
The silver standard world economy 1450–17501
Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank
Editorial note by Barry K. Gills

Unfortunately, the original text of this article ends rather abruptly, ‘unfinished’.
The original file was corrupted or damaged at the time, and the final conclusion
section was lost, and was never retrievable. This is why the original article was
never published.
This paper was written during the period of February–March 1994, while
Andre Gunder Frank was in residence in our private home, working at Newcastle
University on the basis of a visiting fellowship. The intention of this visit was to
work with me on a sequel to our first joint book, The World System: Five Hundred
Years or Five Thousand? (Frank and Gills 1993a), and, following Gunder’s sugges-
tion, to analyse the period 1450–1750, utilizing the same ‘world system’ analytical
framework we had developed in the first book. We quickly established a division of
labour for this new project, in which Gunder focused on India and the commodity
trade, and I concentrated on international monetary issues and on East Asia.
During this brief period of initial work on the project, we undertook an intensive
survey of the literature to explore a set of working hypotheses and central research
questions guiding the new project. Among these was the proposition that during
the period 1450–1750 the world system as a whole was on a ‘silver standard’ (thus
the title of the paper), which of course was implying a precedent and comparison
to the subsequent ‘gold standard’ during the nineteenth century, when the world
system came under European hegemony. In our view, it was silver, during this
earlier period, that constituted the central metal in the international flows in the
trade and monetary system of the period (though obviously, the overall monetary
system of the world system was tri-metallic, consisting of gold, silver and copper/
bronze). We were consciously following the dictum of my former Professor of
International Political Economy at the London School of Economics (LSE), Susan
The modern world system under Asian hegemony 51
Strange, to ‘follow the money’, with the intention of mapping the main flows of
both commodity trade and monetary movements, which are inextricably linked,
thereby ultimately to assess the pattern of the accumulation of capital on the
world scale. Thus, among the maps and charts in this chapter, Maps 4.1 and 4.2
were designed jointly (and Map 4.1 was commissioned for improved graphic
representation from a cartographer in the Geography Department of Newcastle
University, using our original schematic drawing as his basis); Map 4.3 was a
working draft in Gunder’s hand and design, with an accompanying legend for
the codes; and Maps 4.4 and 4.5 were designed by Gunder as revisions of earlier
maps by K. N. Chaudhuri.
We were investigating, on the basis of our original framework elaborated in
the joint articles by Gills and Frank published in 1990, 1991 and 1992, and the
joint book by Frank and Gills of 1993, whether the world system had a ‘super-
accumulation’ zone or a ‘super accumulator’ during this period. There were two
primary candidates for this position: India and China. The central working hypoth-
esis, which I initially proposed in the preliminary discussions for the planning of
the project (which tended to take place over our kitchen table in the evenings),
was that the entire period 1450–1750 could be shown to be ‘before European
hegemony’ and was a period in which the world system as a whole could be
considered as ‘Asia-centered’. The other related primary working hypothesis was
that Europeans did not ascend to a position more advantageous than their Asian
counterparts in the world system before at least the third or the fourth quartile
of the eighteenth century, contra what was contended by Wallerstein and other
theorists of global European ascendance. Moreover, we held the view, intrinsic
in all our earlier work, that the ‘modern world system’ was not the creation of
‘European capitalism’ or its presumed diffusion to the rest of the world, includ-
ing and especially Asia, but a consequence of processes already embedded in the
world system ‘before European hegemony’ and an expression of system-wide
interaction, that is, processes occurring on a world scale overall, in which Asia
remained the predominant economic zone. Whether the world system as a whole
could therefore be shown empirically to be under ‘Asian hegemony’ was another
central concern and research question of the joint project (again, as reflected in
the article’s title).
Finally, we were also looking for evidence concerning the continuation (or pos-
sibly some alteration) of our ‘world system cycle’ and ‘long cycle’ of expansion
and contraction in the world system, as established in our earlier work (Gills and
Frank 1992). We wanted to re-assess the impact of the integration of the Americas
into the world system, and in particular the influx of large amounts of bullion
from the Americas into the pre-existing circuits of world trade in Afro-Eurasia,
with particular attention to India and China, as well as Southeast Asia, in terms of
effects both on the pattern of production and trade, and on monetary flows and
especially the pattern of the accumulation of capital. Given my part in our division
of labour, I posited in my first version of the introduction to this paper that there
had been a:
52 Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank
world crisis approximately in the 1640s, which was perhaps primarily a world
monetary crisis in terms of origins . . . However, this crisis in the 1640s was
probably not as serious as some have considered it to be, or in comparison
to other general world crises. Though there were apparently systemic effects
in many regions, such as famines in Japan, China, and India, and political
upheavals in China especially, but also in the Ottoman empire, in Japan,
and of course in some European states (e.g. England and France), many
states weathered the economic storm, such as Japan, the Ottomans, and the
Mughals. It was the Ming that most spectacularly fell. There was also seri-
ous disruption of trade in East Asia due to the “seclusion” policy of Japan,
the revolt of the Portuguese against Spain, rivalries of the Dutch and English
companies, and the Qing war against the Ming base in maritime southern
and coastal China. However, growth and stability eventually returned and
a newly reorganized world economy recovered from the “mini-crisis” of the
mid seventeenth century. Overall there is still ample evidence of growth
during the seventeenth century.
(Gills and Frank 1994)
Overall, we viewed the research presented in this paper as an aspect of our

critique of Eurocentric world history and as a necessary ‘corrective’ to the dis-
tortions of both the conventional liberal narrative of the ‘rise of the West’ and
the rather early world-system ‘European hegemony’ proposed in Wallerstein’s
analysis. Finally, although this article was intended to be a first draft of our second
joint book, other factors in our lives intervened, including Gunder’s relocation
to Toronto, Canada, to live with Nancy Howell, and the increasing personal dif-
ficulties I encountered in working closely with him. Eventually I was faced with a
dilemma, and an ultimatum from my wife, Dong-Sook Gills: ‘either live with me,
or work with Gunder’. I chose. I decided to withdraw from close collaboration,
and Gunder went on to finish this project as a single author. Years later, Gunder
and I remained close personal friends, until the end. I was honoured to present a
formal eulogy to a small party of the family and close friends during the funeral,
at the home of Gunder’s son Miguel and his wife Fiona.
In the preface to ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Gunder (1998)
makes it clear that the turning point in his thinking first took place when he read
and reviewed Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World
System A.D. 1250–1350 some years before the publication of that book. In 1987
Gunder contributed a comment on the manuscript to a special issue of a journal
devoted to an article-length version of Abu-Lughod’s thesis. That, says Gunder,
led him back to his own ‘sneaking suspicion’ about the ‘possible earlier roots
of the “modern” world system’ (Frank 1998: xix) Whereas Abu-Lughod regarded
her ‘thirteenth-century world system’ as a forerunner of a different modern one
(thereby accepting Wallerstein’s argument of its independent origin post 1450),
Frank’s critique and the origin of his own ‘world system perspective’ lay in his
counter-argument that the:
‘modern capitalist world-system’ was not the reinvention, but the continua-
tion of Abu-Lughod’s version of the same world system already in existence
since at least 1250. However, if this world system already existed two hundred
years before Wallerstein’s starting date of 1450, then why not still earlier?
(Frank 1998: xix)
Frank outlines that, after reading Abu-Lughod, he then engaged with Wallerstein’s
recognition of a ‘long swing’ pattern traced back as early as 1050 ad – in a manu-
script Wallerstein circulated in 1989. Wallerstein, as editor of Review, agreed to
publish Gunder’s reply arguing that the ‘origins’ (and thus the nature) of the
modern world system should be traced back as far as the evidence would take us
(Frank 1990a).
The preface to ReOrient then turns to a recounting of his partnership with
myself:
Barry Gills had already written (but never published) something similar on his
own several years before. When he read the draft of my 1990 article, we made
the initially obvious connection and then started to work it out. The results
were our joint articles on “The Cumulation of Accumulation” on long cycles
from 1700 B.C. to 1700 A.D., on an interdisciplinary introduction to the five-
thousand-year world system, and the book The World System: Five Hundred
Years or Five Thousand? of which we are contributing editors (Gills and Frank
1990, 1991, 1992; Frank and Gills 1992, 1993a).2 Gills generously shared his
erudition with me, both of his historical lore and his theoretical sophistica-
tion. He also loaned me much of his well-selected library and his own early
manuscripts. Therein, he was of enormous help to push or allow me to go
much further much faster than I otherwise might have. However, he also
drew me into some directions about ‘international relations’ and ‘hegemony’
that I liked less and pursued mostly for the sake of our collaboration.
(Frank 1998: xx)
The preface to ReOrient also recounts how, in parallel, commencing in 1989,

Gunder began engaging with Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall. Their
interests in researching ‘world-systems’ intersected with the joint project we had
recently commenced upon, where ‘These include several small ones (i.e. world-
systems) but also the major one Gills and I were researching’ (Frank 1998: xxi). It
recounts further how he met David Wilkinson at about the same time, as did I, and
saw common interest in his investigation of the ‘central civilization’ or ‘central
world system’ (Frank 1998: xxi). Gunder also met Stephen Sanderson at the 1989
meeting of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations
(ISCSC) and William H. McNeill, who became a correspondent and supporter of
the new world system work by Gunder, and who later contributed the foreword
to our book in 1993. Gunder also met Jerry Bentley at the same pivotal meeting,
who had just launched the Journal of World History and who, again, became a
confidant and supporter of Gunder’s new approach, quickly publishing both a

version of Gunder’s review and critique of Abu-Lughod and Wallerstein (Frank
1990b) and his ‘Plea for World System History’ in 1991. Gunder then recounts
how he worked with Steve Sanderson on the project that became first a special
issue of Comparative Civilizations Review and then the book edited by Sanderson,
Civilizations and World Systems (1995). Initially, Sanderson considered publishing
our joint 1994 article ‘The Modern World System under Asian Hegemony: The
Silver Standard World Economy 1450–1750’, but as the conclusion had been lost
irretrievably, he decided not to go forward as the paper was deemed not ready for
publication. In the end, Gunder contributed a single authored piece on ‘Re-reading
Braudel and Wallerstein’ (Frank 1995), and I contributed a piece on the ‘continuity
thesis’ entitled ‘Capital and Power in the Processes of World History’ (Gills 1995).
Gunder then recounts the parallel developments by George Modelski and William
R. Thompson in their historical research into waves of innovation and Kondratieff
waves starting in ad 930, and also their work on ‘prehistoric world system evolu-
tion’. Finally, he concludes these two pages of intellectual history with a personal
note of thanks: ‘The collaboration, help, and encouragement of these colleagues
and now also friends was already acknowledged in greater detail in the preface to
The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? [Frank and Gills 1993a] and
is gladly reaffirmed here’ (Frank 1998: xxi). Gunder also mentions how we were
joined by Jonathan Friedman and his wife Kaisa Ekholm. This then, along with our
preface to the 1993 book, documents the coming together of what Randall Collins
might call a new ‘circle of correspondence’ or a ‘school of world-historical systems
analysis’, in which all of the named scholars were deeply involved, and became
also members of the World-Historical Systems Theory Group of the International
Studies Association, founded by Gills and Wilkinson in 1989, precisely to bring
all these lines of research together into a single multi-disciplinary and multi-
perspectival arena of joint development and exchange of ideas. In this sense,
truly, the world system perspective has always been the product of a larger circle
of scholars moving in related and mutually fruitful direction, but who also each
maintained and still maintain their own distinctive approaches and arguments.
Finally, to complete this story of the origins and provenance of the 1994 joint
article, Gunder recalls and credits the initiation of the ReOrient project as follows:
I gladly accepted the invitation in March 1994 from my often co-author Barry
Gills and his University of Newcastle to begin the joint construction there of
such an alternative perspective. Its twenty-page first draft was entitled ‘The
Modern World System under Asian Hegemony: The Silver Standard World
Economy 1450–1750’ [Gills and Frank 1994]. This work was interrupted,
largely due to illness on my part. Only in late 1995 did it become possible
again for me to pursue and now to expand this work, but now, after my
retirement from the University of Amsterdam, on my own here in Toronto.
(Frank 1998: xxvii)
The alternative perspective he is referring to here is also indicated in the preface,

where Gunder explains that ReOrient was:
my first more holistic attempt at extending Denemark’s and my ‘perspective

of the (whole) world’ onward to early modern world economic history. The
whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts. It also shapes the parts and
their relations to each other, which in turn transform the whole.
(Frank 1998: xxvii)
The real conclusions to this initial joint article, therefore, now published here
for the first time more than sixteen years after the time of writing, can be found in
Andre Gunder Frank’s magisterial work, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.
The reader is therefore recommended to consult that work for the follow-on to
this initial joint draft, a paper that has been superseded and surpassed by Frank’s
continued and dedicated work. The chapters in ReOrient most closely related to
the 1994 joint article are Chapter 2, ‘The Global Trade Carousel 1400–1800’, espe-
cially the ‘Summary of a Sinocentric World Economy’, pp. 126–130; Chapter 3,
‘Money Went Around the World and Made the World Go Around’, pp. 131–164;
and Chapter 7 ‘Historiographic Conclusions and Theoretical Implications’, pp.
321–360. Some sections of text from the Gills and Frank draft article of March
1994 are reincorporated in ReOrient, for example on pp. 166–167, 177–178, 185
and 224. Gunder referenced the draft in the bibliography of ReOrient as ‘Gills, Barry
K. and A. G. Frank. 1994. “The Modern World System under Asian Hegemony. The
Silver Standard World Economy 1450–1750.” Newcastle: University of Newcastle
Department of Politics. Unpublished manuscript’. This is a reference also to the
fact that the draft article was accepted by my colleague Martin Harrop into the
Department of Politics Working Papers Series at Newcastle University at the time
of Gunder’s visiting fellowship.
At the time of his death, Andre Gunder Frank was working on a further sequel,
tentatively entitled ReOrient the Nineteenth Century. At the time of Gunder’s
funeral in Luxembourg, after consulting with his widow Alison and his son Paul,
I called Robert Denemark from Gunder and Alison’s apartment and asked him to
take on the task of preparing a posthumously published edition of the unfinished
manuscript of ReOrient the Nineteenth Century.
Between the efforts of Alison, myself and Bob Denemark, we retrieved the
numerous draft chapters and many versions of these and other notes and working
materials as best we could from Gunder’s study and computer files. After much
cross-checking of multiple versions and very careful work, Robert Denemark has
now edited a version of the unfinished final book, which will be published. The
reader is advised to consult the excellent summary of the provenance and circle
of scholars involved in this final manuscript written by Robert Denemark and con-
tained in the present collection of commemorative essays.
References to editorial note

Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250–
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1987. “Comment on Janet Abu-Lughod’s ‘The Shape of the
World System in the Thirteenth Century’.” Studies in Comparative International
Development, 22 (4): 35–37.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1990a. “A Theoretical Introduction to 5,000 Years of World
System History.” Review, 13 (2) (Spring): 155–248.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1990b. “The Thirteenth Century World System: A Review Essay.”
Journal of World History, 1 (2): 249–256.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1991. “A Plea for World System History,” Journal of World History,
2 (1): 1–28.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1995. “The Modern World System Revisited: Re-reading
Braudel and Wallerstein.” pp. 206–208 in Civilizations and World Systems: Studying
World-Historical Change, edited by Stephen S. Sanderson. Walnut Creek, CA:
Altamira.
Frank, Andre Gunder and Barry K. Gills. 1992. “The Five Thousand Year World System:
An Interdisciplinary Introduction.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 18 (1)
(Spring): 1–79.
Frank, Andre Gunder and Barry K. Gills (eds.). 1993a. The World System: Five Hundred
Years or Five Thousand? London: Routledge.
Frank, Andre Gunder and Barry K. Gills. 1993b. “World System Economic Cycles and
Hegemonial Shift to Europe 100 BC to AD 1500.” Journal of European Economic
History, 22 (1): 155–183.
Gills, Barry K. 1995. “Capital and Power in the Processes of World History.” pp. 136–
162 in Civilizations and World Systems: Studying World-Historical Change, edited by
Stephen S. Sanderson. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.
Anthropology, 15 (1): 19–42.
edited by Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Gills, Barry K. and Andre Gunder Frank. 1992. “World System Cycles, Crises, and
Hegemonial Shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD.” Review, 15 (4) (Fall): 621–687.
Gills, Barry K. and A. G. Frank. 1994. “The Modern World System under Asian
Hegemony. The Silver Standard World Economy 1450–1750.” Newcastle: University
of Newcastle Department of Politics. Unpublished manuscript.
Sanderson, Stephen S. (ed.). 1995. Civilizations and World Systems: Studying
World-Historical Change. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.
The primary purpose of this study is to extend the analysis begun in Gills and
Frank (1992) on world system cycles, crises, and hegemonic cycles to the modern
world system post 1450, and to search for evidence of our distinctive “long cycle”
as outlined in that work and elsewhere (Frank and Gills 1993). We seek to offer a
world systemic alternative to Eurocentrism, which is more Afro-Asian centered,
and therefore more humanocentric.
In the post-Cold War international environment, the air is rife with a scent of
confusion and confounding hypotheses, not to mention renewed “culture wars.”
Perhaps there is even something of a crisis of global civilization, some saying the
present is giving birth to such, others that this is precisely what is now passing
away. In such a situation it is useful to re-examine history and our understanding
of the present through history. It is in this spirit that we explore the modern world
system from the point of view, not of the distortions of inherited Eurocentrism, but
rather through the corrective lenses of appropriate “Asian centeredness,” reflect-
ing Asia’s true weight and importance in the course of world history, including
modern history.
In addition to the above rationale, the much commented upon renewed
industrial-economic rise of East Asia counsels a re-examination of modern and
economic world history from a perspective that accords Asia its due place in the
historical past as well as in the present and future. The present economic [re]sur-
gence of parts of Asia would thus appear as not so novel if Asia were recognized
to have had a prominent place in the world economy in the past.
Yet Asia’s rightful and historically documented place has been denied by the
dominance of excessively Eurocentric perspectives on early modern and recent
world economic history. Accordingly, we wish to help right these Euro- (or
Western-)centric misinterpretations by historians and the general public by offer-
ing a more Asian-centered interpretation of modern and economic world history.
This task is also timely in view of the already widespread present and foresee-
ably still growing future anti-Western sentiment, the iceberg tips of which are
manifest in Islamic, Hindu, and myriad other fundamentalist, ethnic, and various
nationalist movements, as well as in the reaction thereto of Western pundits under
such titles as “Jihad vs. McWorld” (Barber 1992) and “Clash of Civilizations”
(Huntington 1993).
Summary of the argument

We re-examine the conventional understanding of European hegemony in the
“modern world system” from 1400 to 1800. We pursue our earlier hypotheses: (1)
capital accumulation is more important than “power” per se; (2) rarely if ever is
there any “single” or “unipolar” hegemon; rather hegemony is usually “shared”
among “interlinked” hegemonies; (3) there is a world economy-scale cyclical
pattern of faster/slower economic growth and rising/declining hegemonies. We
argue that the so-called “European hegemony” in the modern world system was
very late in developing and was quite incomplete and never unipolar. In reality,
during the period 1450–1750, sometimes regarded as the period of “primitive

accumulation” leading to full capitalism, the world system was still very pre-
dominantly under Asian hegemonic influences. The Chinese Ming/Qing, Turkish
Ottoman, Indian Mughal, and Persian Safavid empires were economically and
politically very powerful and only waned vis-à-vis the Europeans toward the end
of this period and thereafter. Therefore, if anything, the modern world system was
under Asian hegemony, not European. Likewise, much of the real dynamism of
the world economy also still lay in Asia throughout this period, not in Europe.
We examine the impact of the Europeans within this otherwise Asian-dominated
world economy. We argue that the most important European impact was the injec-
tion of new supplies of American bullion – and thereby themselves – into the
already well-established Eurasian economy. The Europeans did not in any sense
“create” either the world economic system itself nor “capitalism.” What the injec-
tion of new liquidity into the world economy actually seems to have done was
to make important, though also limited, changes in financial flows and trade and
production patterns within the world economy, and to permit the Europeans to
participate more actively in the same. However, Europe itself was not a first-rank
power nor economic core region during these three centuries. The core regions,
especially of industrial production, were in China and India; and West Asia and
Southeast Asia also remained economically more important than Europe. We
will try to present estimates of gross national product (GNP) or something like
that by major regions before 1800. Braudel (1992) uses estimates from Bairoch
(1981) according to which the Asian economy was still five times larger than the
European-American one in 1750.
Likewise, China and India were the primary centers of the accumulation of
capital in the world system, and China was in overall balance of trade surplus
throughout most of this period. Indeed, Europe was in deficit with all regions to
the East. West Asia was in surplus with Europe, but in deficit with India. India was
in surplus westward but in deficit eastward to Southeast Asia and China, whence
India re-exported bullion received from the West. In political terms, the hegem-
onic influence of China, India, and the Ottomans was considerably greater than
that of the Europeans. In our terms (Gills and Frank 1990, 1991, 1992; Frank and
Gills 1993), the candidates for the position of “super accumulator” in the world
economy are all in Asia during this period. China is the frontrunner, exporting
huge quantities of valuable commodities and importing vast quantities of silver.
India, however, does not seem to have been far “behind” China in this regard,
being the seat of very significant industrial centers, particularly in cotton textiles,
and importing huge quantities of bullion, being a “sink” for gold in particular.
West Asia too seems to have continued to prosper both from its own industrial
base, in cotton and silk textiles, for instance, and from trans-shipments of com-
modities between Europe and the rest of Asia.
Both Southeast Asia and Central Asia appear to have prospered, largely on the
trans-shipments of bullion and goods between regions, but in the case of Southeast
Asia also in terms of silk exports of its local production, especially to Japan. One
thing is very clear: Europe was not a major industrial center in terms of exports
to the rest of the world economy, and in fact it had a chronic balance of payments
deficit due to the bullion drain to Asia. Only its colonial sphere in the Americas
explains its viability in the world economy, without which it could not have made
good its huge deficits in the commodities trade with Asia. This problem was not
overcome until the eighteenth century.
Continuing the above argument, the changes in the world economic system
after the injections of American (and Japanese) bullion were not simply due to
Europe, nor were they primarily a diffusion of changes occurring within Europe.
Instead, the injection of American bullion (overwhelmingly silver) provided new
liquidity and credit formation that facilitated an important, perhaps dramatic,
increase in worldwide production, which rose to meet the new monetary demand.
This “pull” factor therefore encouraged further industrial success and develop-
ment in China, India, Southeast Asia, and West Asia (including Persia). Even so,
the Europeans were able to sell very few manufactures to the East, and instead
profited primarily from inserting themselves into the “country trade” within the
Asian economy itself.
Europe’s source of profits was overwhelmingly derived from the carrying
trade and from parleying multiple transactions in bullion, money, and commodi-
ties in multiple markets, and, most importantly, across the entire world economy.
Previously, no one power or its merchants had been able to operate in all markets
simultaneously or to systematically integrate its activities between all of them in
such a coherent logic of profit maximization. The Europeans perfected this role
on the basis of three factors: their control over huge supplies of bullion; their
naval capabilities for “global reach”; and their imperial or private company forms
of commercial organization operating on a world scale. Europeans played the
differentials in exchange rates between gold and silver across all the countries
of Asia, and placed themselves in an indispensable middleman role in some cir-
cuits, particularly between China and Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries.
We also inquire into our long world economy/system cycle, in which we had
found 200- to 250-year phases of the expansion and contraction going back to
3000 bc (Gills and Frank 1992; Frank 1993a). Now we seek evidence for the
continuation (or not) of this cycle and patterns of hegemonic rise and decline into
the modern period. So far, our reading of the evidence is still very tentative. Like
others, we do seem to find a discernible pattern of long cyclical expansion from
about 1450. However, there seems to be evidence for its continuation far beyond
the “long sixteenth century” well into the eighteenth century, and that despite the
“seventeenth-century crisis.” Apparently, even over this much longer period or
“A” phase, the world economy expanded, with creation of vast new liquidity, cap-
ital formation, growth in population, urbanization, production, and trade, and the
simultaneous expansion of the imperial Ming, Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman, and
Hapsburg hegemonies, up to the mid-seventeenth century. During this period the
world economy was on a silver standard. The Ottomans, Ming, and India coined
huge quantities of silver to support their currency systems, ultimately sustained by

the huge and cheap production of American mines, but also Japanese.
However, during the “seventeenth-century crisis,” this A-phase expansion was
punctuated by a world monetary crisis culminating in the 1640s. Large-scale pro-
duction of silver had led to a fall in the value of silver relative to gold. This decline
in the price of silver and the inflation in terms of silver content led to a drastic drop
in the profitability and thus in the production of silver for export in the major pro-
ducer regions of Latin America, Central Europe, Persia, and Japan. Indeed, Japan
reacted to this crisis by prohibiting any export of silver whatsoever, after having
been a huge exporter during the previous period of the silver-based boom. In fact,
we suggest that Japan’s reaction to this crisis, the famous “seclusion” policy, may
be best explained in this world systemic context, that is, the economic position of
being in deficit with everyone. However, this crisis in the 1640s was probably not
as serious as some have considered it to be, or in comparison with other general
world crises, although there were apparently systemic effects in many regions,
such as famines in Japan, China, and India, perhaps associated with the “little ice
age,” political upheavals in China (leading to the fall of the Ming Dynasty and its
replacement by the Qing in 1644), the Cromwell Revolution of 1640 in England,
and the turmoil in the Ottoman empire [which Jack Goldstone (1991) analyzed in
terms of a common demographic-structural crisis].
Japan and some European states weathered the economic storm, perhaps
thanks in no small part to their continuing sources and supplies of silver, which
dried up much more for the unfortunate Ming. Nonetheless, there was also seri-
ous disruption of trade in East Asia because of the resulting “seclusion” policy
of Japan, the revolt of the Portuguese against Spain, rivalries of the Dutch and
English companies, and the Qing war against the Ming base in maritime southern
and coastal China – all of whose politics may be usefully reinterpreted against
the background of this silver shortage monetary crisis in a world on the silver
standard. In particular, it may be that devoting more attention to this silver short-
age monetary crisis can go a long way toward explaining the Japanese “political”
decision to “seclude” themselves and to leave only one door open to the Dutch,
who (unlike the Portuguese) offered Japan the possibility to export goods and not
just silver. Indeed, the Chinese partial withdrawals from maritime trade should
also be (re)analyzed against the background of similar financial considerations.
However, growth and stability returned and a newly reorganized world economy
recovered from the “mini-crisis” of the mid-seventeenth century. Overall, there is
still ample evidence of growth during the seventeenth century.
We also propose to inquire to what extent we can identify shorter economic
cycles, and especially financial crises and recessions, that were simultaneous in
many far-flung parts of the world economy. The recessions of the early 1760s,
1770s, and again 1780s were worldwide economic downturns, each of which
had far-reaching simultaneous political-economic repercussions at least in India,
Russia, Western Europe, and the Americas, including the American and French
Revolutions (Frank 1993b). Other such cases can surely be identified and should
be analyzed from a world economic perspective; and conversely the simultaneity

of such economic events in distant parts of the world is prima facie evidence of
their participation in a single world economic system, rather than in several dif-
ferent and distinct “world economies” as per Braudel, Wallerstein, et al. The
identification of long economic cycles back to 1700 bc (Gills and Frank 1992)
and even to 3000 bc (Frank 1993a), which were simultaneous across much of
Afro-Eurasia, is evidence, or indeed an operational definition, of the wide geo-
graphical extent of the world economy/system, the identification of which helps
us bound who was “in” the system or not.
We also wish to inquire into possible shorter “long” cycles, which are associ-
ated with Kondratieffs. Frank (1978) and Goldstein (1988) identified some back
into the seventeenth century, and Modelski and Thompson (1994)3 have now
identified nineteen “K-waves” beginning in ad 930. But can any of these cycles
be said to have been world economy/system wide? Modelski and Thompson say
so; but after the first four in China, they see them and hegemony to have been cen-
tered in Europe from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward. We certainly
do not and would have to find evidence for K-waves that include large parts of
the still-dominant Asia. Metzler (1994) claims to find them in Japan and maybe in
China, which would be a good start.
Returning to our thesis, Asian hegemony was not seriously threatened before
the second half of the eighteenth century. Islam’s geographic expansion contin-
ued through the sixteenth century. Hodgson (1974, 1993) and Djait (1985) are
emphatic that Islam was still decidedly dominant (hegemonic?) in the world at
the end of that century or even later and that any contemporary observer had good
grounds for anticipating more of the same. Even the European(ist) Braudel had
long insisted that the world economic center of gravity did not even begin to shift
westward until after the end of the sixteenth century. So it is not so far-fetched for
us not to see it until the end of the eighteenth century.
As far as changes in the “locus” of accumulation are concerned, Asians were
preponderant in the world economy/system in production, capital formation,
trade, and hegemonic power until circa 1750. Thus, the “locus” of accumulation
and power in the modern world system did not really change much during these
three centuries. China and India in particular remained first-ranked overall (i.e.
areas in surplus and also the areas of largest GNP), with West Asia not far
behind, whereas Europe was a deficit area and clearly of less significance than
Asia in the world production system and in size of GNP. It is also difficult
therefore to detect even any significant change in the relative position among the
Asian powers, Europe excluded. Europe did not emerge as a challenger “newly
industrializing country” until the eighteenth century. Before that time its profits
were based on imports not exports, the sine qua non of industrial ascendance,
then as now. The fundamental shift in locus in the modern world system, and
of industrial centers in particular, did not occur until the period of transition
1750–1850. That is when the fundamental hegemonic shift to Europe began to
take place, and not before.
Only in the second half of the eighteenth century, especially in the last quarter,
did decline trends accelerate in the Ottoman, Indian, and Chinese areas/empires.
The decline was earliest and most accelerated in India, with the gradual loss of
competitive advantages in textiles and the reversal of bullion flows (i.e. outward
rather than inward) after the mid-eighteenth century. However, the Bengali textile
industry was already in trouble before the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The accom-
panying political disarray of the Mughals and others rendered Asians vulnerable
to predatory European merchants and naval and ultimately political power. The
Europeans captured the carrying trade from the indigenous shipping and mer-
chants in the mid-eighteenth century on a new scale in Indian waters. India was
the first Asian hegemon to begin the “fall” to European hegemony. During the
early eighteenth century, however, there was still a boom in China under the
Qing, which may have been “delayed” by the decades necessary to defeat the
Ming and reorganize the country from the 1640s to the 1680s. Ottoman weakness
increased steadily during the eighteenth century, expansion having peaked in the
late seventeenth century. Ottoman power was gradually undermined in the late
eighteenth century by the ascendance of new industrial centers and the increasing
commercial dominance of the Europeans. Political power began to be eclipsed
by the Europeans at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, fol-
lowing Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. In China, economic dislocation occurred
rapidly in the early nineteenth century, for example through the opium trade and
its bullion drain of silver out of China, which destabilized the entire economic
system. This process of weakening culminated in the Opium Wars and the “fall”
of China.
Up to that time, that is, the emergence of the distinctive European-centered
world hegemonic order of the nineteenth century, there continued to be an
Asian cultural flowering and particularly of Islamic and Sinic culture, with an
Indic Islamic variant as well. There was no unipolar cultural system nor set of
international norms or mores. This occurred only in the nineteenth century and
was imposed through force by the Europeans’ cultural imperialism. It was then
projected backward into previous world history by a triumphalist West seeking
to convince the world of its inherent superiority. It is from this same nineteenth-
century imperialism that we still derive so many of our most distorted notions of
European hegemonic influence since the time of supposed “contact” with Asia in
the sixteenth century.
Thus, we can conclude that the world economy remained firmly under Asian
hegemony until the 1750–1850 period, when Asian economic and political power
waned. The “rise of the West” in Europe, therefore, far from pulling itself up by
its own bootstraps, should more properly be seen as being possible by ascend-
ing at that time in the world economy/system over the shoulders of the Asian
economy and hegemonies, which were then declining (cyclically?). We are led to
ask whether this period may have begun a ‘B” phase of world political-economic
decline in Asia to the benefit of the previously relatively marginal and now rapidly
ascending Europeans. The world system cycle we identified previously (Gills and
Frank 1992) implies that the simultaneous “fall” of so many important hegemonic
states, that is, the Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids, Qing, and Hapsburgs, would be
the accompaniment of a world system crisis and B phase.
In analogy to other periods of cyclical decline and transition, this period was
still one of “shared” hegemony between the declining Asians and the rising
Europeans. Only then was a new hegemonic order built with European power at
the center, in which a new period of industrial and economic expansion occurred,
now with rapid capital accumulation in Europe itself. This nineteenth-century
world hegemonic system was eventually followed by increasing intra-European
rivalry and rivalry with the United States and Japan, and culminated in a gen-
eral crisis and war between 1914 and 1945, leading to the construction of a new
hegemonic order and renewed world economic growth thereafter under American
leadership. However, the “American century” also lasted only twenty years. The
contemporary economic expansion in East Asia, beginning with Japan, then in
the East Asian newly industrializing countries (NICs), and now apparently also
in coastal China, may spell the beginnings of a return on a world economic scale
in which parts of Asia again play a leading role in the future as they did in the
not-so-distant past.
Putting Europe in its Afro-Asian place

Modern world and economic history has been (mis)read from the vantage point
of the ascendance of the West, which in turn has also been interpreted in almost
exclusively Eurocentric terms. This Western-centric bias in modern and economic
world history is so well nigh universal as to make its documentation hardly nec-
essary or even possible. Almost all modern and economic world history since
1500 and even before has (at least since the nineteenth century) been written as
though it began in Europe and then spread out from there to “incorporate” and
“modernize” first the Americas and then Africa and “traditional” Asia. Moreover,
the ancient roots of this “modernizing” process of recent “capitalist” economic
development and “enlightened” cultural/civilizational progress are also sought
first within (Western) Europe itself and earlier on in Rome and Greece, while
the “orientalizing” influence of Egypt and Mesopotamia upon Greece and Rome
is too often ignored. Even their ancient history is “Europeanized” as a supposed
direct descendant of modern European developments, and they drop out of sight
and out of mind again after their momentary “contributions” to European history
have been extracted from a Eurocentric perspective. Afro-Asians’ history is not
regarded in their own right, and their place in world and economic history, as well
as their far-reaching contributions to Europe itself, are completely disregarded
other than to note in passing the Asian origins of such “items” as numbers, com-
pass, gun powder, etc. – but omitting even printing, which originated in China
centuries before Gutenberg was born!
“Economic history” is even more confined to the West. The Study of Economic
History: Collected Inaugural Lectures 1893–1970 (Harte 1971) includes lectures
from twenty-one of the most eminent English-speaking economic historians who

review and comment on what their colleagues in the profession have written on
economic history over most of the past century – and almost every word is about
Europe and the United States. The People Without History (Wolf 1982) elsewhere
in the world appear to have even less economic history, and it seems to have had
absolutely no bearing on that of Europe or on the rise of “the West.” We will
argue below that this (mis)interpretation of modern and economic world history
is seriously erroneous, counter-factual, and anti-historic.
A whole library full of books and articles has been devoted to explaining “The
Rise of the West” in terms of its own supposed “exceptionalism.” Interestingly,
William McNeill (1963), the dean of world historians who used this as the title for
his path-breaking book, is among the few Western historians to take exception to
this exceptionalism. Not so E. L. Jones (1981), who revealingly entitles his book
The European Miracle, and many others, such as White (1962), Hall (1985), or
Baechler, Hall, and Mann (1988). They all find the rest of the world deficient or
defective in some crucial historical, economic, social, political, ideological, or
cultural respect in comparison to the West. Therefore, these authors also revert
to an internal explanation of the presumed superiority of the West to explain its
ascendance over the rest of the world. For all of them, the rise of Europe was a
unique “miracle” and not a product of Eurasian history and of shifts within the
world (system). However, as the Islamicist and world historian Marshall Hodgson
writes:
All attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre-Modern seminal traits in the
Occident can be shown to fail under close historical analysis, once other
societies begin to be known as intimately as the Occident. This also applies
to the great master, Max Weber, who tried to show that the Occident inherited
a unique combination of rationality and activism.
(Hodgson 1993: 86)
Hodgson (1993) and Blaut (1992, 1993) derisively call this “tunnel history”
derived from a tunnel vision, which sees only “exceptional” intra-European causes
and consequences and is blind to all extra-European contributions to modern
European and world history. Yet, as Blaut points out, in 1492 or 1500 Europe
still had no advantages of any kind over Asia and Africa, nor any distinctively
different “modes of production,” and there would then have been no reason to
anticipate the triumph of Europe or its “capitalism” three and more centuries later.
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century development of economic, scientific,
rational “technicalism” that Hodgson regards as the basis of the subsequent major
“transmutation” nonetheless also occurred, as he insists, on a worldwide basis and
not exclusively or even especially in Europe.
Yet even Blaut fails to see the Afro-Eurasian continuity in the early modern
world and economic history, for he marks a supposedly crucial breaking point
with the voyage of Columbus in 1492. Political scientists concerned with political
hegemony prefer the year of the division of the world between Spain and Portugal
in 1494 (Modelski and Thompson 1994). Both dates, of course, are chosen from
a European perspective, even if they radically altered the course of history in the
Americas. The voyage of Columbus in 1492 and that of Vasco da Gama in 1498
are also the dates and events that Adam Smith and Karl Marx already identified as
“the most important in the history of mankind.” The recent five hundredth anni-
versary of that date (1492) occasioned countless memorials that commemorated
the benefits or commiserated the “untold misfortunes” (as Adam Smith called
them) of the subsequent events. However, all agree that this date marked a new
departure – whether for good or bad – in world history. Yet this consensus about
the new departures since 1492 or 1500 obscures the perhaps even more important
continuity in the history of Afro-Eurasia across this supposed historical divide.
A particularly Eurocentric example of this kind of history is The Rise of the
Western World: A New Economic History by the 1993 Nobel laureate in econ
omics Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas (1973). It merits special note
not only for the recognition given to its author but also because of the explicitness
of its title – its emphasis on “new” – and the revision of received theory. Yet under
their subtitle “Theory and Overview: 1. The Issue,” and on the very first page,
they clearly state that “the development of an efficient economic organization
in Western Europe accounts for the rise of the West” (North and Thomas 1973:
1, our emphasis). They then trace this institutional change, and especially the
development of property rights, to increased economic scarcity, which was gener-
ated in turn by a demographic upturn in Western Europe. The rest of the world
was not there for them. Moreover, as North and Thomas (1973: vii) emphasize in
their preface, their economic history is also “consistent with and complementary
to” standard neoclassical economic theory, which we may suppose influenced the
award of the Nobel prize.
Marxist economic history seems different in using concepts such as “mode
of production” and “class struggle,” but it is equally Eurocentric. Both of these
concepts have generally also been interpreted within a framework of a single
“society” or social formation, or at least a single entity, whether that be a state
or a civilization. Thus, Marxist economic historians also look for the sources of
“the rise of the West” and “the development of capitalism” within Europe and are
equally or even more Eurocentric than their “bourgeois” opponents. Examples are
the famous debate in the 1950s on “the transition from feudalism to capitalism”
among Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahashi, Rodney Hilton, and
others (reprinted in Hilton 1976) and the Brenner Debate on “European feudal-
ism” (Aston and Philpin 1985). De Ste. Croix (1981) on the class struggles in the
ancient “Greco-Roman” civilization and Anderson (1974) on “Japanese feudal-
ism” also considered these as a particular “society.”
In his excellent critique of Perry Anderson and others, Teshale Tibebu (1990:
83–88, emphasis in original) also argues persuasively that much of their analysis
of “Feudalism, Absolutism and the Bourgeois Revolution” and “their obsession

with the specificity . . . [and] supposed superiority of Europe” is Western “civili-
zational arrogance,” “ideology dressed up as history,” and “Orientalism painted
red,” that is, the “continuation of orientalism by other means.” The other means
is provided by theoretical Marxism.” It also provided, we might add, the nefari-
ous Eurocentric concept and terminology of “the Asiatic mode of production,” of
which there was nary a trace to be found anywhere in the myriad of real-world
productive and other relations anywhere in Asia itself. Nevertheless, this concept
bequeathed Marxism with a systematic bias against Asian development, which
was regarded as traditional, backward, and stagnant.
Thus, the reverse side of the European exceptionalist coin has been the equally
Eurocentric theses about “orientalism,” which have been justly criticized by
Edward Said (1978), Martin Bernal (1987), Samir Amin (1989), and Hichem
Djait (1985) writing against Eurocentrism. All of them show how nineteenth-
century European liberalism invented a single “oriental” grab bag from which
to distinguish European “exceptionalism.” Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production”
was no better, and only little better were Weber’s studies on other religions that
did not share “the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.” However, these
critiques of Eurocentrism are limited almost entirely to an ideological discourse
and critique of Eurocentrism. A world historical, not to mention world economic,
alternative to Eurocentric distortions of early modern world history is still wanting
– except for the following still very partial initiatives. [Teggart’s (1939) Eurasian
approach seems to have been too far ahead of its time, and many good histories
of Asia or its regions on which we rely rarely have or offer a “world” historical
perspective.]
In recent years, Fernand Braudel’s (1992) Perspective of the World and
Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974, 1980, 1989) Modern World System have deliber-
ately tried to break away from some of this Eurocentrism. So did Frank’s (1978)
World Accumulation 1492–1789 and the above-mentioned book by Samir Amin
(1989). Yet the last three (Frank even in the title!) still mark 1492 or thereabouts
as a breaking point, and they still read all succeeding history as having been
centered on Europe and its westward and eastward expansion. Only Braudel
(1992: 57) writes that “I do not share Immanuel Wallerstein’s fascination with
the sixteenth century” as the time that the modern world-system emerged in
Europe. Nonetheless, he also concentrates on the emergence and expansion of
a supposed autonomous “European world economy” – even though his book is
replete with evidence that Europe was part and parcel of a wider world economy,
whose main economic activity in all manner of ways remained in Asia through
the eighteenth century (Frank 1994 cites Braudel chapter and verse to this effect).
Indeed, Wallerstein (1989; Palat and Wallerstein 19904) also supplies abundant
evidence of economic life of Asia in close relation with that of Europe before the
latter supposedly incorporated the former into its “modern world-system.”5
A more Asian-centered alternative reading of modern and economic world
history gives Asia more of its historical due. Two recent pioneering departures
stand out: Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) described a thirteenth-century Eurasian world
system, Before European Hegemony, and Chaudhuri (1990) analyzed Asia Before
Europe (also see Chaudhuri 1985). As their titles imply, these writers recognize
the significance of Asia before European hegemony. However, Abu-Lughod limits
her purview to the thirteenth century and does not pursue Eurasian economic his-
tory into more modern times. Only Chaudhuri recognizes that Asian economic life
continued to prosper long after the supposed sixteenth century “rise of the West.”
Paradoxically, however, as we will note below, so does Braudel (1992) when he is
not blinded by fixation on “the European world economy.”
Although he was not a close “relative” of this group, another important pioneer
in this recognition was Marshall Hodgson. His magisterial three-volume Venture
of Islam (1974) not only claimed the central place in world history for Islam from
the seventh through the ninth centuries, but also argued that Islam still or again
merited this place through its expansion (again) in the fourteenth to sixteenth cen-
turies. Similarly, Hichem Djait (1985: 110) observes that in 1600 the greater part
of the human race was in Islamic lands ruled by the Turkish Ottomans, Persian
Safavids, Indian Mughals, and other Muslims ranging from Africa to Southeast
Asia. Hodgson (1993: 100) finds Muslims at both their political and cultural peak
in the sixteenth and still in the seventeenth centuries.
The recent compilation of some of Hodgson’s still earlier published articles
and of manuscripts that remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1968
again underscores the importance of Rethinking World History (Hodgson 1993) in
giving Afro-Eurasian peoples and regions outside of Europe their historical due.
Long ago already, Hodgson (1993) wrote:
A Westernist image of world history, if not disciplined by a more adequate

perspective, can do untold harm; in fact it is now doing untold harm. That
is why I lay so much stress on not assuming “decadence” in Islamic society
before the eighteenth century unless one has really good evidence . . . One
of the most important tasks of world history, as I see it, is to give people a
sense of the pattern of time periods and geographical areas which is free of
the multifarious Westernist presuppositions. (p. 94)
It has become clear that historical life, from early times at least till two or
three centuries ago, was continuous across the Afro-Eurasian zone of civili-
zation: that zone was ultimately indivisible . . . [and] is the only context large
enough to provide a framework for answering the more general and more
basic historical questions that can arise. (p. 17)
We must recognize the limited role in history of our West, as one region
among others, during much of its development [sic] distinctly peripheral; and
even in modern times, as not the substance of the age. (p. 292)
We must force ourselves to realize what it means to say that the West is not
the modern world, gradually assimilating backward areas to itself; but rather
a catalyst, creating new conditions for other forces to work under. (p. 290)
The great modern Transmutation presupposed numerous inventions and dis-

coveries originating in all the several citied people of the Eastern Hemisphere,
discoveries of which many of the earlier basic ones were not made in Europe
. . . At least as important was the very existence of the vast world market, con-
stituted by the Afro-Eurasian commercial network, which had cumulatively
come into being largely under Muslim auspices, by the middle of the second
millennium . . . Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Eurasian
Oikoumene, of which the Occident had been an integral part, the Western
Transmutation would be almost unthinkable . . . [for only therein] European
fortunes could be made and European imaginations exercised. (p. 47)
Indeed, even the master Europeanist Braudel finds that
it was only because the accessible markets of the Far East formed a series of
coherent economies linked together in a fully operational world-economy,
that the merchant capitalism of Europe was able to lay siege to them and to
use their own vitality.
(Braudel 1992: 496)
A similar critique of Eurocentric misrepresentation of the early modern his-

torical record had also already been made by Jacques Gernet (1985) from the
perspective of his History of Chinese Civilization:
what we have acquired the habit of regarding – according to the history of

the world that is in fact no more than the history of the West – as the begin-
ning of modern times was only the repercussion of the upsurge of the urban,
mercantile civilizations whose realm, extended, before the Mongol invasion,
from the Mediterranean to the Sea of China. The West gathered up part of this
legacy and received from it the leaven which was to make possible its own
development. The transmission was favored by the crusades of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries and the expansion of the Mongol empire in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries . . . There is nothing surprising about the
Western backwardness: the Italian cities . . . were at the terminus of the great
commercial routes of Asia . . . The upsurge of the West, which was only to
emerge from its relative isolation thanks to its maritime expansion, occurred
at a time when the two great civilizations of Asia [China and Islam] were
threatened.
(Gernet 1985: 347–348)
Or, as Abu-Lughod (1989: 388) put it succinctly, “the decline of the East preceded
the rise of the West.” But the question comes: When did this happen, and why?
Even the Europeanist Braudel points out that this change did not occur in the
sixteenth century, as is so widely claimed and as even Wallerstein (1974) argues in
his examination of the rise of the “modern world-system.” The historical evidence
shows rather unequivocally that this “Great Transformation” (Polanyi 1957), or
“transmutation” as Hodgson calls it, was not completed or even far advanced until
the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth. Until then
there was still the “Perspective of the World in Asia Before European Hegemony
in the Modern World-System” to combine the titles of Braudel, Chaudhuri,
Abu-Lughod, and Wallerstein.
Such a reinterpretation of modern and economic world history has other far-
reaching implications: cultural connotations that contradict the Eurocentrism of
alleged European “exceptionalism”; theoretical ramifications for our reading of
history in general and economic history in particular, and for the analysis of the
world system and its cycles of economic and hegemonic expansion and decline;
and political or ideological significance, which questions the utility of “capital-
ism” (or for that matter “feudalism” or “socialism”) as a category of scientific
analysis and political policy. This article pursues these important tasks by building
on the aforementioned pioneers and by carrying our own work on The World
System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (Frank and Gills 1993; see also
Frank 1994) further forward through the early modern period.
World trade network and balances by regions 1400–1800

Long before the birth of the “European world economy” and still long after its
advent, the world economy had a far-flung division of labor and intricate trade
system, which was preponderantly Asian. The introduction of American silver
(and to a lesser extent gold) and with it of Europeans into this Afro-Eurasian
economy only increased and accelerated quantitative economic growth in an
otherwise qualitatively ongoing system. The accompanying maps and charts are
a very preliminary attempt to summarize this network of world trade – including
many bulk commodities, even of daily necessities such as rice – for the period
between about 1450 and 1750. (The most schematic world economic overview
is in Map 4.1; increasing regional detail, mostly still only for South Asia, is in
Maps 4.2–4.5). For the transatlantic trade network, we provisionally still rely on
the schematic map presented in Frank (1978), but we will wish to revise that map
in the light of our mapping of the global network.6 Various major “regions” and
inter-regional trade, especially in and through West and Central Asia, but also in
China, still receive short shrift. Moreover, the (non)identification of both cyclical
and tendential changes, and local or even regional ups and downs, is – in this pre-
liminary version – sacrificed to emphasizing the essential stability and continuity
in this world economy.
wool
textiles
Baltic
raw
materials Western Eastern
North Europe Europe
America manufatures, wools, textiles,
wool, textiles, furs,naval stores,
metals flax and hemp
Russia
silk
spices
pepper
Central Asia
ceramic horses Japan
silk sugar, spice,
West silk silk, medicine,
copper
Asia velvet
West Indies arms cotton

silk
China
ceramic
sugar
silk
cotton,
rice, pulses,
rice,
slaves,
wheat, oil,
coffee, pepper
India cotton,
textiles, rice
spice
rice
ivory ivory Manilla
slaves Africa
slaves
slaves silk
Latin
America
South East
Gold
Asia
Silver silk, ceramic, tin,
Goods metals, spice
Map 4.1 Global commodity and monetary flows 1400–1800.7
CHINA KOREA
IRAQ IRAN/PERSIA
KH
UZ
IS T
AN HORMUZ
BANDAR ABBAS PUNJAB A
BA
MAKRAN R
H
HR
SIND ST BENGAL MACAO -

ACAMBAY CANTON
AI
OMAN H
U SURAT HOOGLI
SA
N
HIJAZ A
AR
S
GUA KON
T MAUSULI- I S
NA
AU R
AK
AM PATNAM O
AN
EL
JA R K
DR PEGU
AN
MOCHA
YEMEN H A
M A ND
SIAM
CH
AT A N
ADEN
CA
AM
MANILA
MB
CORO
PA
MA
OD
A
ETHIOPIA
LI
LAB
IA
MA
CEYLON
A
AR
C
SO
ACHEH AC SULAWESI
MOGADISHU AL CELEBES
MALDIVES M
BORNEO
Z AR IC A
A F A ST
SEYCHELLES
NJ
MOLUCCAS
E
JAVA
KILWA
Map 4.2 Networks of Asian commerce.8
Insufficiency of information, or of our search for it, and technical problems (we
are not map-makers but are seeking help from professional ones) in presenting
even what we already have result in a still unclear picture or presentation. There
are serious problems in trying today to reconstruct a picture of Asia or even its
economy then. Ironically, most of the still extant documentary evidence on Asian
trade comes from European company, private, and other sources who recorded
it, and of course only recorded what was of commercial or other interest to them.
Therefore much of the evidence on Asian production and trade fell through the
European cracks. This is particularly the case with the inland economies and the
transcontinental caravan trade, which the Europeans hardly saw, although there is
silk woole CENTRAL silk

ns ASIA
silk horses CHINA
IRAN/PERSIA silver
IRAQ
KH c
in otto
silve es
UZ di n
IS T
hor
BASRA go s,
r, g
AN w
s
he
s
old
cotton
at
,
er HORMUZ
P
s ia si PUNJAB NEPAL
n BANDAR ABBAS lver
BA
Gu p YUNNAN
lf MAKRAN sp ep
H
dye ice pe
R
, pe
SIND s r TR A
AI
arl,
salt al BENGAL BURMA
, co met
N
rice
, wh ffee SH HOOGLI cotto
ns
OMAN eat, , ar RA CAMBAY gold,
ms,
fruit SAU silver,lry
GU J
HUSCAT oil, SURAT

cot
jewe
AR
SA
M
ton , ho
sugar,
s, sp
VIJAYANAGARA R IS
rses
A R A KON K
NA
AK
ices ,(sil
k) O r
AN
ga
AN
T
silk
su
T
AU ices MASULIPATNAM
e, horses PEGU
AM ns, sp ric tin
cotto
EL
DR gold SIAM
pep
ADEN silver, gold s

silver, co ilk
HA ine
M A ND
m, w tin f cottons
per
CH
CA
, d ee,
opiu ,s
AN
f
ye fru
pic
MB
AM
, w its,
Arabian Sea MADRAS es
,m sp lens, gs
oo dru
MA
et ice
C OR O
OD
PA
pepper, spices
on
al, s,
rice
ce
LA
cinnam
go
ra
IA
m
ld
horses,
BA
dia ic, Gulf of

,m
silve
LACCADIVES m silk
rice
et
Siam
A
on , g
r
al
LI
ds ol
M
CEYLON ,s d
gold
AL
MA
lav
fish
es
ig o
AY
,c
SO
ot
nd
spices, silk, ceramic i to
A
, ACHEH ns
cottons, to b a c c o ilver
s MALACCA
cowry shells ivory, slaves MALDIVES sp
ice c o ral SU
s ,s u ons ,
gar, c c o tt M
era m ic AT
MOGADISHU R
KILWA A
Map 4.3 Intra-Asian commodity and bullion flows.9
Brocades Wheat Brocades Dates Silk Wheat Rice Silk Gold Silk Tea
Nuts Flour Muslins Salt Muslins Rice Pulses Raw silk Raw silk Sugar
Floss Silk Mullet Attar of roses Fish Chintz Pulses Ghee Opium Porcelain Rhubarb
Muslins Pulses Pearls Coarse Ghee Sugar Muslins Lacquerwork Copper cash
Linens Fruits Carpets cotton Raw cotton Saltpetre Chintz Spelter
Glass Timber (Fir) Raw silk Cloth Tobacco Coarse
Pottery Shiraz wine Agate beads Indigo cotton
Arms, Thoroughbred Glass beads Coconut Cloth
Armour horses Oynx fibres
Paper
Coral Silver
Woolen
Cloth
Copper
Diamonds
Steel Silver (after 1580)
Fruits Incense Black pepper Ironware
Nuts Pearls Coconut Swords Rice
Indigo Precious Araca nuts Muslins
Leather stones Timber (teak) Chintz
Dates Ivory Coarse cotton
Coffee Cloth
Cardamom
Cinnamons
Sandalwood Rice Nutmeg
Cotton cloth Ghee Mace
Rhino horns Gold Timber Ships Dyewood Cloves
Gold
Ivory Sandalwood
Slaves Cowries Cinnamon Incense
Coconut Elephants Tortoise shells
products Edible birds’ nests
Black pepper Sea slugs
Rice
Camphor
Tin
Dye wood
Bulk and low- Luxury and Gold and silver

value goods high-value goods
Map 4.4 Asia’s export commodities.10

From East From West From East & South From West From East & South
ALEPPO Silk Silver Silk Silver Silver
Cotex Horses Pepper Cotex Gold
ALEXANDRIA Pepper Coffee Spices Spices
BASRA Spices Coral Copper Pepper Cotex
Drugs Nuts Rice Silk
HORMUZ Rosewater Sugar
CAIRO Wine CANTON Spices
Fruits HUGLI
MUSCAT SURAT Carpets
Arms
Silver JEDDA Silk HANOI
Gold From West & North From East
Wotex Rice
From West
Metals Silk Cotex MASULIPATAM
Arms ADEN Arms Pepper BANGKOK Cotex
Wotex Spices Silk
From West Coral Indigo GOA
Metal Tin MADRAS MANILA
Fruits Sugar
Coffee Wheat
Carpets Rice
Rice
Silver Lac
Slaves MOGADISHU Gold Pulses Silk ACHEH MALACCA
Ivory Peppers
Gold Spices
Cotex Metals
Wotex Tin
Ceramics Copper
Horses
Ceramics
Drugs
Wood BATAVIA
MALDIVES Copper
Jewels
BANTAM
Dyes
Carpets Elephants
Slaves Coconut
KILWA Rice
Fruit
Cinnamon
Wine Cotex Spices
Rosewater Gold Slaves Copper
Pearl From East
Glass Silk
Gold Opium Ceramics
Silver Rosewater
From East & North
From West From West
Map 4.5 Asia’s import commodities.11
reason to believe that they were fully as important as and complementary to the
maritime trade throughout this entire period up to 1800.
We also do not yet know enough about multilateral balances of trade and their
“settlement” through money, or how to present them graphically, and still less
through credit. (Mostly we have evidence only of settling trade deficits through
the remission of bullion or coin, and very little evidence of the undoubtedly also
very extensive use of bills of exchange, letters of credit, etc.) Therefore, we also
offer the following preliminary textual summary of regional trade balances, which
were interlinked in deficit and surplus literally around the globe – from west to
east.
The net export of silver and/or gold bullion and coins is evidence of a negative
deficitary balance of trade (b/t), except perhaps in some cases where the exporter
is also a producer and commercial exporter of precious metals (e.g. Southeast
Asian gold).
The producing and exporting regions were:
• silver:
–– major: Mexico and Peru; Japan;
–– minor: Northeast Europe; Persia; Central Asia; Burma/Thailand;
• gold:
–– major: Africa (West and Southeast); Spanish America (sixteenth century);
Brazil (eighteenth century after 1690); Southeast Asia;
–– minor: Japan; Persia; China;
• copper and tin (for low value coinage, sometimes alloyed):
–– Japan (copper);
–– Europe (copper);
–– Malaya (tin).
So the major producers/exporters of silver bullion were Latin America and

Japan; and of gold Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Both West and
Southeast Africa had been a, or the, major source of gold for centuries, but parts
of Africa also exported slaves westward and eastward. The other regions were
importers of precious metals and copper for their own monetary, coinage, and
hoarding use – or for re-export to cover their own b/t deficits.
The major importer and re-exporter of both silver and gold bullion was Western
and Southern Europe, to cover its own perpetual massive structural b/t deficit
with all other regions, except (perhaps) with the Americas and Africa, although
the Europeans received African and especially American bullion without giving
much in return. Western Europe had a b/t deficit with and therefore re-exported
much silver and some gold to the Baltics and Eastern Europe, to West Asia, to
India directly and via West Asia, to Southeast Asia directly and via India, and to
China via all of the above as well as from Japan.
An indication of the European structural b/t deficit is that the British state,
representing also manufacturing and other interests (in “export promotion”),
obliged the British East India Company by its charter to include British export
products of at least one-tenth of the value of its total exports. Yet the Company
had constant difficulty to find markets even for this modest export, and most of
that went only as far as West Asia; and later a small amount of broadcloth woolen
textiles were placed in India for use not in clothing but as household and military
goods, such as rugs, saddles, etc. Most European exports were of metal and metal
products. Unable to fill its one-tenth export quota, the Company had to resort to
over/underinvoicing to reduce “total” exports, and it was under constant pressure
to find financing for its Asian imports in Asia itself, by engaging in the inter-
Asian “country” trade, which was much more developed and profitable than the
Asia–Europe trade.
West Asia had a b/t surplus with Europe, but a b/t deficit with South, Southeast,
and East Asia (and with Central Asia?). West Asia covered its b/t deficits to the
East with the re-export of bullion derived from its b/t surplus with Europe, the
Maghreb, and via it with West Africa, and gold from East Africa, as well as some
of its own production of both gold and silver, especially in Persia.
India had a massive b/t surplus with Europe and some with West Asia, based
mostly on its more efficient low-cost cotton textile production and export. These
went westwards to Africa, West Asia, and Europe, and from there across the
Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas. In return, India received massive
amounts of silver and some gold from the West, directly around the Cape or via
West Asia. As India produced little silver of its own, it used the imported silver
mostly for coinage or re-export and the gold for coinage (of pagodas), jewel-
lery, and hoarding. India also exported cotton textiles to and imported spices
from Southeast Asia, and also via the same exchanged cotton textiles for silk and
porcelain and other ceramics from China. However, India had a b/t deficit with
Southeast Asia and especially with China. Therefore, India was obliged also to
re-export especially silver both to Southeast Asia and to China.
Different Indian regions also traded and had b/t surplus/deficits with each
other. The major coastal regions, Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel, and Bengal, all
traded with each other – and with Ceylon – and also served as entrepôts for each
other in transoceanic and continental caravan trade (b/t among regions?). They
also competed with each other as “exporters” to the interior of India, where their
market areas overlapped. However, in general, the interior had an export surplus
with the coastal ports and in exchange received imported goods and coin, which
had been minted from imported bullion (or melted-down foreign coins) in or near
the ports. Silver tended to move north into regions governed by the Mughals, and
gold went to the south, especially to Malabar and Vijayanagara.
Southeast Asia exported spices and tin of its own production to Europe, West
Asia, and India, and re-exported imports from India to China, which were its
major customers, some eight times more than Europe. Additionally, Southeast
Asia exported gold of its own production to India, China, and Japan, although
it received silver from India, some of which it also re-exported to China via
Malacca. So Southeast Asia seems to have had a b/t surplus with India (and of
course with West Asia and Europe) but still a b/t deficit with China.
China had a b/t surplus with everybody, based on its unrivalled manufacturing
production and export of silks and porcelain and other ceramics. Therefore, China,
which like India had a perpetual silver shortage, was the major net importer of
silver and met much of its need for coinage out of imports of American silver that
arrived via Europe, West Asia, India, and Southeast Asia, and, with the Manilla
galleons, directly from Acapulco. China also received massive amounts of silver
and copper from Japan, and some through the overland caravan trade across
Central Asia.
Gold was both imported to and exported from China, depending on chang-
ing gold/silver/copper price ratios. In general over the centuries, silver moved
eastward (except for westward from Japan and Acapulco via Manila), and gold
moved westward (except for eastward from Africa) over both overland and mari-
time routes. Some eastward-moving gold even reached Europe.
Japan, like Latin America, was a major producer and exporter of silver to China
and Southeast Asia, but also of some gold and considerable copper as far as India
and West Asia. (What did the Japanese receive in return other than some Chinese
silks and Indian cotton textiles, and a few other items on our list?).12
The complexity of the international division of labor and the network of world
trade was of course vastly greater than anything we can represent here. A tip of
the iceberg representative sample is a letter from the Director of the British East
India Company, Sir Joshua Child, detailing how the Company could profit from
taking advantage of price differentials and availability of sources and markets in
the intricacies of the inter-Asian trade:
Notes
1 This text, dated 22 March 1994, is an initial draft by the authors that was circulated
for comment, but which is only now published. The editorial note at the beginning of
the essay, completed in August of 2010, explains its provenance and its sequels. In
addition, this and the subsequent notes have been added to this published version by
Barry K. Gills.
2 See also Frank and Gills (1993b) in ‘References to Editorial Note’.
3 This refers to a draft manuscript of a study by George Modelski and William R.
Thompson, circulated to Gills and Frank in 1994 by the authors for comment. A still
earlier version of this project (Modelski and Thompson 1992) was also read by Gills
and Frank. This study by Modelski and Thompson was eventually published in 1996
as Modelski, George, and William R. Thompson. 1996. Leading Sectors and World
Powers: The Co-evolution of Global Economics and Politics. Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press.
4 See Chaudhuri, S. and M. Morineau (eds.). 1999. Merchants, Companies and Trade.
New York: Cambridge University Press for a later published version.
5 Following discussion between Barry Gills and Gunder Frank in Newcastle and
Amsterdam concerning the issue of Braudel’s arguments in ‘The Perspective of the
World’ in relation to how many of these positions appeared to validate our own inter-
pretations of the history of capitalist development in Europe in relation to elsewhere in
the world, we incorporated this observation into our joint paper. In the following few
months Gunder subsequently greatly expanded this analysis. The reader is advised to
consult ‘The World Economic System in Asia Before European Hegemony’ by Andre
Gunder Frank (1994) in The Historian, 56: 259–276, which incorporates some of the
theses and arguments in our joint draft article of March 1994. The conclusion to The
Historian article reiterates the central thesis that ‘The West and the East were only
parts of a single age-old world economic system’ and the ‘rise of the West’ may be
better dated ‘after 1800’ than before (p. 276).
6 The map referred to is ‘Multilateral Trade in the Eighteenth Century’ in Andre
Gunder Frank. 1978. World Accumulation 1492–1789. London: Macmillan, p. 221
(see Appendix 4.1). In addition, see Map 3.1 ‘World Silver Productions, Exports, and
Receipts’ in Andre Gunder Frank.1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 148.
7 Although Map 4.1 is entitled ‘Global Commodity and Monetary Flows 1400–1800’,
there is no time series indicated in the data as presented. First, this means that it is an
attempt to summarize flows over the period as a whole, an exercise which of course
has some intrinsic flaws to it from the point of view of identifying change in the
flows over a four-century period. Second, it also shows the bullion flows of monetary
metals – gold and silver. Here the intention was to illustrate one of the main conten-
tions of the paper as a whole, which was to argue that, during this period ‘before
European hegemony’ in Asia, China was a central ‘hub’ or ‘point of convergence’
of a number of very important flows in the global monetary ‘system’ of that period,
and India was likewise a very significant hub or centre of convergence of flows, to
which we might ascribe the category of ‘super accumulation’ of profits (accrued in the
form of monetary metals) within the world system as a whole, and thus confirm its
‘Asia-centeredness’.
8 Map 4.2 is best seen as a very early version of what Bob Denemark has now identified
as the use of ‘triangles’ within Gunder’s last work, ReOrient the Nineteenth Century.
The lines on this map trace the main lines of economic intercourse among key points
in the matrix of the world system in Asia. We have now darkened the lines of the
triangles, which were not darkened in the original 1994 version. One ‘triangle’ that
emerges from this graphic is the ‘South China Sea’ triangle linking Canton–Manila–
Malacca, which were arguably pivotal for Asia’s position in the world system as a
whole during part or most of that period (linking the Americas with Asia directly, and
China with India, via Malacca). Another triangle is the ‘Bay of Bengal’ triangle, link-
ing Malacca–Ceylon/Coromandel–Bengal (Hoogli) with the related triangle linking
Malacca–Ceylon–Coromandel and Mausulipatnam. The third triangle is the ‘Arabian
Sea’ triangle, linking Aden–Gujarat (Cambay–Surat)–Malabar, with an alternative
link connecting Hormuz to the Malabar coast (and thus onward to the Mesopotamian
corridor to the West (as Aden was the sea corridor to the West in the south). [Gunder
called these the ‘northern’ sea route and the ‘southern’ sea route linking East and West
(i.e. Asia and Europe).] The map also shows an overland link stretching from Egypt
and Iran (Persia) across Central Asia (although not identified on the map itself) to
China, thus linking with the sea routes to Japan, Manila and the Americas. The point
is also that the so-called ‘silk roads’ of Asia were a network of both overland and sea
routes, all ‘segmental’ in scope, but all parts of a single and overarching global system
of economic logistics. We refer the reader to Gunder’s analysis of ‘the centrality of
Central Asia’, published under that title around the time of this work (Frank, Andre
Gunder. 1992. The Centrality of Central Asia. Amsterdam: VU University Press). Map
drawn by Robin Cheung based on the hand-drawn original by Andre Gunder Frank.
9 Map 4.3 more specifically shows the direction and content of main flows of com-
modities in the intra-Asian world system nexus. It also shows the overland Central
Asia link more clearly. However, it also makes it clear that we thought (and Gunder
was keen to show empirically) that actually one could err by putting too much histori-
cal emphasis on the overland route. The latter was by far the longer, more difficult
and more dangerous way – and therefore also likely more expensive and less profit-
able – compared with the extensive and heavily used ubiquitous sea routes in Asia
(and beyond to circumnavigate Africa and link to the Americas after the voyages of
Columbus and Vasco de Gama). This map also focuses upon India rather than China
as the central ‘hub’ in the matrix displayed. This does not mean links to China were
not important – it is just where the focus of the mapping is in this graphic. Here the
commodities inhabiting the triangles are spelled out more clearly (as dominant com-
modities for these links) and there are sets of arrows for each link, showing ‘import’
and ‘export’ lines. In reality this can be a bit misleading unless the reader clearly
understands that modern ‘national economies’ are not genuinely involved. Instead the
Asian economy consisted of a series of zones and nodes of production and exchange,
with political entities playing a very significant role of course, but the point is that
modern ‘import–export’ and therefore ‘current account’ and ‘deficit–surplus’ national
accounting techniques do not apply exactly here. Again, much of this trade is segmen-
tal and of a kind of global ‘down the line’ transfer, which today we would possibly
call ‘re-exports’, but the latter again is a modern economic concept that may not apply
very exactly to the period in question. It can be derived from the graphic that there
is a general structural exchange relation between the ‘East’ (i.e. mainly South Asia,
Southeast Asia and East Asia) and the ‘West’ (which perhaps economically speaking
‘begins’ in East Africa, and at Hormuz, although that does not correspond to our con-
temporary national territorial or regional biases either in this regard). This East–West
linkage entailed, as a general pattern, the export of less valuable commodities from
West to East and more valuable commodities from East to West (with perhaps some
limited exceptions to this rule). If this relation holds, it would confirm the hypothesis
we put forward that, historically, for some two millennia, the ‘terms of trade’ between
Asia and Europe tended to favour Asia, and generate a long-term structural trade
deficit for Europe, which Europe tended to ‘cover’ by the export of bullion or specie
to the East. This pattern persisted since the ancient world system cycle that involved
the Roman, Parthian/Persian, Kushan, and Han polities in a dense network of world
system exchange and accumulation in the first century of the common era when, as
Pliny complained, Rome faced a fiscal crisis to cover the import of silks and pearls
to adorn Roman women! The late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German
historian of the Asian world, Heeren, contended in his early major work on Asian
history that it was India that had been the real centre of world commerce, and thus also
of the civilizing influences via such intercourse – for some two millennia. See Gills,
Barry and Andre Gunder Frank. 1992. ‘World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonial
Shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD’, Review, 15: 621–687. Map drawn by Robin Cheung
based on the original hand-drawn version by Andre Gunder Frank.
10 Reproduced from Chaudhuri, K. N. 1985. Trade and Civilization in the Indian
Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 186–187.
11 Map drawn by Robin Cheung, based on Andre Gunder Frank’s hand-drawn revision
of map in Chaudhuri, K. N. 1985. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An
Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 186–187.
12 There is a handwritten note from myself on the original draft of this section at this
point that reads: ‘Japan was in deficit with everybody [like other bullion exporters,
e.g. Americas, and Africa (?)], exporting (only) silver and importing commodities
especially raw silk and woven silk, spices, sugar, medicines, velvet, damask, honey,
gold’. This passage was not incorporated into the March 1994 draft, however.
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Appendix 4.1
This map is adapted from Andre Gunder Frank’s somewhat neglected but very sig-
nificant book World Accumulation 1492–1789, published in 1978 by Macmillan
Press. It represents perhaps the first attempt by Frank to schematially depict “tri-
angular” trade relations in the Atlantic economy (a key feature of the analysis
in the book and an aspect of Frank’s early contribution to the development of
world-system analysis) as well as to incorporate a global set of trade relations
including Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, thus creating a schematic
map of the world economy as a whole (in the eighteenth century). The original
source upon which Frank drew for this map was Frederic Mauro. 1961. “Towards
an ‘Intercontinental Model’: European Overseas Expansion between 1500 and
1800,” Economic History Review, 14 (1): 1–17. It is appended here as a supple-
ment and background to the map of the world economic system that Frank and I
created for the world system 1400–1800.
BALTIC
s
e rial
mat y
raw e
NORTHERN mon
COLONIES manufac
raw mate tures
rials, mo
ney ENGLAND
FRANCE
services, manufactures
fo
raw materials, services
od
ser res
ctu
tures
y
vi fa
s
anu
mone
ture
ces
firearms, services
m
manufac
, ru
ufac
oney
m
man
wine, etc, m
services,
d
foo
food,
SOUTHERN ,
ices
COLONIES SPAIN
serv
PORTUGAL
ey
food
s
on
textile
molasses, money
es
s, m
tur
sse
fac
nu
ola
ASIA
ma
m
ar,
sug
textiles
WEST
INDIES
contraband
sla
ve
s
money
ey
slav
mon
es
y
ne
mo
LATIN slaves
AFRICA
AMERICA
Appendix 4.1 Multilateral trade in the eighteenth century. Manufactures: especially

textiles, not necessarily self-produced or consumed; food: including
tobacco and fish; services: especially fishing; money: in coin, bullion
and drafts; raw materials: especially timber and other naval stores, and
iron (from Baltic). Adapted from Frank, Andre Gunder. 1978. World
Accumulation 1492–1789, with permission from Palgrave Macmillan.
Part II
Continuing debates
5
Exiting the crisis of capitalism
or capitalism in crisis?
Samir Amin
Capitalism, a parenthesis in history

The principle of endless accumulation that defines capitalism is synonymous
with exponential growth and the latter, like cancer, leads to death. John Stuart
Mill, who recognised this, imagined that a ‘stationary state of affairs’ would put
an end to this irrational process. John Maynard Keynes shared this optimism of
Reason. But neither was equipped to understand how the necessary overcoming
of capitalism could prevail. By contrast, Marx, by giving proper importance to
the new class struggle, could imagine the reversal of power of the capitalist class,
concentrated nowadays in the hands of the ruling oligarchy.
Accumulation, which is synonymous with pauperisation, provides the objec-
tive framework of the struggles against capitalism. But accumulation expresses
itself mainly by the growing contrast between the affluence of the societies in the
centre (of the world system) who benefit from the imperialist rent and the misery
of the societies at the dominated peripheries. This conflict becomes therefore the
central axis of the alternative between ‘socialism and barbarism’.
Historically ‘real existing’ capitalism is associated with successive forms of
accumulation by dispossession, not only at the beginning (‘primitive accumula-
tion’) but also at each stage of the unfolding of the capitalist system. Once properly
constituted, this ‘Atlantic’ capitalism sought to conquer the world and has remade
it on the basis of permanent dispossession of the conquered regions, which in this
process became the dominated peripheries of the system.
This ‘victorious’ globalisation has turned out to be unable to impose itself in
a durable manner. Just about half a century after its triumph (which appeared to
inaugurate the ‘end of history’), this model was questioned by the revolution of
the Russian semi-periphery and the (victorious) liberation struggles in Asia and
Africa that constitute the history of the twentieth century – the first wave of strug-
gles in favour of the emancipation of the workers and the peoples.
84 Samir Amin
Accumulation by dispossession continues in front of our eyes in the late

modern capitalism of the contemporary ‘oligopolies’. In the centres, monopoly
rents – whose beneficiaries are the oligopolistic plutocracies – are synonymous
with the dispossession of the entire productive basis of society. In the periph-
eries, this pauperising dispossession manifests itself in the expropriation of the
peasantry and the plundering of natural resources of the regions in question. Both
these practices constitute the essential pillars of the strategies of expansion of the
late capitalism of the ‘oligopolies’.
In this spirit, I situate the ‘new agrarian question’ at the heart of the challenge
for the twenty-first century. The dispossession of the peasantry (in Asia, Africa
and Latin America) is the major contemporary form of the tendency towards pau-
perisation (in the sense that Marx ascribed to this ‘law’) linked to accumulation.
Its implementation cannot be dissociated from the strategies of imperialist rent-
seeking and rent-capturing by the ‘oligopolies’, with or without bio-fuels. I deduce
from this that the development of the struggles on the ground, the responses that
will be given through these struggles to the future of the peasant societies in the
South (almost half of mankind), will largely determine the capacity or otherwise
of the workers and the peoples to produce progress on the road of constructing an
authentic civilisation, liberated from the domination of capital, for which I do not
see any name other than that of socialism.
The plundering of the South’s natural resources, which is demanded by the pur-
suit of the model of wasteful consumption to the exclusive benefit of the North’s
affluent societies, destroys any prospect of development worthy of this name for
the peoples in question and therefore constitutes the other face of pauperisation
on a worldwide scale. In this spirit, the ‘energy crisis’ is neither the product of
the rarefaction of certain resources necessary for production (oil, obviously) nor
the outcome of the destructive effects of energy-devouring forms of production
and consumption that are currently in place. This description – which is not
wrong – fails to go beyond banal and immediate evidence. The ‘energy crisis’ is
the product of the will of ‘oligopolies’ and a collective imperialism to secure a
monopoly of access to the planet’s natural resources, whether these be scarce or
not, in such a way as to appropriate the imperialist rent – even if the utilisation of
these resources remained the same as it is now (wasteful and energy-devouring)
or if it were subject to ‘environmentally friendly’ measures and new correctives. I
deduce from this that the pursuit of the expansionist strategy of the late capitalism
of ‘oligopolies’ will inevitably clash with the growing resistance of the nations of
the South.
The current crisis is therefore neither a financial crisis nor the sum of multiple
systemic crises but the crisis of the imperialist capitalism of ‘oligopolies’ whose
exclusive and supreme power risks being questioned once more by the strug-
gles of the entire popular classes and the nations in the dominated peripheries,
even if they are apparently ‘emerging markets’. This crisis is also at the same
time a crisis of U.S. hegemony. Taken together, the following phenomena are
inextricably linked to one another: the capitalism of ‘oligopolies’, the political
Exiting the crisis of capitalism or capitalism in crisis? 85
power of oligarchies, barbarous globalisation, financialisation, U.S. hegemony,

the militarisation of the way globalisation is operated in the service of ‘oligopo-
lies’, the decline of democracy, the plundering of the planet’s resources, and the
abandoning of development for the South.
The real challenge is therefore as follows: Will these struggles manage to con-
verge in order to pave the way – or ways – for the long route towards the transition
to world socialism? Or will these struggles remain separate from one another, or
will they even clash with each other and therefore become ineffective, leaving the
initiative to the capital of the ‘oligopolies’?
From one long crisis to another

The financial meltdown in September 2008 probably took by surprise the con-
ventional economists who advocated ‘happy globalisation’ and threw some of
the fabricators of liberal discourse, triumphant since the ‘fall of the Berlin wall’,
in common parlance. If, however, this event did not surprise me – I expected it
(without of course predicting its date, like Mrs Soleil) – it is simply because for
me this event is part of the unfolding of the long crisis of an ageing capitalism,
begun in the 1970s.
It is good to return to the first long crisis of capitalism, which fashioned the
twentieth century, as the parallel between the stages of the unfolding of both crises
is so striking.
Industrial capitalism, which was triumphant in the nineteenth century, entered
a crisis from 1873 onwards. Profit rates dropped, for the reasons highlighted by
Marx. Capital reacted by a double movement of concentration and globalised
expansion. The new monopolies confiscated, in addition to their profits, a rent
levied on the massive added value generated by the exploitation of labour. They
reinforced the colonial conquests of the planet. These structural transformations
allowed a new surge in profits; and led to the ‘belle époque’ – from 1890 to
1914 – which is the period of globalised domination of the capital owned by the
financialised monopolies. The dominant discourses of that time praised colonisa-
tion (‘civilising mission’) and described globalisation as synonymous with peace,
earning the support of the workers’ social democracy.
However, the ‘belle époque’, announced as the ‘end of history’ by the ideologues
of this period, ended in the First World War, as only Lenin had presaged. And the
period that followed and lasted until the aftermath of the Second World War was
the period of ‘wars and revolutions’. In 1920, after the Russian Revolution (the
‘weak link’ of the system) had been isolated following the defeat of the hopes of
revolution in central Europe, the capital of the financialised monopolies restored
against all the odds the system of the ‘belle époque’; a restoration, denounced by
Keynes at the time, which was at the origin of the financial collapse of 1929 and
the Great Depression, which it led to until the beginning of the Second World War.
The ‘long twentieth century’ – 1873–1990 – is therefore both the century of
the deployment of the first systemic and profound crisis of ageing capitalism
86 Samir Amin
(to the point where Lenin thought that this capitalism of monopolies constitutes
the ‘supreme phase of capitalism’) and that of the first triumphant wave of anti-
capitalist revolutions (Russia, China) and the anti-imperialist movements of Asia
and Africa.
The second systemic crisis of capitalism began in 1971 with the abandoning of
the gold convertibility of the dollar, almost exactly a century after the commence-
ment of the first. Profit rates, investment levels and growth rates all collapsed (and
never again reverted to the levels in the period 1945–1975). Capital responded to
the challenge not unlike in the previous crisis by a double of concentration and
globalisation. As such, capital established structures that defined the second ‘belle
époque’ (1990–2008) of financialised globalisation, allowing oligopolistic groups
to levy their monopoly rent. The same discourse accompanied this process: the
‘market’ guarantees prosperity, democracy and peace; it’s the ‘end of history’.
The same rallying occurred, this time by the European socialists to the new
liberalism. However, this new ‘belle époque’ was from the outset accompanied
by war, the war of the North versus the South, started in 1990. Just as the first
financialised globalisation had led to 1929, so the second produced 2008. Today
we have reached this crucial moment that announces the probability of a new
wave of ‘wars and revolutions’. This is even more so since the ruling powers do
not envisage anything other than the restoration of the system as it was before the
financial meltdown.
The analogy between the unfolding of these long, systemic crises of ageing
capitalism is striking. There are nonetheless differences whose political signifi-
cance is important.
Exiting the crisis of capitalism or capitalism in crisis?

Behind the financial crisis lies a systemic crisis of the capitalism of oligopolies.
Contemporary capitalism is first and foremost a capitalism of ‘oligopolies’ in the
full sense of the term (which so far capitalism was only in part). What I mean
by this is that the ‘oligopolies’ alone command the production of the economic
system in its entirety. They are ‘financialised’ in the sense that they alone have
access to capital markets. This financialisation grants the monetary and financial
market – their market, on which they compete with each other – the status of
dominant market, which in turn fashions and commands the labour and commod-
ity exchange markets.
This globalised financialisation expresses itself by a transformation of the
ruling bourgeois class, which has become a rent-capturing plutocracy. The oli-
garchs are not only Russian, as is too often presumed, but rather and much more
so U.S., European and Japanese. The decline of democracy is the inevitable prod-
uct of this concentration of power to the exclusive benefit of the ‘oligopolies’.
The new form of capitalist globalisation that corresponds to this transformation
– in contrast to the one that characterises the first ‘belle époque’ – is also important
to specify. I have expressed it in a sentence: the passage from imperialisms (that
of the imperialist powers in permanent conflict with each other) to the collective
imperialism of the triad (the United States, Europe and Japan).
The monopolies, which emerged in response to the first crisis of profit rates,
constituted themselves on the bases that have reinforced the violence of com-
petition between the major imperialist powers of the time, and led to the armed
conflict begun in 1914 and which continued through the peace of Versailles and
then the Second World War until 1945. That is what Giovanni Arrighi, Andre
Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein and I described in the 1970s as the ‘war of
thirty years’, a notion that has been taken up by others since then.
By contrast, the second wave of oligopolistic concentration, begun in the
1970s, constituted itself on totally other bases, within the framework of a system
that I have described as the ‘collective imperialism’ of the triad (the United States,
Europe and Japan). In this new imperialist globalisation, the domination of the
centres is no longer exercised by the monopoly of industrial production (as had
been the case hitherto) but by other means (the control of technologies, financial
markets, access to the planet’s natural resources, information and communica-
tions, weapons of mass destruction). This system, which I have also described as
‘apartheid on a global scale’, implies a permanent war against the states and the
people of the recalcitrant peripheries, a war begun in the 1990s by the deployment
of military control over the world by the United States and their subordinated
NATO allies.
According to my analysis, the financialisation of this system is inextricably
linked to its clearly oligopolistic aspect. What pertains between them is a fun-
damentally organic relation. This point of view is not prevalent, neither in the
expansive literature of conventional economists nor in the majority of critical
writings on the current crisis.
It is the entire system that henceforth is in difficulty. The facts are clear: the
financial collapse is already producing not a ‘recession’ but a veritable, profound
depression. But beyond this, other dimensions of the crisis of this system surfaced
in the public consciousness before even the financial meltdown. We know the
sort of labels – energy crisis, food crisis, environmental crisis, climate change –
and the numerous analyses of these aspects of the contemporary challenges are
produced on a daily basis, some of which are of the highest quality.
I remain nonetheless critical about this mode of treating the systemic crisis of
capitalism, which excessively isolates the different dimensions of the challenge.
I would therefore redefine the diverse ‘crises’ as the facets of the same challenge
– that of the system of contemporary capitalist globalisation (whether liberal or
not), founded upon the principle that the imperialist rent operates on the global
scale, to the benefit of the plutocracy of the ‘oligopolies’ of the imperialist triad.
The real battle is fought on this decisive ground between the ‘oligopolies’ who
seek to produce and reproduce the conditions that allow them to appropriate the
imperialist rent and all their victims – the workers of all the countries in the North
and the South, the peoples of the dominated peripheries condemned to give up any
perspective of development worthy of the name.
88 Samir Amin
‘Exiting the crisis of capitalism or capitalism in crisis?’ This formula had been
suggested by Andre Gunder Frank and myself in 1974. The analysis which we
developed about the new great crisis that we thought had begun led us to the major
conclusion that capital would respond to the challenge by a new wave of con-
centration on the basis of which it would proceed to massive dislocations. Later
developments largely confirmed this. The title of our intervention at a conference
organised by Il Manifesto in Rome in 1974 (‘Let us Not Wait for 1984’, referring
to the work by George Orwell unearthed from oblivion on this occasion) invited
the radical left at that time to renounce any strategy of coming to the aid of capital
by looking for ‘exits from the crisis’ in order to seek strategies aimed at an ‘exit
from capitalism in crisis’.
I have pursued this line of analysis with a kind of stubbornness that I do not
regret. I have suggested a conceptualisation of new forms of domination on the
part of the imperialist centres grounded in new modes of control that replaced
the old monopoly over exclusively industrial production, which the rise of the
countries referred to as ‘emerging markets’ has confirmed. I have described the
new globalisation that is being built as an ‘apartheid at the global level’, calling
it the militarised management of the planet and in this way perpetuating (in new
conditions) the polarisation that cannot be dissociated from the expansion of the
‘really existing capitalism’.
The second wave of emancipation by the people: a

‘remake’ of the twentieth century or better?
There is no alternative to a socialist perspective. The contemporary world is
governed by oligarchies: the financial oligarchies in the United States, Europe
and Japan who dominate not only economic life but also politics and daily life;
Russian oligarchies in their image that the Russian state tries to control; stat-
ocracies in China; autocracies (sometimes hidden behind the appearance of an
electoral democracy ‘of low intensity’) inscribed into this worldwide system
elsewhere across the globe.
The management of contemporary globalisation by these oligarchies is in
crisis.
The oligarchies of the North seek to remain in power once the crisis is over.
They do not feel threatened. By contrast, the fragility of the power held by the
autocracies of the South is clearly visible. The model of globalisation that is cur-
rently in place is therefore vulnerable. Will it be questioned by the revolt in the
South, as was the case in the previous century? Probably so, but that would be
cause for sadness. For humanity will only commit itself on the road to socialism
– the only humane alternative to chaos – once the powers of the oligarchies, their
allies and their servants have been defeated in both the countries of the North and
those in the South.
Long live the internationalism of the people in the face of the cosmopolitanism
of the oligarchies.
Is the reinstatement of the capitalism of financialised and globalised ‘oli-

gopolies’ possible? Capitalism is ‘liberal’ by nature, if by ‘liberalism’ we mean
not the nice label that this notion inspires but the plain and total exercise of the
domination of capital not only over work and the economy but over all aspects
of social life. There can be no ‘market economy’ (a vulgar expression for capital-
ism) without a ‘market society’. Capital pursues stubbornly this unique objective:
money; accumulation for its own sake. Marx, and after him other critical thinkers
such as Keynes, understood this perfectly. But not our conventional economists,
including those on the left.
This model of total and exclusive domination by capital had been imposed
ruthlessly by the ruling classes throughout the previous long crisis until 1945.
Only the triple victory of democracy, socialism and the national liberation of
the people allowed, from 1945 to 1980, a replacement of this permanent model
of the capitalist ideal with the conflictual co-existence of three social regulated
models, which were the welfare state of Western social democracy, the ‘really
existing’ socialism in the East and the popular nationalisms in the South. The
demise and collapse of these three models made the return of the exclusive
domination by capital possible, this time described as the neo-liberal phase of
capitalism.
I have linked this new ‘liberalism’ to a series of new aspects that appear to
me to merit the description of ‘senile capitalism’. My book with the eponymous
title, published in 2001, is probably one among the very rare writings at the time
that, far from viewing globalised and financialised neo-liberalism as the ‘end of
history’, analysed the system of ageing capitalism as unstable, condemned to
eventual collapse, precisely in terms of its financialisation (its ‘Achilles heel’, as
I wrote then).
Conventional economists have remained persistently deaf to any questioning
of their own dogma, so much so that they were unable to foresee the financial
collapse of 2008. Those whom the media have portrayed as ‘critical’ hardly
deserve this description. Even Joseph Stiglitz remains convinced that the system
as it stands – globalised and financialised liberalism – can be fixed by means of
some corrections. Amartya Sen preaches morality without daring to think ‘really
existing’ capitalism as it necessarily is.
The social disasters, which the deployment of liberalism – ‘the permanent
utopia of capital’, as I wrote – would cause, have inspired quite a bit of nos-
talgia in relation to the recent or distant past. But such and similar kinds of
nostalgia cannot respond to the present challenge. For they are the product of an
impoverished critical, theoretical thinking that has gradually stopped itself from
understanding the internal contradictions and the limits of the post-1945 systems
whose erosions, diversions and collapses appeared to be unforeseen cataclysms.
However – in the void created by these regressions of critical, theoretical
thinking – a consciousness about the new dimensions of the systemic crisis of civ-
ilisation managed to chart a path. I am referring here to the ecological movement.
But the Greens, who have purported to distinguish themselves radically from both
90 Samir Amin
the Blues (the Conservatives and the Liberals) and the Reds (the Socialists), are
locked into an impasse, since they have failed to link the ecological dimension to
the challenge of a radical critique of capitalism.
Everything was therefore ready to ensure the triumph – in fact, ephemeral
but experienced as ‘definitive’ – of the alternative of ‘liberal democracy’. A
miserable kind of thinking – a veritable non-thinking – that ignores Marx’s deci-
sive argument about bourgeois democracy’s failure to acknowledge that those
who decide are not those who are concerned by these decisions. Those who
decide and benefit from the freedom reinforced by the control over property are
nowadays the plutocrats of the capitalism of ‘oligopolies’, and states are their
debtors. Perforce the workers and the people in question are little more than their
victims. But this sort of liberal nonsense might at some point have been credible,
at least for a short while, as a result of the diversions of the post-1945 systems.
The misery of the prevailing dogmas could no longer understand the origins of
the crisis. Liberal democracy might therefore look like ‘the best of all possible
systems’.
Today the powers that be, those who did not foresee anything, are busy restor-
ing the same system. Their possible success, as that of the conservatives in the
1920s – which Keynes had denounced without much of an echo at the time – will
only exacerbate the scope of the contradictions that are the root cause of the 2008
financial collapse.
No less serious is the fact that economists on the ‘left’ have long since
embraced the essential tenets of vulgar economics and accepted the erroneous
idea that markets are rational. The same economists have focused their efforts on
defining the conditions for this market rationality, thereby abandoning Marx who
had discovered the irrationality of markets from the point of view of the workers
and the peoples, a perspective deemed ‘obsolete’. According to this ‘left-wing’
perspective, capitalism is flexible, adjusts itself to the requirements of progress
(technological and even social) if it is constrained in this way. These ‘leftist’
economists were not prepared to understand that the crisis that has erupted was
inevitable. They are even less prepared to confront the challenges that are faced
by the peoples as a result. Like the other vulgar economists, they will seek to
repair the damage without understanding that it is necessary to pursue another
route if this is to be successful – that of overcoming the fundamental logics of
capitalism. Instead of looking for exits from capitalism in crisis, they think they
can simply exit the crisis of capitalism.
U.S. hegemony is in crisis. The recent G20 Summit in London in April 2009 in
no way marks the beginning of a ‘reconstruction of the world’. And it is perhaps
no coincidence amidst the flurry that it was followed by a summit meeting of
NATO, the right hand of contemporary imperialism, and by the reinforcement of
NATO’s military involvement in Afghanistan. The permanent war of the North
against the South must continue.
We already knew that the governments of the triad – the United States, Europe
and Japan – would pursue the only goal of restoring the system as it existed before
September 2008, and one must not take seriously the interventions at the G20
Summit in London by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, on the one hand, and
those of Sarkozy and Merkel, on the other hand. Both were aimed at amusing the
spectators. The purported differences, identified by the media but without any
genuine substance, respond to the exclusive needs of the leaders in question to
make the best of themselves in the face of naïve public opinion. ‘Re-create capi-
talism’, ‘moralising financial operations’: such and similar grand declarations in
order to eschew the real questions. That is why restoring the system, which is not
impossible, will not solve any problem but will in fact exacerbate the gravity of
the crisis. The Stiglitz Commission, convened by the United Nations, is part of
this strategy of tricking the public. Obviously one could not expect otherwise from
the oligarchs who control the real power and their political debtors. The point of
view that I have developed and which puts the emphasis on the inextricable links
between the domination of the ‘oligopolies’ and the necessary financialisation of
managing the world economy is confirmed by the results of the G20.
More interesting is the fact that the invited leaders of the ‘emerging markets’
chose to remain silent. A single intelligent sentence was said throughout this day
of great spectacle, by the Chinese President Hu Jintao, who observed ‘in passing’,
without insisting and with a (mocking?) smile, that it would be necessary to envis-
age the creation of a global financial system that is not based on the U.S. dollar.
Some commentators immediately linked this – correctly – to Keynes’s proposals
in 1945.
This ‘remark’ is a rude awakening that the crisis of the capitalist system of
‘oligopolies’ is inextricably linked to the crisis of U.S. hegemony, which is on
the ropes. But who will replace it? Certainly not ‘Europe’, which does not exist
apart from or outside Atlanticism and has no ambition to be independent, as the
NATO summit meeting once more confirmed. China? This ‘threat’, which the
media undoubtedly repeat ad nauseam (a new ‘yellow peril’) in order to justify the
Atlantic alignment, has no foundation in reality. The Chinese leadership knows
that the country does not have such means and they do not have the will. China’s
strategy is confined to promoting a new globalisation without hegemony – some-
thing that neither the United States nor Europe deem acceptable.
The likelihood of a possible evolution in this direction depends once more on
the countries of the South. And it is no coincidence that UNCTAD (the United
Nations Conference on Trade and Development) is the only institution within the
UN umbrella that has taken initiatives that are fundamentally different from those
of the Stiglitz Commission. It is no coincidence that UNCTAD’s Secretary-General
Supachai Panitchpakdi from Thailand, hitherto considered to be a perfect liberal,
has dared propose in a report of March 2009 entitled ‘The Global Economic
Crisis’ realistic ideas that are part of a second wave of a ‘Southern awakening’.
For its part, China has begun to build – in a gradual and controlled manner
– alternative regional financial systems rid of the U.S. dollar. These and similar
initiatives complete on the economic level the promotion of political alliance
92 Samir Amin
within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which is a major obstacle

to NATO’s belligerence.
The NATO summit meeting, which was convened at the same time in April
2009, endorsed Washington’s decision not to start a gradual military disengage-
ment but on the contrary to reinforce the scope of its military involvement, always
under the misguided pretext of the ‘war against terror’. President Obama deploys
his talent to save Clinton’s and Bush’s programme of imposing global military
control, which is the only way of prolonging the days of U.S. hegemony now
under threat. Obama scored points and obtained a total unconditional surrender
from Sarkozy’s France – the end of Gaullism – which has now rejoined NATO’s
military command, something that was difficult during Bush’s reign when
Washington spoke without intelligence but not without arrogance. Moreover,
Obama has acted like Bush by ignoring Europe’s independence and giving lessons
about how Turkey should be allowed to enter the Union!
Towards a second wave of victorious struggles for the

emancipation of workers and peoples
Are new advances in the struggles for the emancipation of the peoples possible?
The political management of the worldwide domination by the capital of ‘oli-
gopolies’ is necessarily marked by extreme violence. For in order to maintain their
status of affluent societies, the countries of the imperialist triad are henceforth
obliged to limit access to the planet’s natural resources to their own exclusive
benefit. This new requirement is at the origin of the militarisation of globalisation,
which I have elsewhere described as the ‘empire of chaos’ (the title of a book of
mine published in 2001), an expression that others have since taken up.
In line with the ‘Washington project’ of military control over the planet and the
waging of ‘pre-emptive wars’ under the pretext of the ‘war against terror’, NATO
has portrayed itself as the ‘representative of the international community’ and has
thereby marginalised the UN – the only institution entitled to speak in this name.
Of course these real goals cannot be openly acknowledged. In order to mask
them, the powers in question have chosen to instrumentalise the discourse on
democracy and have arrogated to themselves the ‘right to intervene’ so as to
impose ‘the respect for human rights’!
At the same time, the absolute power of the new oligarchic plutocracies has
hollowed out the substance of the practice of bourgeois democracy. In former
times, political negotiation between the different social parties of the hegemonic
bloc was necessary for the reproduction of the power of capital. By contrast,
the new political management of the society of the capitalism of ‘oligopolies’,
established by means of a systematic de-politicisation, has given rise to a new
political culture of ‘consensus’ (modelled on the example of the United States)
that substitutes the consumer and the political spectator for the active citizen –
a condition for an authentic democracy. This ‘liberal virus’ (the title of another
book of mine published in 2005) abolishes the opening of possible alternative
choices and replaces it with a consensus that is centred on the sole respect for a
procedural, electoral democracy.
The demise and collapse of the three above-mentioned social models is at the
origin of this drama. The page of the first wave of struggles for emancipation has
now been turned; that of the second wave has not yet been opened. In the twilight
that separates them one can discern the ‘monsters’, as Gramsci writes.
In the North, these developments have caused the loss of a real sense of
democratic practice. This regression is masked by the pretensions of the so-called
‘post-modern’ discourse, according to which nations and classes have already left
the scene and ceded the political space to the ‘individual’, who is now the active
subject of social transformation.
In the South, other illusions dominate the political realm. The illusion of a
capitalist, national and autonomous development that is part of globalisation,
which is powerful among the dominant and the middles classes in ‘emergent mar-
kets’, fuelled by the immediate success of the last few decades. Or the nostalgic
(para-ethnic or para-religious) illusions about the past in the countries excluded
from this process.
What is worse, these developments have strengthened the general embrace
of the ‘ideology of consumption’ and the idea that progress is measured by the
quantitative growth of consumption. Marx had already shown that it is the mode
of production that determines the mode of consumption and not vice versa, as is
claimed by vulgar economics. What is lost sight of in all this is the perspective of
a humanist and superior rationality, the basis for the socialist project. The gigan-
tic potential that the application of science and technology offers to the whole of
humanity and which would enable the real flourishing of individuals and societies
in the North and the South is wasted by the requirements of its subordination to
the logics of the unlimited pursuit of the accumulation of capital. What’s even
worse, the continuous progress of the social productivity of labour is linked to the
breathtaking use of mechanisms of pauperisation (visible on a global scale, among
others the wholesale attack on peasant societies), as Marx had already understood.
Embracing the ideological alienation that is caused by capitalism does not only
adversely affect the affluent societies of the imperialist centres. The peoples of
the peripheries, who are for their most deprived of access to acceptable levels of
consumption and blinded by aspirations to consume like the opulent North, are
losing consciousness about the fact that the logic of historical capitalism makes
the extension of this model to the entire globe impossible.
We can therefore understand the reasons why the 2008 financial collapse
was the exclusive result of a sharpening of the internal contradictions peculiar
to the accumulation of capital. Only the intervention of forces that embody a
positive alternative can offer a way of imagining an exit from the chaos caused
by the sharpening of the internal contradictions of the system. (In this spirit, I
have contrasted the ‘revolutionary way’ with the model of overcoming the histori-
cally obsolete system through ‘decadence’.) And in the current state of affairs,
the movements of social protest, despite their visible growth, remain as a whole
94 Samir Amin
unable to question the social order linked to the capitalism of ‘oligopolies’ in the
absence of a coherent political project that can match the challenges.
From this point of view, the current situation is markedly different from that
which prevailed in the 1930s, when the forces of socialism clashed with fascist
parties, producing Nazism, the New Deal and the Popular Fronts.
The deepening of the crisis will not be avoided, even if reinstating the system
of the domination by the capital of the ‘oligopolies’ were potentially successful,
which is not impossible. In this situation, the possible radicalisation of the strug-
gles is not an improbable hypothesis, even if the obstacles remain formidable.
In the countries of the triad, such a radicalisation would imply that the agenda
would be to expropriate the ‘oligopolies’, which seems to be excluded for the fore-
seeable future. In consequence, the hypothesis that – despite the turmoil caused by
the crisis – the stability of the societies of the triad will not be questioned cannot
be discarded. There is a serious risk of a ‘remake’ of the wave of struggles of
emancipation as happened in the twentieth century, that is, a questioning of the
system exclusively by some of its peripheries.
A second stage of ‘the South’s awakening’ (the title of yet another book of
mine published in 2007, which offers a reading of the period of Bandung as the
first stage of this awakening) is now on the agenda. In the best possible scenario,
the advances produced in these conditions could force imperialism to retreat, to
renounce its demented and criminal project of controlling the world militarily.
And if this were the case, then the democratic movement of the countries at the
centre of the system could make a positive contribution to the success of this
strategy of neutralisation. Moreover, the decline of the imperialist rent, which
benefits the societies in question, itself caused by the re-organisation of the inter-
national equilibria to the advantage of the South (especially China), could help the
awakening of a socialist consciousness. But on the other hand, the societies of the
South could still confront the same challenges as in the past, a situation that would
produce the same limits on their progress.
A new internationalism of the workers and the peoples is necessary and pos-
sible. Historical capitalism is all things to everyone, except that it is durable. It
is but a short parenthesis in history. The fundamental questioning of capitalism
– which our contemporary thinkers in their overwhelming majority deem neither
‘possible’ nor ‘desirable’ – is nonetheless the inescapable condition for the eman-
cipation of the dominated workers and the peoples (those of the peripheries, i.e.
80 per cent of mankind). And the two dimensions of the challenge are inextricably
linked with one another. There will be no exit from capitalism by way of the sole
struggle of the people of the North, or by the sole struggle of the dominated people
of the South. There will be an exit from capitalism only if and when these two
dimensions of the challenge combine with one other. It is far from ‘certain’ that
this will occur, in which case capitalism will be overcome by the destruction of
civilisation (beyond the malaise in civilisation, to use Freud’s terminology) and
perhaps life on the planet. The scenario of a ‘remake’ of the twentieth century
falls short of the requirements of a commitment by mankind to the long route
of the transition towards worldwide socialism. The liberal catastrophe requires

a renewal of the radical critique of capitalism. The challenge is that which con-
fronts the permanent construction/reconstruction of the internationalism of the
workers and the peoples in the face of the cosmopolitanism of oligarchic capital.
Constructing this internationalism can be envisaged only by successful, new,
revolutionary advances (such as those begun in Latin America and Nepal), which
offer the perspective of an overcoming of capitalism.
In the countries of the South, the battle of the states and the nations for a
negotiated globalisation without hegemonies – the contemporary form of de-
linking – supported by the organisation of the demands of the popular classes
can circumscribe and limit the powers of the ‘oligopolies’ of the imperialist triad.
The democratic forces in the countries of the North must support this battle. The
‘democratic’ discourse that is proposed – and accepted by a majority on the left as
it stands – and the ‘humanitarian’ interventions conducted in its name, just like the
miserable practices of giving ‘aid’, eschew real engagement with this challenge.
In the countries of the North, the ‘oligopolies’ are already clearly forms of the
‘common good’ whose management cannot be left to sectional private interests
alone (the crisis has highlighted the catastrophic results of such an approach). An
authentic left must dare envision nationalisation as the first inescapable stage of
the socialisation of the ‘oligopolies’ by deepening democratic practice. The cur-
rent crisis enables the conception of a possible crystallisation of a common front
of the social and political forces bringing together all the victims of the exclusive
power of the ruling oligarchies.
The first wave of the struggles for socialism, that of the twentieth century,
has shown the limits of European social-democracies, the communisms of the
third international and the popular nationalism of the Bandung era, the demise
and collapse of their socialist ambition. The second wave, that of the twenty-first
century, must draw lessons from this. In particular, one lesson is to associate the
socialisation of economic management and the deepening of the democratisation
of society. There will be no socialism without democracy, but equally no demo-
cratic advance outside a socialist perspective.
These strategic goals invite us to think the construction of ‘convergences in
diversity’ (referring here to the formula used by the World Forum of Alternatives)
of the forms of organisation and the struggles of the dominated and exploited
classes. And it is not my intention to condemn from the outset the convergences of
the forms that in their own way would retrieve the traditions of social-democracy,
communism and popular nationalism, or would diverge from them.
According to this perspective, it seems to me to be necessary to think of the
renewal of a creative Marxism. Marx has never been so useful and necessary in
order to understand and transform the world, today even more so than yesterday.
Being Marxist in this spirit is to begin with Marx and not to stop with him, or
Lenin or Mao, as conceived and practised by the historical Marxists of the previ-
ous century. It is to render onto Marx that which is owed to him: the intelligence to
have begun a modern critical thinking, a critique of capitalist reality and a critique
96 Samir Amin
of its political, ideological and cultural representations. A creative Marxism must

pursue the goal of enriching this critical thinking par excellence. It must not fear to
integrate all the input of reflection, in all areas, including those that have wrongly
been considered to be ‘foreign’ by the dogmas of historical Marxisms of the past.
Note
The theses presented in this chapter have been developed in my book entitled La
Crise, Sortir de la Crise du Capitalisme ou Sortir du Capitalisme en Crise. Paris:
Editions Le Temps des Cerises, 2009.
Acknowledgement
This chapter was previously published in Globalizations 7 (1–2), 2010, in the
special issue on ‘Globalization and Crisis’, edited by Barry K. Gills. The special
issue was subsequently published as Globalization in Crisis (Routledge, 2011)
in the Rethinking Globalizations series, edited by Barry K. Gills, in which Samir
Amin’s article appears as a chapter.
6
East and West in world-systems
evolution
Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall
Andre Gunder Frank’s legacy is deep and wide. He was a founder of dependency
theory and the world-systems perspective. He took the idea of a whole historical
system very seriously and his rereading of Adam Smith has borne new fruit in
Giovanni Arrighi’s (2007) recent comparison of China and the West. This chapter
addresses issues raised by these two authors by using a comparative world-systems
perspective to tell the East/West story again and to discuss the political implica-
tions of their analyses for the near future. We pay special attention to the process
of semiperipheral development as it worked itself out in East Asia and the West.
We also discuss U.S. hegemonic decline, the potential for future hegemonic
rivalry, and the possibility that both the United States and China might contribute
to the restructuring of the twenty-first-century world order along more democratic
and sustainable lines.
The comparative world-systems perspective uses world-systems, defined as
important and consequential interaction networks, to describe and explain human
socio-cultural evolution since the emergence of language. It compares earlier and
smaller regional world-systems to later and larger continental and global world-
systems in order to see the patterns of structural change. The claim is that, at
least since the emergence of chiefdoms, much of human socio-cultural evolution
cannot be explained without using world-systems (rather than single societies) as
the unit of analysis. This is because semiperipheral societies have been an impor-
tant source of innovation and transformation in all world-systems that have core/
periphery hierarchies (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: ch. 5).
Spatial boundaries of world-systems

Before the global world-system emerged in the nineteenth century ce nearly all
regional systems were composed of spatially nested interaction networks. There
98 Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall
were smaller bulk goods networks (BGNs) in which food and everyday raw mate-
rials were circulated. These were encompassed by larger networks of sovereign
polities that fought and allied with one another (political–military networks –
PMNs).1 These in turn were encompassed within even larger networks in which
prestige goods and information flowed (PGNs and INs). Bulk goods and politi-
cal–military networks were extremely important for the reproduction or change in
local socio-cultural structures in all systems. Prestige goods networks were more
important in some systems than in others, and the nature of the functioning of
prestige goods was different in some systems than in others.2
Using nested interaction networks to define the spatial boundaries of systems
makes it possible to map the expansions and contractions of interaction networks
over time.3 David Wilkinson (1987) produced a chronograph of the expansion
of what he originally called “Central Civilization” (a political–military network)
that began with third millennium bce Mesopotamia and Egypt. We modified his
chronograph adding BGNs and PGNs and portraying the East Asian and Central
Systems as they eventually merged to form a global PMN in the nineteenth cen-
tury ce (Figure 6.1). It was at this point that the states of the Europe-centered
system surrounded and tried to penetrate China.
Figure 6.1 portrays the expansion of state-based world-systems in both East
Asia and the Central System of the West. It shows how the prestige goods networks
4000 BCE
Central PGN
East Asian PGN
Mongol Empire
Central PMN East Asian

PMN
2000 CE
West East
Figure 6.1 East/West networks expand and merge.

East and West in world-systems evolution 99
connected with each other intermittently during periods of trade expansion over
several millennia before they became permanently connected. The PGN corre-
sponds to an information network in which ideas and technologies were diffused,
along with pathogens. In the nineteenth century the PMN caught up with the PGN
and in the twentieth century the BGN also became global.
This approach to bounding systems is much more empirically explicit than that
adopted by Andre Gunder Frank in his work on 5,000 years of world-system history
(Frank and Gills 1993). Frank and some of his followers (e.g. Chew 2001) seemed
to think that there was already a global, or at least a Eurasia-wide, world-system
5,000 years ago. This was an instance in which “painting with broad strokes”
missed a lot of important detail. The important volume by Arrighi, Hamashita, and
Selden (2003) gets the spatial bounding of East–West connections mostly right.
Semiperipheral development
Another important recurrent pattern that becomes apparent once we use world-
systems as the unit of analysis for analyzing socio-cultural evolution is the
phenomenon of “semiperipheral development.” This means that semiperipheral
groups are unusually prolific innovators of techniques that both facilitate upward
mobility and transform the basic logic of social reproduction. This is not to say
that all semiperipheral groups produce such transformational actions, but rather
that the semiperipheral location is more fertile ground for the production of inno-
vations than is either the core or the periphery. This is because semiperipheral
societies have access to both core and peripheral cultural elements and tech-
niques, and they have invested less in existing organizational forms than core
societies have. So they are freer to recombine the organizational elements into
new configurations and to invest in new technologies, and they are usually more
highly motivated to take risks than are older core societies. Innovation in older
core societies tends toward minor improvements. Semiperipheral societies are
more likely to put their resources behind radically new concepts.
Thus knowledge of core/periphery hierarchies and semiperipheral locations
is necessary for explaining how small-scale interchiefdom systems evolved into
the capitalist global political economy of today. The process of rise and fall of
powerful chiefdoms, called “cycling” by anthropologists (Anderson 1994; Hall
2001, 2006), was occasionally punctuated by the emergence of a polity from the
semiperipheral zone that conquered and united the old core region into a larger
chiefly polity or an early state. This phenomenon is termed the “semiperipheral
marcher chiefdom” (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997: 83–84; Kirch 1984: 199–202).
Much better known is the analogous phenomenon of “semiperipheral marcher
states” in which a relatively new state from out on the edge of a core region
conquered adjacent states to form a new core-wide empire (Collins 1981; Mann
1986). Almost every large conquest empire one can think of is an instance of this.
A less frequently perceived phenomenon that is a quite different type of semi
peripheral development is the “semiperipheral capitalist city-state.” Dilmun, early
Ashur, the Phoenician cities, the Italian city-states, Melakka, and the Hanseatic
cities of the Baltic were such instances. These small states in the interstices of the
tributary empires were agents of commodification long before capitalism became
predominant in the emergent core region of Europe, itself a still semiperipheral
region in the larger Afroeurasian world-system.
The semiperipheral development idea is also an important tool for understand-
ing the real possibilities for global social change today because semiperipheral
countries are the main weak link in the global capitalist system – the zone where
the most powerful anti-systemic movements have emerged in the past and where
vital and transformative developments are most likely to occur in the future.
The idea of evolution

It remains necessary to clarify what we mean and what we do not mean by the
word “evolution.” Sanderson (1991, 2007) has explained that the scientific study
of evolution must be cleansed of certain assumptions that tend to be included by
most users of this word. We are not necessarily talking about “progress.” Progress
is an idea that requires specifying a set of desiderata, value commitments, and
assumptions about what is good and what is not. That is a fine thing to do and we
shall do it toward the end of this chapter. Progress can be an empirical question
once one has defined what is meant. But the study of evolutionary patterns of
change need not assume either progress nor its opposite, regress. It is simply a
study of certain directional patterns of change.
In general, societies have become larger and more complex and more hier-
archical, albeit with occasional reverses in these patterns. We further note that
new social forms most often arise out of a necessity fostered by social interac-
tions, resource shortages, climate change, diffusion of new ideas, technologies, or
microorganisms, and most typically a combination of one or more of these. New
social forms often appear via a satisficing mechanism: the first form that is found
to work is seized. As more versions appear (say states) and come into competition
a selection process favors those that can outproduce and outfight the others, that
is, a maximization process. However, the “selection pressure” is locally deter-
mined, both spatially and chronologically. We also note that these changes, or
evolution, are rarely linear, or even smooth. Rather, they are marked by many
reversals, collapses, fragmentations, and so on. (Hall 2006). Development of
complexity often engenders other societies to become more complex, though at
times promotes break-up or collapse to simpler forms. Scientific explanations of
evolutionary change do not employ purposes as causes (teleology) and they do not
assume inevitability.
Central and East Asian evolution since the Stone Age

East Asian complexity and hierarchy emerged as sedentary agriculture developed
in inland fertile valleys. Horticultural settlements developed into chiefdoms and
farmers traded and fought with those groups that continued to rely primarily on
hunting and gathering. Eventually the hunter-gatherers were pushed onto the
steppes, where they shifted toward pastoralism. Thus began the long sedentary/
nomadic dance that was to have such huge consequences for the evolution of
East Asian world-systems. The pastoralists traded meat and live animals for grain.
Some of them settled on the edges of the region of sedentary polities to form
new semiperipheral chiefdoms, and later states. Often small states and non-state
societies were linked by trade networks (Smith 2005).
In Central Asia the domestication of the horse followed the development
of agriculture (Anthony 1998; Honeychurch and Amartuvshin 2006; Levine et
al. 2003; Linduff 2003; Mair 2003; Sherratt 2003). Steppe nomads brought the
chariot to China from the West. And they may have also brought bronze-making
technology, although that may have emerged independently in China. In either
case horses and bronze were technologies that accelerated the growing complex-
ity and size of polities and gave rise to the early state formation. The Shang were
the first of a series of semiperipheral marcher states that conquered older core
states to put together a core-wide empire in China (see Figure 6.2).
It was not until the first century bce that the Silk Road became a safe route for
caravans with the establishment of a chain of empires linking Han China and the
Kushan, Parthian, and Roman Empires (Liu and Shaffer 2007; Teggart 1939).
Before that, diffusion was limited to down-the-line trade among oases settlements
and/or the carrying of cultural elements by migrating steppe nomads. Nomads
played a crucial role in the development of trade from China across Central Asia;
they linked the disparate nodes from the down-the-line trade. Indeed, “the nomads
were, if you will, the godfathers of international overland trade in Eurasia, making
peoples all along the route offers they could not refuse” (Barfield 2001a: 259;
see also Sherratt 2003). Some have argued that original Chinese state formation
by the Shang was spurred by an invasion of chariot-making barbarians from the
West (McNeill 1963; Mair 2003; Renfrew 2001). Whether or not bronze-making
diffused from the West or was independently developed in China is still in con-
tention (Linduff 1998; Puett 1998), but the origin of the chariot is not. Primary
state formation in China was largely autochthonous, a matter of local chiefdoms
emerging in a context in which horticulture had long been established (Barfield
2001b; Underhill and Habu 2006).
The partial isolation of Chinese civilization from the West was great enough to
prevent the diffusion of phonetic writing, an invention that spread widely in the
West displacing earlier ideographic forms of writing. By the time contacts with
the West became more common, the Chinese already had a substantial invest-
ment in a great literature written in their ideographic script and this became the
symbolic core of Eastern civilization that could not be lightly thrown away in
favor of a less cumbersome form of representing language. Ideographic writing
also had the advantage that it could easily transcend dialect, and even language
differences. It served as a lingua franca, not unlike Latin in Europe, but was better
and lasted longer.
Indeed, the Silk Road cities, and occasional statelets, were hotbeds of change,
as would be expected in nodal areas. Recent works by McNeill and McNeill (2003)
and Christian (2004) have stressed the importance of trade and communications
networks in the processes of human socio-cultural evolution. Both of these recent
works employ a network node theory of innovation and collective learning that
is similar to the human ecology approach developed earlier by Amos Hawley
(1950). Innovations are said to be unusually likely to occur at transportation and
communications nodes where information from many different sources can be
easily combined and recombined.
This is one, but only one, of the reasons Andre Gunder Frank (1992) argued for
the “Centrality of Central Asia.” Central Asian states seldom made the semiper-
ipheral marcher state transition – with the glaring exception of the Mongols (Hall
2005); they were conduits of change in many directions. Indeed, Central Asian
nomads were the vectors of many social changes, in all directions (for instance see
Barfield 1989; Kradin 2002; Kradin et al. 2003).
For most of its four millennia history China was linked to West Asia or South
Asia, or even Southeast Asia, only via trade and information networks (PGNs and
INs). Only during the Mongol Empire did it become linked to West Asia militar-
ily (PMN). Yet a curious synchrony of Eastern and Western cycles of population
growth, largest city population sizes, and territorial sizes has been observed from
about 500 bce to about 1500 ce, whereas South Asia does not appear to follow
the same pattern. These synchronies could have been caused by climate change,
but they also could have been caused by trade fluctuations, epidemic diseases, or
warfare with Central Asian peoples (Chase-Dunn et al. 2000; Turchin and Hall
2003).
Figure 6.2 shows the territorial sizes in square megameters of the largest states
and empires in East Asia from 1900 bce to 206 bce with the sequential upsweep
carried out by Chu, Qin, and Western Han. Both of the upsweeps involved the
actions of semiperipheral marcher states who rolled up the regional system of
states (Chase-Dunn et al. 2008).
The history of core/periphery interaction in China makes it clear that a dis-
tinction needs to be made between peripheral and semiperipheral marcher states.
Semiperipheral polities are recently settled sedentary societies on the geographi-
cal edge of a region of older sedentary polities. But not all of the empire-makers
have been of this kind. Sometimes huge confederations of still-nomadic peoples
emerged from Central Asia to conquer the farmers and cities of China. And
whether or not these steppe confederacies succeeded in conquest, they posed a
continuing threat to agrarian states in both the East and the West for millennia.
These must be considered to have been peripheral marcher states.
Figure 6.3 shows the sizes of the largest states and empires in East Asia from
1900 bce to 1949 ce; the area to the left of the vertical line overlaps with Figure
6.2. We see that the second upsweep shown in Figure 6.2 was carried further by
the Hsiung-nu, a steppe nomad conqueror state that many believe was composed
of the same people who were known as the Huns in the West.
Territorial Sizes of Largest Early East Asian States and Empires
3.00
Western Han
2.50
UPSWEEP 2
Territorial size (square megameter)
Qin
2.00
1.50
Chu
1.00
Shang
Zhou
0.50
UPSWEEP 1
0.00
–1900 –1800 –1700 –1300 –1122 –1050 –800 –770 –500 –350 –300 –250 –220
Year
Figure 6.2 Largest empires in the East Asian region.

Territorial Sizes of Largest East Asian Empires
30.00
UPSWEEP 3
25.00 Mongols
20.00
Square kilometers (millions)
UPSWEEP 4
Qing
15.00
UPSWEEP 2
10.00 Hsiung-nu
RECOVERY
Eastern Han
Turks
5.00
UPSWEEP 1
0.00
–500
–250
–176
–1700
–1050
150
221
316
347
441
548
581
624
670
751
800
895
923
958
–50
1127
1204
1222
1260
1309
1369
1450
1620
1650
1725
1780
1865
1900
1949
Year
Figure 6.3 Territorial sizes of largest states and empires in East Asia.
All of these upward sweeps in the territorial sizes of empires involved semi
peripheral or peripheral marcher states. The Hsiung-nu were classic horse pastoralist
nomads who came out of Central Asia, very similar to the later Mongols. The
Turks were also from Central Asia but they were different. They were originally
hill people who specialized in mining and metallurgy. They became an important
ethnicity in the Central Asian oasis states, and then led several expansive con-
quests toward both the East and the West (Chase-Dunn et al. 2006).
In his classic study, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, Owen Lattimore graphi-
cally described the cycles of Chinese dynasties thus:
Although the social outlook of the Chinese is notable for the small honor it
pays to war, and although their social system does not give the soldier a high
position, every Chinese dynasty has risen out of a period war, and usually a
long period. Peasant rebellions have been as recurrent as barbarian invasions.
Frequently the two kinds of war have been simultaneous; both have usu-
ally been accompanied by famine and devastation, and peace has never been
restored without savage repression. The brief chronicle of a Chinese dynasty
is very simple: a Chinese general or a barbarian conqueror establishes a peace
which is usually a peace of exhaustion. There follows a period of gradu-
ally increasing prosperity as land is brought back under cultivation, and this
passes into a period of apparently unchanging stability. Gradually, however,
weak administration and corrupt government choke the flow of trade and
taxes. Discontent and poverty spread. The last emperor of the dynasty is
often vicious and always weak – as weak as the founder of the dynasty was
ruthless. The great fight each other for power, and the poor turn against all
government. The dynasty ends, and after an interval another begins, exactly
as the last began, and runs the same course.
(Lattimore 1940: 531)
Lattimore qualifies this characterization for different periods. But it remains an

insightful description of a process that repeated itself over the centuries until
China became surrounded by the West.
ReOrient and the largest cities: the timing of the rise of

the West
Andre Gunder Frank’s (1998) provocative study of the global economy from
1400 to 1800 ce contended that China had long been the center of the global
system. Frank also argued that the rise of European hegemony was a sudden and
conjunctural development caused by the late emergence in China of a “high level
equilibrium trap” and the success of Europeans in using bullion extracted from the
Americas to buy their way into Chinese technological, financial, and productive
success. Frank contended that European hegemony was fragile from the start and
will be short-lived with a predicted new rise of Chinese predominance in the near
future. He also argued that the scholarly ignorance of the importance of China
invalidates all the social science theories that have mistakenly understood the
rise of the West and the differences between the East and the West. In Frank’s
view there never was a transition from feudalism to capitalism that distinguished
Europe from other regions of the world. He argues that the basic dynamics of
development have been similar in the global system for 5,000 years (Frank and
Gills 1993).
Frank’s model of development is basically a combination of state expansion
and financial accumulation, although in ReOrient he focused almost exclusively
on financial centrality as the major important element. His study of global flows
of specie, especially silver, is an important contribution to our understanding of
what happened between 1400 and 1800 ce. Frank also uses demographic weight,
and especially population growth and growth of the size of cities, as an indicator
of relative importance and developmental success.
In Figure 6.4 we see the emergence of the world’s first cities in Mesopotamia
and Egypt, represented here by the designation West Asian/North African. In the
upper left-hand corner of the graph the dashed line shows that this region had 100
percent of the largest cities on Earth in 2000 bce. As other regions developed large
cities this monopoly necessarily diminished, and 4,000 years later only a very
small percentage of the world’s largest cities were in this region. This is strong
evidence of the notion of uneven development and the geographical movement of
the cutting edge of societal complexity.
The relative size importance of European cities (indicated by the solid line)
shows a long oscillation around a low level, indicating Europe’s peripheral and
semiperipheral location in the larger Afroeurasian world-system. The long his-
tory of the incorporation of the very small systems of Europe into the expanding
Central System of West Asia/North Africa is discussed in Chase-Dunn and Hall
(1997: ch. 9). Europe had been firmly incorporated into the trade networks of
Regional Urban Population as a % of the World’s Largest Cities

100
%European
90
% West Asian-North African
% South Asian
80
% East Asian
70
Percentage Urban Population
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
2000 BCE
1600 BCE
1200 BCE
800 BCE
430 BCE
100 CE
500 CE
800 CE
1000 CE
1150 CE
1250 CE
1350 CE
1450 CE
1550 CE
1600 CE
1700 CE
1800 CE
1850 CE
1900 CE
1925 CE
1970 CE
Year
Figure 6.4 Regional urban population as percent of the world’s largest cities.
the Central System during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Figure 6.4 indicates that
by around 1450 ce Europe began a long rise. It passed East Asia in 1825 ce and
peaked in 1850, and then underwent a rapid decline in importance as indicated by
the relative size of its largest cities.
All of the largest cities on Earth, including those in the Americas and Oceania,
are in the denominator of our measure of relative city sizes. So in the decades of
the twentieth century the percentages shown in Figure 6.4 do not add up to 100
percent because some of the largest cities are in none of the regions tracked (e.g.
New York, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, etc.). The Americas had become part of the
Central System, but Figure 6.4 compares constant regions rather than expanding
networks. Thus Figure 6.4 indicates that the relatively smaller and older European
cities (e.g. London and Paris) were surpassed by the much larger American and
Asian cities in the twentieth century.
The trajectory of Europe displayed in Figure 6.4 supports part of Gunder
Frank’s (1998) analysis, but contradicts another part. The small cities of Europe
in the early period indicate its peripheral status vis-à-vis the core regions of West
Asia/North Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. As Frank argues, Europe did not
best East Asia (as indicated by city sizes) until the eighteenth century. But the long
European rise, beginning in the fifteenth century, contradicts Frank’s depiction of
a sudden and conjunctural emergence of European hegemony. Based on relative
city sizes it appears that the rise of Europe occurred over a period of 500 years.
For East Asia we see in Figure 6.4 a rapid rise that began in 1200 bce with
the emergence of states. This was followed by a small decline and then another
burst of relative urban growth that began in 361 ce and rose to a peak in 800
ce, another decline, and then a further rise to the highest peak of all in 1350 ce.
Then there was a small decline and another peak in 1800. Not until 1825 was
East Asia bested by the European cities after a decline that started in 1800 and
continued until 1914, when a recovery began. The European cities were bested
again by the East Asian cities between 1950 and 1970 during the rapid decline of
the European cities in terms of their size importance among the world’s largest
cities. This most recent rise of the East Asian cities is a consequence of the upward
mobility of Japan, China, and the East Asian newly industrialized countries in the
global political economy.
Frank’s depiction of a sudden and radical decline of China that began in 1800
ce is supported in Figure 6.4. His analysis, which focuses on the period from 1400
to 1800 ce, does not examine the relative decline of East Asian predominance
that began in 1350 and the rise to a new peak that began in 1650, as indicated in
Figure 6.4.
Our examination of the problem of the relative importance of regions relies
exclusively on the population sizes of cities, a less than ideal indicator of power
and relative centrality.4 Nevertheless, these results suggest some possible prob-
lems with Andre Gunder Frank’s (1998) characterization of the relationship
between Europe and China before and during the rise of European hegemony.
Frank’s contention that Europe was primarily a peripheral region relative to the
core regions of the Afroeurasian world-system is supported by the city data, with
some qualifications. Europe was for millennia a periphery of the large cities and
powerful empires of ancient West Asia and North Africa. The Greek and Roman
cores were instances of semiperipheral marcher states that conquered important
parts of the older West Asian/North African core. After the decline of the Western
Roman Empire, the core shifted back toward the East and Europe was once again
importantly peripheral.
Counter to Frank’s contention, however, the rise of European hegemony was
not a sudden conjunctural event that was due solely to a developmental crisis
in China. The city population size data indicate that an important renewed core
formation process had been emerging within Europe since at least the fourteenth
century. This was partly a consequence of European extraction of resources from
its own expanded periphery. But it was also likely due to the unusually virulent
forms of capitalist accumulation within Europe, and the effects of this on the
nature and actions of states. The development of European capitalism began
among the city-states of Italy and the Baltic. It spread to the European interstate
system, eventually resulting in the first capitalist nation-state – the Dutch Republic
of the seventeenth century – as well as the later rise of the hegemony of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain in the nineteenth century.
This process of regional core formation and its associated emphasis on
capitalist commodity production further spread and institutionalized the logic of
capitalist accumulation by defeating the efforts of territorial empires (Hapsburgs,
Napoleonic France) to return the expanding European core to a more tributary
mode of accumulation.
Acknowledging some of the unique qualities of the emerging European
hegemony does not require us to ignore the important continuities that also existed
as well as the consequential ways in which European developments were linked
with processes going on in the rest of the Afroeurasian world-system. The more
recent emergence of East Asian cities as again the very largest cities on Earth
occurred in a context that was structurally and developmentally distinct from the
multi-core system that still existed in 1800 ce. Now there is only one core because
all core states are directly interacting with one another. Although the multi-core
system prior to the eighteenth century was undoubtedly systemically integrated to
an important extent, it was not as interdependent as the global world-system has
now become.
A new East Asian hegemony is by no means a certainty, as both the United
States and German-led Europe will be strong contenders in the coming period
of hegemonic rivalry (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1999; Chase-Dunn et al.
2005). In this competition megacities may be more a liability than an advan-
tage because the costs of these huge human agglomerations have continued to
increase, while the benefits have been somewhat diminished by the falling costs
of transportation and communication. Nevertheless megacities will continue to
be an indicator of predominance because societies that can afford them will have
demonstrated the ability to mobilize huge resources.
Modes of accumulation and the East/West comparison

In 1989 Gunder Frank wrote the first version of his contention that “the modes of
production” distinction made by Marxists is just so much ideological nonsense
(Frank 1989).5 He had discovered that something very like capitalism existed in
the ancient and classical worlds, and he had become quite skeptical about the idea
of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, which he increasingly
saw as a Eurocentric construction that ignored important larger Eurasian-wide
dynamics. Gunder came to accept something close to Kasja Ekholm and Jonathan
Friedman’s (1982) notion of “capital-imperialism” in which the world system
had oscillated back and forth between more state-organized and more market-
organized conditions since the emergence of cities and states in Mesopotamia.
According to Frank’s view there have been no transitions from qualitatively dif-
ferent logics of social reproduction. This view ignored what had happened before
the emergence of states (the so-called kin-based modes of production), and it
minimized the idea of a long-term trend in which large tributary states became
increasingly commercialized as they adopted and expanded the use of money and
markets. Frank also largely ignored what we have called “semiperipheral capital-
ist city-states” in the ancient and classical worlds. And he completely denied that
Europe had experienced a transformation in which capitalism had become the
predominant mode of accumulation.
This conceptual move on Frank’s part was arguably an over-reaction to some
very important but not well-understood insights – that markets, money, merchant
capitalism, finance capitalism, capitalist manufacturing, and wage labor had
played a much more important role in the ancient and classical worlds than many
others had recognized, and that much of the Marxist version of the transformation
of modes of production was very Eurocentric. Furthermore, as did many others
by 1989, Frank came to see the Soviet Union more as a somewhat modernized
and totalitarian version of capital-imperialism than as an experiment in social-
ism. Frank’s response to these insights was to completely throw out the idea that
modes of accumulation evolve. As with the contention that there had been a single
world system since the Bronze Age, he may have over-reacted in order to make a
dramatic break with his own earlier thought and that of many others.
Our own position is that there have, indeed, been major transformations in the
modes of accumulation. One reason both Frank, and to a lesser extent Arrighi,
miss this is that they start their histories well after states have been invented.
We, however, start about twelve millennia ago, and recognize, along with many
anthropologists, that the invention of the state is itself a major shift, marking the
invention of the tributary modes of accumulation (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997).
That this transition has occurred independently several times in human history
indicates that it is part of a regular process of socio-cultural evolution (Chase-Dunn
and Lerro forthcoming; Hall and Chase-Dunn 2006; Sanderson 1999).
In our 1997 book, Rise and Demise, we characterized Rome and China as
commercializing tributary empires in which substantial amounts of marketization,
commodity production, and wage labor had emerged, but the predominant logic
of social reproduction remained based on the appropriation of surplus product
through the use of state power.
Taxation, tribute-gathering, and rents from landed property were the mainstays
of the state and the ruling class. Paper money was used in Sung China in the
tenth century ce. However, the state and the ruling class of mandarins, or the
marcher-state usurpers who sometimes came to power, were mainly dependent
on the use of state coercion to extract surplus product from the direct producers.
This is rather different from a capitalist system in which profit-making and the
appropriation of surplus value through employment of wage labor has become
the mainstay of the state and the ruling class. China was commercialized, but the
central state was still a tributary state, not a capitalist state. A capitalist state is
controlled by capitalists and acts primarily in their interest, although state power
is sometimes used to also serve others who are allied with and needed by the
capitalists. Capitalist states existed in the ancient and classical worlds, but they
were out on the edge, in the interstices between the tributary states and empires.
Only in Europe did a cluster of semiperipheral capitalist city-states emerge, and
then later a capitalist core state, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, in the
seventeenth century.
In Volume 1 of The Modern World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) noted
a key difference between China and the West that had huge consequences. He
pointed out that China had a central government – single “world empire” – that
could make and enforce a system-wide policy. Wallerstein pointed out that at the
same time as the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator was heading out, with
Genoese support, to circumnavigate Africa for the purposes of outflanking the
Venetian monopoly on East Indian spices, the Ming Dynasty was abandoning
the treasure fleet explorations to Africa and the West in order to concentrate on
defending the heartland of the middle kingdom from steppe invaders. In Europe
there was no central emperor to tell the Portuguese to desist. Europe was develop-
ing a multi-centric interstate system in which finance capital was beginning to
play an important role in directing state policy (see Arrighi 1994), while China
was maintaining a relatively centralized tributary empire. Arguably this was the
most important difference between China and the West. It was the weakness
of tributary states in the West after the fall of Rome that allowed capitalism to
become a predominant form of accumulation, while the strong tributary state in
China, run by mandarins and semiperipheral conquerors, repeatedly succeeded in
confiscating the wealth of merchants who posed a political threat to state control.
This explanation was rejected as so much Eurocentric claptrap by Frank
because Max Weber and Karl Marx had said as much, and they needed to be
thrown into the dustbin of Eurocentrism with all the other dead white guys.
In Adam Smith Giovanni Arrighi (2007) reviews and recasts the recent work
on Chinese economic history that has been partly inspired by Gunder Frank’s
analysis (e.g. Pomeranz 2000; Sugihara 2003; Wong 1997). These authors show
extensive markets, commodity production, buyer-driven commodity chains, and
so on in China and confirm that Chinese economic institutions in 1900 were not
inferior to those of the West. Arrighi (2007) ends with the conclusion that the key
question is “who controls the state?” In Europe capitalists came to control, first,
city-states, and then nation-states. In China that never happened, although it may
be happening now for the first time.
One may ask what happened to capitalist efforts to gain state power in China.
Even if they did not succeed, efforts should have been made. Of course Melakka,
a Chinese ally in Malaysia, was a semiperipheral capitalist city-state in the sea-
borne carrying trade (Curtin 1984). But there was also Koxinga, a maritime
capitalist state that nearly emerged in China in the seventeenth-century transition
from the Ming to the Qing dynasties (Arrighi 2007: 333–334; Hung 2001). So
capitalists were not absent from the stage in East Asia, but neither did they suc-
ceed in conquering the commanding heights as they did in the West.
Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing is dedicated to Andre Gunder Frank,
and Frank’s influence is obvious throughout. Arrighi does not accept Frank’s
blanket rejection of the distinction between the tributary mode of accumula-
tion and the capitalism mode of accumulation. In The Long Twentieth Century
Arrighi (1994) describes China as having been a tributary state. But in Adam
Smith Arrighi depicts China as having developed a more labor-intensive form of
market society that is less inhumane than the kind of capitalism that developed
in the West. Like Frank, Arrighi appears to have abandoned any discussion of
the possibility of a future transition to a qualitatively different socialist mode of
accumulation, although this is not explicitly discussed. Whereas Frank sees his-
tory as a great wheel that goes around and around between more state-organized
and more market-organized forms, Arrighi sees some possibility of progress in the
sense of a more egalitarian form of market society, with China playing the role of
exemplar and midwife.6
Both Frank and Arrighi share the conviction that East Asia is again rising to
a central position, although Frank did not say as explicitly as Arrighi has exactly
what is meant by this. As reviewed above, Frank argued that China had been the
center of the Eurasian world-system until the late eighteenth century and that
Europe had then suddenly got the upper hand, but that the European societies and
their offshoots were now in decline and China will be the center once again. In
Adam Smith Arrighi is careful to avoid saying that China will become the next
global hegemon. Rather he sees China as the exemplar of a better form of political
economy – market society – and so the world will become flatter (less unequal)
to the extent that other countries emulate the Chinese model of networked and
state-led market society.
Arrighi contends that the kind of market society that is said to be emerging
in China is kinder and gentler to workers because it does not replace labor with
machines in such a disruptive manner and it is less destructive to the environment
than Western capitalism because it does not employ such large-scale methods
of harvesting nature. It is also supposedly less imperialistic. He contends that
there was an “industrious revolution” in China in the eighteenth century in which
intensive labor was used to produce commodities instead of replacing labor with
machines. This kind of market society was characterized by Mark Elvin (1973)
as a “high level equilibrium trap” in which capital had little incentive to invest
in labor-saving technology because labor was so cheap. Arrighi emphasizes the
upside of this for employment. He also contends that the Chinese Revolution
helped to create the conditions under which this kind of market society could
re-emerge in the decades since Mao’s demise.7
Arrighi further contends that China was less imperialistic than the West in
earlier centuries, concentrating more on domestic development than on global
expansion. The East Asian PMN with China at its core was somewhat less prone
to interstate war than was the multi-centric European system of competing core
states. Physical and human geography are also relevant here. As John Fitzpatrick
(1992) first points out, despite a relatively great degree of centralization, the East
Asian system was still an interstate system that periodically broke down into
smaller warring states. These breakdowns were less frequent than the nearly
constant interstate wars of Europe, but this is probably due to the preponderance
of power held by the East Asian hegemon – China – than to any difference in
the modes of accumulation. An 800-pound gorilla can keep the peace. The East
Asian trade–tribute system studied by Takeshi Hamashita (2003) was a rather
hierarchical form of international political economy, although it was probably
less rapacious than European colonialism. But again this was at least partly due
to the fact that the core was a single core-wide state rather than a collection of
competing core states.
The notion that China concentrated only on domestic problems after the Ming
abandonment of the treasure fleets is contradicted by Peter Perdue’s (2005)
careful study of Qing expansion in Central Asia, and the notion that China is
an exemplar of contemporary egalitarianism in relations with the periphery is
contradicted by the situation in Tibet and by many observers of Chinese projects
in Africa. Although we do not condone China-bashing, and we agree with Arrighi
that China is a somewhat more progressive force in world society than many other
powerful actors (including the current U.S. regime), the idea that adoption of the
Chinese model of political economy, so-called market society, can be the main
basis of a more egalitarian, just, and sustainable form of global governance is a bit
of a stretch. On the other hand there are important elements of the idea of market
society that probably are quite relevant for a formulation of what should be the
goals of contemporary progressives, and that are possibly achievable during the
twenty-first century.
World revolutions and East Asia

As far as we know the idea of world revolutions was first developed by
Giovanni Arrighi, Terry Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein in their 1989 book
Antisystemic Movements. The idea is that the structure of global governance in
the modern world-system evolves because of competition among core states
for hegemony and because subordinated groups of people resist oppression and
domination. These latter forms of resistance coalesce when local and national
social movements, uprisings, rebellions, and revolutions cluster in time, and as
these subordinate groups increasingly become connected to one another across
space. Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein (1989) analyzed the world revolutions of
1848, 1917, 1968, and 1989. They contend that the demands put forth in a world
revolution do not usually become institutionalized until a consolidating revolt has
occurred, or until the next world revolution. So the revolutionaries appear to have
lost by the failure of their most radical demands, but enlightened conservatives
who are trying to manage hegemony end up incorporating the reforms that were
earlier radical demands into the current world order.
Up until the nineteenth century movements of resistance in the East and the West
were mainly disconnected from one another. In China the great peasant rebellions
continued as part of the dynastic cycle. In the West, world revolutions, beginning
with the Protestant Reformation, played an important role in the rise and fall of
hegemons and the development of capitalism (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000).
But in the nineteenth century these two separate phenomena became intertwined.
The world revolution of 1848 in Europe was linked in interesting ways with the
Taiping Rebellion, and the Chinese nationalist revolution of 1911 was an impor-
tant part of the world revolution of 1917 (Chase-Dunn 2008).
Rerise of the global left

We agree with Arrighi that the current rise of China as an important player in the
world economy was facilitated by the period of development led by the Chinese
Communist Party. And we also stand firmly with Arrighi to help defend him when
he (and sociology) are red-baited and demeaned by economistic trolls (e.g. Clark
2008). But in this friendly context (a conference devoted to Andre Gunder Frank’s
critical social science) we will also say where we agree and where we disagree
with the political implications of Arrighi’s analysis as presented in Adam Smith
(2007).
The world revolution of “20xx” (twenty dos equis) is going on now (Chase-Dunn
2008). There are many continuities with earlier revolutions, and we substantially
agree with Arrighi’s specification of how the decline of U.S. hegemony is similar
to, and different from, the decline of British hegemony in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Although there was a huge wave of globalization in the
late nineteenth century, and then a wave of deglobalization during the “Age of
Extremes” in the first half of the twentieth century, the world is quite a bit more
globalized now than it was then (Chase-Dunn et al. 2000).
The family of anti-systemic movements in the global justice movement of
movements has achieved some recent successes, and has endured some failures.
There has not been much in the way of domestic violence or divorce, but some
new relatives have appeared and some of these either want to move into the house
or refuse to do so. Nevertheless, a multi-centric and strongly linked network
of movements has emerged in the context of the World Social Forum process
(Chase-Dunn et al. 2007). The labor movement is no longer hegemonic on the
left, even in its own eyes. Most of the labor activists in the global justice move-
ment now see a big tent in which labor plays an important role, but is only one of
several other important players (Santos 2006).
What exactly is wrong with capitalism?

The ideological hegemony of neoliberalism has been a useful foil for encouraging
social movements and non-governmental organizations to scale up their activi-
ties – to become more transnational and to form global networks of opposition.
If a problem is obviously not resolvable at the local or national level, people will
make larger coalitions and create global networks, as many (but not all) have done
(Reitan 2007).
But the neoliberal bogeyman has also created some problems for the orienta-
tion of the movements. Because neoliberals use “market magic” as a justification
for attacking and dismantling all institutions that operate to protect the interests
of workers or the poor, this encourages movement leaders and writers to go back
to railing about commodification and commercialism, as the Marxist left has done
in the past. Karl Polanyi’s works on the negative properties of disembedded mar-
kets have had an understandable resurgence of popularity. Some of this is good
because it gives people a way to resist the arguments of the neoliberal ideologues.
And some of it is good because the notion of fair trade is a valuable part of local
and North/South altruistic solidarity. But it would be unwise to carry the anti-
market sentiment as far as was done in the Soviet Union. To our knowledge no
one is now advocating the abolition of market exchange or money. That is good.
This raises the issue of what is really wrong with capitalism. Most leftists agree
that capitalism destroys the environment, exacerbates social inequalities, and
leaves vast numbers of people in extreme poverty and bad health. But what is it
about the institutional features of capitalism that causes these negative outcomes?
For his analyses of the evolution of hegemony Giovanni Arrighi has adopted a
Braudelian understanding of capitalism that contrasts the local market economy,
which is not capitalism, with haute finance, which is capitalism. We agree with
the part about the relative worthiness of small commodity production. But we
think that a contemporary political analysis needs to once again also consider the
issue of the institutional nature of property. Private property in the major means
of production (meaning large private firms) is an important institutional form of
modern capitalism. No one now advocates the expansion of state-owned firms
as the solution to the problems created by capitalism because the Soviet Union
showed that such firms are grossly inefficient.
As we have said above, Giovanni Arrighi suggests in Adam Smith that a more
benign form of market economy is emerging in China that can be a model that
will help resolve the main negative consequences of capitalism for other countries
as well. He does not discuss in detail exactly which institutional features of the
Chinese system are worth emulating. His discussion of a benign state that man-
ages a market society is suggestive, but more needs to be said about this. This is
difficult terrain on which to tread, especially with respect to sensitivities in China
about being lectured by Westerners about democracy and human rights, but the
contested notions of democracy must necessarily be part of the discussion.
The Chinese use the term “market socialism” to describe their own model. At
present this seems to mean a state managed by the Communist Party and a market
society in which private ownership of the major means of production is allowed.
Whether or not China is a developing exemplar, the emerging global justice
movement needs to debate again the classical issues of democracy and socialism
and to learn from the mistakes of the past. The world revolution of 1989, in which
the peoples of Eastern Europe threw the Russians out, and sought to establish indi-
vidual political rights and protections long disparaged on the left as “bourgeois,”
sensitizes many progressives to the need to reconsider the attacks on individualism
that leftists carried out in response to the perceived anti-collectivism of capitalism
(e.g. Kaldor 2003). New social movements such as the European autonomists
contend that individualism and collectivism are not necessarily incompatible.
This said, we think that simply extending social democracy to the global level,
as advocated by the LSE scholars and others, does not address the more funda-
mental issues of economic democracy that must be addressed in moving toward a
more just and sustainable world society. Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) outlined
a modified version of John Roemer’s model of market socialism in which capital
itself is socialized (see also Loy forthcoming).
Left cosmopolitans are advocating globalization from below, while indigenous
peoples and some neo-anarchists and autonomists simply want self-reliance and
the right to do what they want to do without interference. These are huge issues
and they reverberate in East–West relations. There has been very little participa-
tion by people from the People’s Republic of China in the World Social Forum
process, and the somewhat understandable protective attitude of the Chinese
government toward propaganda from abroad stands in the way of greater partici-
pation. If China is to play a progressive role in world politics its people must be
allowed and encouraged to become autonomous activists in transnational social
movements.
Multilateral global governance

Although Arrighi does not specifically address the issue of hegemonic evolution,
it is a topic that his analysis of East Asia naturally raises. He is being careful to
show that the current Chinese regime is not plotting to become the next hegemon.
This is understandable because racists and nationalists in the rest of the world
are champing to once again use the “yellow peril” as a bogeyman. But another
approach is suggested by Arrighi’s analysis. He shows that there have been a
series of hegemonies and that each successive one has been larger than the pre-
vious one, and that more of the political, military, financial, and transportation
functions of the world economy have become incorporated and coordinated

within the state boundaries of each successive hegemon. He discusses the issue of
appropriate state size in light of Adam Smith’s analysis of the proper role of the
developmental state.8
We extend Arrighi’s analysis of the evolution of hegemony in the following
way. The next hegemon will not be a single state and neither will it be the European
Union, which is about the same size economically as the United States. In this
sense the cycle of hegemony will end, but there will be further cycles of political
centralization and decentralization. The next one will probably be a condominium
of core states and their allies that will embrace universalistic principles and pre-
sent itself as a global democratic state. It will be a form of global confederacy
stronger than the United Nations, and more democratic, at least in appearance.
There will be a global peoples’ parliament in which global political parties will
contend to have their representatives elected by the citizens of the Earth (Monbiot
2003). China is likely to play a progressive role in this emergent multilateral
global governance. The tasks of the family of anti-systemic movements will be
to make the democracy real, to expose sham, to see that minorities and majorities
from the global South are respected, and to mobilize new movements that experi-
ment with sustainable economic democracy. A truly democratic and collectively
rational form of global governance could emerge in the twenty-first century. As
Gunder would have said, the struggle continues.
Notes
1 The PMN is an interacting system of sovereign polities. This is what international
relations scholars study as the international system of national states, except that all
world-systems have this even if the polities are bands, tribes, or chiefdoms instead of
states.
2 In the classical prestige goods system a local elite monopolizes the importation of
goods that are deemed to be necessary for important social institutions such as mar-
riage. If you must have a holy pot to get married and Uncle Joe controls access to
these pots then Joe has a lot of control over when and who you marry. In other systems
prestige goods function as a medium of exchange that symbolizes alliances or as a
stored form of wealth that allows a group to trade for food during a time of scarcity
instead of resorting to raiding. This latter was the way that prestige goods were impor-
tant in indigenous California.
3 The advantages of this approach to spatial bounding of systems is argued more
recently by Chase-Dunn and Jorgenson (2003).
4 For more discussion of this and more evidence about the rise of Europe see Chase-
Dunn and Manning (2002).
5 This eventually became Chapter 6 of Frank and Gills (1993). In an earlier battle with
Marxists Frank had convincingly argued that the characterization of a systemic mode
should include more than production, and so he shifted to the term “mode of accumu-
lation,” which we also adopted.
6 Arrighi’s model of the evolution of Western hegemonies contains a version of the
oscillation back and forth between network and corporate forms of organization
(Arrighi 2006).
7 We can note that the strongest challenges to capitalism in the twentieth century came
from semiperipheral Russia and China.
8 Immanuel Wallerstein had his own consideration of the issue of state scale in his
analysis of hegemonies. France was too large and contained regions with contradic-
tory interests vis-à-vis the larger world economy, and so it was not able to attain the
position of hegemon.
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7
The paradoxes of colonial/
modernity
Aníbal Quijano
From the beginning of the 1960s until almost the end of the twentieth century,
Latin America was Andre Gunder Frank’s spatial/temporal point of reference
for his theoretical and political proposals, the starting point on which he based
his vast historical perspective that culminated in ReOrient (1998). Without his
contributions, the trajectory of the Latin American debate of the period would
not in any way be complete. At the same time, removed from that trajectory, his
proposals would not be understood in all their significance. In this sense, it could
well be said that Frank’s proposals and the Latin American debate are reciprocal
tributaries, each of the other. But Frank’s work on Latin America, and especially
that which revolves around questions of development/underdevelopment and of
dependency, has already been widely discussed. Not so, however, for the broader
Latin American debate: the region’s place in contemporary power struggles and
in perspectives of knowledge has framed this debate, which, after a lapse, is being
examined again. This examination leads us to the critique of Eurocentrism, the
hegemonic perspective that presided over those debates. Frank’s work made an
important contribution to this critique. It is because of this, specifically, that it
is relevant to return to that Latin America, as a way of making more visible the
prominence of his contribution.
Since the final years of the twentieth century, new debates and new social
movements have emerged whose magnitude, meaning, and international rever-
berations are beginning to equal those that dominated Latin American debates
and processes between the end of the Second World War and the explosion of the
global crisis in the mid-1970s.
These new movements of Latin American reflection and social action are not
lineal descendants of those that predated the crisis, but without a doubt they are
deeply rooted in the trajectory of the Latin American debate of the nineteenth
century. This trajectory constituted a complex and heterogeneous genealogy. Its
The paradoxes of colonial/modernity 121
sources have grown and diversified in tandem with the process of change of the
geo-cultural and geopolitical distribution of Euro-centered coloniality, now a
global pattern of power; we have inhabited this pattern since its creation, in what
we now know specifically as Latin America. A special moment in that trajectory
occurred immediately after the Second World War. It was into this context that
Andre Gunder Frank’s studies and proposals were inserted, and they contributed
to the well-known vitality of the debates of that time.
In this perspective it is pertinent – in reality, necessary – to ask why Latin
America? – and what space did it occupy? What specific space/time was it at this
earlier time in the global pattern of power, and what is it now? What space does
it occupy in a historical period whose central tendencies imply such a drastic
reconfiguration of this pattern of power?
We can start with a question asked by Frank himself. In an article giving
belated recognition to Celso Furtado,1 one of the most frequent targets of his
critiques/polemics, he commented that, in some countries (Rumania, Bulgaria,
Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia), there were debates and policies after the First World
War which offered questions and perspectives analogous to those produced in
Latin America after the Second World War. But, whereas these had died off even
before the end of the 1930s and were not familiar to the majority of the Latin
American intellectuals and politicians, the Latin American debates gained fame
and global influence, especially those revolving about development and depend-
ence. According to Frank, Nazi/fascist power prevented the realization of those
policies in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans at the end of the 1930s. And this
very same role was played in the case of Latin America, after the Second World
War, by the United States. Frank asked himself how, then, to explain the global
fame and influence of the Latin American debates and proposals: “In response,”
he said, “two words are sufficient: Cuba and Vietnam.”
Obviously, much remains to be said about this topic as, before the Second World
War, the relations among poporanism, corporatism, fascism, fundamentalism,
and the eventual Nazi-fascism were far more complex, especially those linking
Manoilescu and Mussolini (see, for example, Chirot 1996). On the other hand, the
echoes of these stories in Latin America should not be ignored (see, for example,
Love 1996; Fausto 2001). And given that in Cuba and Vietnam the United States
was defeated, these terms hardly produce explanations. They demand them. In
this respect, it is for this reason more productive to ask why analogous processes
and products arose in contexts so historically distinct and distant. Although this is
not the occasion to enter this particular labyrinth, these questions will be seen, in
any event, from the historical perspective of Latin America.
Eurocentric myopia
Since the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, world politi-
cal debate has been prisoner to two major Eurocentric perspectives – liberalism
and socialism – each with its own variants. Many conflicts and processes have
122 Aníbal Quijano
profoundly transformed the context of the debate and, since the end of the twen-
tieth century, new perspectives and new horizons of reference for the debate have
already been emerging. Nevertheless, we can say, without risking very much, that
they have not yet stopped being hegemonic.
Within this Eurocentric perspective, liberalism implies individual citizenship
as the basic political institution of modern society, and the modern nation-state
as its institutional universe for representation and action. Individual citizenship
is founded, in turn, on social equality and the autonomy of all individuals. Such
modern society is, of course, configured around industrial capitalism. Socialism
implies the political hegemony of the industrial proletariat within the whole
of this capitalist society and its dominion of the state as the expression of its
hegemony, while the forms and institutions of exploitation and domination among
social classes are eradicated.
Away from the seats of Eurocentric control of world power – especially
Western Europe and in another way the United States – both perspectives soon
met, and then got bogged down for a long period that still has not ended in most of
the countries that were constituted outside those two areas during the nineteenth
century, as well as many of those that emerged later, during the twentieth century.
On the one hand, liberalism discovered that in these countries citizenship was,
for most of the population, an empty model, if not a ghostly abstraction: neither
the social equality of individuals nor the autonomy of free individuals existed,
nor was either possible. On the other hand, capital as a social relationship, specifi-
cally industrial capital (or, in Eurocentric terms, capitalism), was not hegemonic
nor, consequently, could the proletariat be so in the broader society. There was
to be neither citizenship, nor the modern nation-state, nor liberal democracy on
the one hand, nor on the other industrial capitalism, nor a hegemonic industrial
proletariat, nor, then, the dictatorship of the proletariat in the quest for a classless
society.
Given these conditions in those historical contexts, nothing that was done
or that could have been done within those Eurocentric perspectives would be
anything other than useless mimicry or would lead to anything other than, as in
fact happened, violent dead ends without quick or stable conclusions. Or, even
worse, these perspectives would produce historical phenomena or processes that
disguised their real character with the names of liberalism or socialism, inevitably
the opposite of their formal discourse.
Liberal democracy could now be lived or seen as a real experience in a few of
the seats of control of Euro-centered colonial/modern power. Away from these, it
could be imitated in institutional forms, but their respective experiences could be
nothing other than frustrating. Not only could they not achieve an effective liberal
democracy, but in fact they helped block its penetration and its radicalization in
the “center” itself. We find this not only in Italy, in Spain, in Eastern Europe, and
in the Balkans, but even in Germany itself, shortly after the Weimar Republic. The
same thing happened – in truth something worse – in the case of socialism. When
all was said and done, liberalism survived the conflict, although its rationality
after Auschwitz could not remain undamaged. And for the others, recent tenden-
cies of global coloniality now pushed for re-privatizing public space in the state
and de-democratizing political relations, all across the world of capitalism.
As far as socialism was concerned, an analogous trajectory implied not only
an experience that was the opposite of its formal discourse, but also a definite
de-legitimization, perhaps an exile, of the very promise of social democracy as
superior to liberal democracy, as a fuller expression – deeper and more effective
– of social equality, of solidarity, and of the liberty and autonomy of individuals.
Indeed, under the name of “really existing socialism,” that which was “really”
imposed, finally, and especially from the mid-1920s onward, was bureaucratic
despotism, a form of power without any real relationship with the right to social
existence free from domination, exploitation, violence.
In truth, here we are dealing with the creation, stabilization, and control of
the only public authority that from a Eurocentric perspective, whether liberal or
socialist, could be considered legitimate – the modern nation-state – including
those proposals and processes that were explicitly authoritarian. These historical
dis/encounters have not left the stage in our own times because, at this time of
crisis for the modern nation-state, this Eurocentric perspective has still not lost its
hegemony in the current global debates. This perspective remains especially cen-
tral in those countries where the state really was neither national nor democratic
nor modern, in much of Latin America, in Africa, or in Eastern Europe.
For our purposes here, the world hegemony of Eurocentrism leads us to two
principal questions: (1) Why does Eurocentrism see itself – and make us regard
all the world – as if it were Western Europe? and (2) Why does the rest of the
non-European world accept seeing itself, indeed try to see itself and to be seen,
in this manner?
The examination of these questions leads us to explore the historical territory
called Latin America once again, not just in an attempt to find answers to these
questions, but in order to begin to understand the existence of Eurocentrism itself
and the place and the trajectory/genealogy of Latin America’s debates and histori-
cal processes.
The coloniality of power and Latin America

What we now call Latin America was constituted as the inaugural stage and as the
original identity of a pattern of power without historical precedents. There were
two foundational axes of this new pattern of power, each of which was equally
without historical precedent. On the one hand, a new system of social domination
was founded on the basis of and around the idea of race, a mental construct that
naturalized – that made seem “natural” – the relations of the new rulers with the
conquered and colonized peoples and which was constituted at the beginning of
the period known as modernity. On the other hand, there was a new system of
social exploitation that structurally tied all existing forms of exploitation together,
in order to produce commodities for the world market under the hegemony of
124 Aníbal Quijano
capital. Both axes have always been complementary, since they are reciprocally
entangled.
The foundational axes of this pattern of power were not only produced during
and under colonial violence, but also came to define the specific nature of the new
pattern. And they have maintained themselves across a period of somewhat more
than 500 years – in spite of, or, better said, through all the changes – as perma-
nent, inextricable, constitutive elements that continue to define the basic character
of this pattern of power today. For these reasons, it is absolutely necessary to
recognize the coloniality of this specific pattern, around and under which today’s
complex of domination/exploitation/conflict is integrated and which constitutes
all power across all the territories and peoples of our planet.2
Eurocentricizing the coloniality of power and its historical

implications
It is indispensable that we keep in mind that, during the sixteenth and part of the
seventeenth centuries, the only two terminals or identities of the new patterns
of power were America – dependent – and the Iberian Peninsula – the center
of control of this power. In consequence, Iberia was the larger, if not the only,
beneficiary. The Mediterranean stopped serving as the central route of world
commerce in favor of the Atlantic Basin, across which the prodigious wealth
produced in America sailed. With the disintegration of Arabian hegemony in the
Mediterranean, and given the historical circumstances that led to the production
of America, the first groups to benefit from and the only ones to dominate in the
new pattern of power were those who controlled Iberia: the Castilian Crown and
its allies.
Nevertheless, the new holders of power in the Iberian Peninsula were doubly
incapable of using these new resources that were, in fact, even more potent than
those from before – to either benefit the people of the peninsula or, at least,
maintain their own hegemony. On the one hand, they were carriers and violent
agents of the religious ideology of the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation,
exacerbated by wars aimed at conquering the enemy religion. They were ready
to use the violence of the Inquisition to punish their enemies and to require cer-
tification of purity of blood of those suspected of being heretics. This religious
ideology formed a powerful barrier to freedom of thought and against the liberty
and autonomy of individuals, even though it was facing a rapid process of new
social subjectification based in mercantile social practices that no seigniorial
power would be able to detain or to control.
On the other hand, Iberian noblemen were carriers and representatives of
patterns of social domination that were very backward when compared with the
social practices and ideas historically constituted in the sophisticated world of the
Mediterranean. This was true, even during the earlier period under Arabian-Muslim
hegemony. It continued in the context of the new power and commercial capital
that, after America, tended to develop more intensely and rapidly, using resources
that were not only more abundant but which were obtained at much less cost,
produced with the unpaid labor of racialized laborers – slaves and serfs. The sei-
gniorial power of the new owners of Iberia – even while Charles V was introducing
the ancient line of the Hapsburgs – reflected the north of the peninsula – rural,
poor, and culturally backward. In this new historical context it was archaic.
This model of power was imposed violently on the southern Iberian people,
after they were defeated, but it never became hegemonic. This ideology of nobility
had to co-exist, in a manner both conflictive and pragmatic, with social ideology
and practices inherited from the previous period and which were spread across
the Iberian and Italian peoples of the Mediterranean by mercantilism, thanks to
the riches produced in the Americas. This helps explain the peculiar association
between seigniorial supremacy and its formally dominant ideology of nobility,
imposed after the overthrow and expulsion of the Moors and Jews, on the one
hand, and the very extensive social practices produced by vigorous commercial
capitalism with its respective ideologies and pragmatic ethics, on the other. This is
the world that Cervantes immortalized in Don Quijote.3 And this is the specificity
of what is called early modernity.
In Iberia, this archaic form of domination was sustained by oppression and
violence, and it resulted in internal colonization rather than a homogenization/
nationalization of the heterogeneous identities of the peninsula. And outside Iberia,
this social power frittered away the vast resources of commercial capital in order
to expand its power and the prestige of the nobility and the Counter-Reformation,
repaying the bankers of Northern/Central Europe, who had first helped to buy the
throne of Castile/Aragón and then helped to pay the expenses of dynastic wars
outside Iberia.
Given these circumstances, the uncontested and exclusive Iberian domina-
tion of the first period of the coloniality of power was, in reality, a mechanism
for the transfer of wealth, of the great benefit produced by the global commerce
of the products of America, to newly powerful groups that were forming along
the shores of the new trade routes of the Western Atlantic. In other words, this
new and specific pattern of power developed by producing first a new central
route, and then an equally new configuration of global commerce, based on total
monetization and the entrance of new products – produced by unpaid labor in
Latin America – which were quickly converted into global merchandise. During
a relatively short period of time, because of the potential of the new resources
and the new market, a new world region emerged in the Atlantic Basin. It was
developing a new historical identity that would come to be called Western Europe
and would become the new and definitive central seat of control of this power. In
this way, at the conclusion of Iberian hegemony, (Latin) America was configured
as a space and a time dependent upon a Euro-centered pattern of power.
From the middle of the seventeenth century until the “industrial revolution,”
America and the emergent Western Europe were the principal historical identities
of this pattern of power. But following the “industrial revolution,” colonial domi-
nation by this new Western Europe expanded across virtually all the remaining
126 Aníbal Quijano
territory and peoples of the planet. This global expansion of European colonial
domination also implied the globalization of the pattern of power born in the
Americas.
This relatively long period opens up, of course, a broad range of questions
that are entering the debate that has been developing since the start of the current
crisis in this power configuration, the mid-1970s, but we will not now stop to
examine them. For what interests us here, it is better to put in relief, first, that this
is the period that has been called modernity, and second, the essential, unavoid-
able ambiguity of this modernity in a pattern of power whose coloniality cannot
be denied, because all this implies that we live in and are confronting a colonial
modernity. And this essential and constitutive ambiguity is precisely the one thing
that allows us to understand – or, in other words, to create meaning around –
the necessarily distorted and distorting character of the Eurocentric perspective
regarding the historical experience of this entire period. This is the main question
that we must consider.
Euro-centered colonial/modernity
To start, it is necessary to explain what, in this context, the term “modernity”
refers to. In this respect, I must repeat that, from my point of view, the extended
but banal dispute regarding the European copyright on modernity, understood as
a phenomenon or process characterized by the development of scientific/techno-
logical rationality and its subjective and material instruments, will not lead us
very far, or more strictly speaking is a dead end. In these terms, all the so-called
“high cultures” (see Quijano 2007b) have demonstratively been producers of
notable levels of development of scientific and technological knowledge for their
respective instruments and means of production of meaning and explanation, and
of their splendid use values.
Leaving aside the ridiculous and racist idea that they were the work of extra-
terrestrial beings, the grand buildings, the great roadways, the complex and
technologically sophisticated hydraulic engineering, mathematics, astronomy
and notably exact calendars, writing, poetry, narrative, philosophy, medicine, gun
powder, and printing press, as well as the domestication/production of thousands
of edible and medicinal plants and animals, long predated the constitution of the
West. These were to a great degree destroyed or lost, principally by the Iberian
conquerors and above all in America and, although not as extensively and pro-
foundly, by the British, French, Belgians, and Germans in Southeast Asia and
Africa, pushing back by centuries humanity’s knowledge and quality of life.4
The most that we can say about the scientific-technological production of
Euro-centered coloniality of power is that it has traveled, in many ways, much
further than other patterns of power in earlier periods. Thus, astrophysics and
the exploration of space beyond our planet, and biotechnology, including the
technology for killing more people, more rapidly, and at less cost and less chance
of putting planetary life at risk, are without a doubt superior than in any other
historical horizon. But they also reflect the central character and inherent tenden-
cies of the pattern of power within which we still live.
At the same time, it is indispensable that we recognize that, during the period
of Euro-centered coloniality of power, something specifically original, sui gen-
eris, and without known historical precedents, was produced. This singular and
specific product is Euro-centered colonial/modernity. It represents a continual
process of creation–production/conflict/change/reproduction – of a new histori-
cal horizon of meaning and explanation, and which makes sense of that which
is observed, experienced, and/or lived in the world of Euro-centered coloniality
of power. The central nucleus of Euro-centered colonial/modernity is the pecu-
liar association with, on the one hand, the experience of an exceptionally great
historical change that includes the reciprocal production of the Americas and of
Western Europe; I mean the production of nothing less than a historically specific
pattern of power without precedent: Euro-centered coloniality of power. And, on
the other hand, there are the cognitive necessities and those of the social-material
existence of industrial, Euro-centered capitalism – produced within and upon the
base of Euro-centered coloniality of power.
Because of its relationship with this specific pattern of power, and given the
historical/structural heterogeneity, discontinuity, and complexity of the world that
held this power, the character of Euro-centered colonial/modernity could not have
been anything other than a heterogeneously rooted configuration, contradictory
and conflictive. This is attested to by the incurable contradiction and ambiguity of
an association structured between ideas of social equality, of solidarity, of liberty
and autonomy of all individual humans – the fundamentals of citizenship and its
expression in the modern nation-state – specifically within and on the basis of the
social re-classification of the population of all Euro-centered coloniality of power
in terms of “race.”
Nevertheless, the consistency and prolonged reproduction of this pattern of
power also takes into account the prolonged global hegemony of its specific
historical horizon of meaning. Euro-centered colonial/modernity has not been –
could not be – less globally structured nor less globally hegemonic: it is a means
of production and of control of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, imaginary,
memory, forms of giving meaning, of production of knowledge and of explana-
tion within the allied social existence of this world of Euro-centered coloniality of
power. In this sense, this configuration exists and acts as one of the central agents
of the preservation and reproduction of this new pattern of power.5 We are dealing,
in this way, with a Eurocentric and Eurocentrist rationality or Eurocentrism.
The paradoxes of Euro-centered colonial/modernity

The Iberian nobility, the first controllers of the coloniality of power, began to
dominate the early modernity that they encountered and inherited in Spain, and
in general in the Mediterranean, but they ended up dragging it into decline and
recession for a rather long time. Colonial/modernity was not, then, its historical
128 Aníbal Quijano
product. This would belong to those who stole their hegemony and created Western
Europe.
Without a doubt, Eurocentrism was produced along the double axis of this
pattern of power. We have the racialization of social classification of the global
population, with all its pervasive consequences in all aspects of social existence.
At the same time and in the same movement, we have the production require-
ments for goods for the world market, under the hegemony of capital – that
specific social relationship based on merchandizing living labor power, which
initially expanded in the emerging Western Europe based upon slave and servile
labor in America, “Latin” in the first instance.6 But no less decisive and funda-
mental, it was produced by the process that constituted the pattern of power’s
very center of control, in other words by Eurocentralization – or, more precisely,
by Western Europe. It would not be correct to remove this question from debate,
because it is a sign that Eurocentrism gave – both to this power and to the world
articulated around it – a quality that would have otherwise been difficult to obtain.
Eurocentrism is, then, part of this specific history.
Although Iberia exclusively held on to this hegemony for more than a cen-
tury, the American experience also affected, obviously and from the beginning,
the subjectivity of all the countries that would later constitute Western Europe.
The American experience was, in fact, the experience of the entrance of a new
historical period in a new world, and of a profound and vast historical change that
was the result of human actions. In the Eurocentric historical/social imaginary,
a profound displacement of the horizon of historical meaning was quickly pro-
duced: the Golden Age, no longer existing in a mythic/mystic lost Eden, would in
the future situate itself in the only authentic continent of change. This displace-
ment of time on the horizon of historical meaning would later form, in the course
of European colonial expansion, part of the epistemic/intellectual operation of
relocating the space of Western Europeans and the non-Europeans in historical
time, between the future and the past. But it also took them to the encounter
with social forms of existence centered around reciprocity, solidarity, community,
above all in the regions that are today called Andean/Amazonian.7 Beginning in
the sixteenth century, European “utopias” cannot be understood as foreign to this
experience. They show that the new historical horizon of meaning that we call
Eurocentrism first began to shape itself as a new horizon of the meaning of history
(see Quijano 1988).
As far as the method of production of knowledge is concerned, colonial/
modern Eurocentrism emerged expressing, first of all, the demands of the world
of Euro-centered capital. Capital is a specific social relationship based on the
sale of living labor power. In this sense, it is a social relationship of exploitation.
However, not in all places/times, as we now know, has capital founded a true, his-
torical world. Now we know, also, that the expansion of capital in that period was
founded upon the expansion of the commercial benefit produced by non-salaried
relations of exploitation, above all slavery, serfdom, and reciprocity, to a great
extent in America. So the expansion of capital took place in the very space/time of
the creation of what we now call Western Europe, as the global center of control
of the coloniality of power. But we must also remember that this Western Europe
comes with a new historical identity, as its own historical and differentiated world,
including that of its physical neighbors, rivals or enemies, such as the Iberians and
the conquered Arab/Muslims.
The world that constituted itself as Western Europe and the social relation of
exploitation which historically specified itself as European capitalism developed
an intersubjectivity that was also specific. Its main axes can today be identified as,
on the one hand, a horizon of historical meaning that expresses and elaborates the
vast and profound experience of a larger historical change – America, the coloni-
ality of power, Western Europe – and, on the other, the cognitive requirements of
the rapid and massive expansion of European capitalism: systematic observation,
measurement, quantification, experimentation, the verification of information,
doubt, consequences. Both sides of the new intersubjectivity advance while recip-
rocally involving one another; they were not originally overlapping. After all,
capital as a specific social relation predates Western Europe by several centuries.
We are in the presence of the constitution of a new rationality. For this, intellectual
freedom, ergo autonomy and individual liberty, were, are, indispensable. From
this perspective, the social equality of individuals at the fringes of the market was
a basic condition. Everything that was an obstacle to these demands and powers
and to the powerful of church and society had to be subverted or destroyed.
This specific rationality, as Max Weber has already observed, belonged to those
who confronted the control of subjectivity by the church and the monarchy, and
that of the social relations by the feudal lords and those who dominated the “Old
Order.” But Max Weber could not realize that this rationality was produced and
exercised in the context of the coloniality of power. As a good Western European,
he did not doubt that he was dealing with a self-produced and self-designed his-
torical world, in which capital was a specifically European/Western product, not
only independent, but also separate and in opposition to all other forms of social
exploitation. It would have been even more difficult for him, as it was for Marx, to
perceive the principal topic of the debate: that the centrality of capital in Western
Europe corresponded to its hegemony in the exploitation of unpaid labor, first in
America and later in the rest of the world, by the racialization of the distribution
of work.
What interests us here, beyond these comments, is that the ideas of social
equality, of liberty and of the autonomy of all individuals, of citizenship as a
fundamental institution of political order and its expression in the modern nation-
state as the only legitimate political authority were produced by this specific
rationality. In other words, they are products of the rationality that is recognized
as modern. And in this sense, they are strictly specific to modernity within the
present pattern of power.
Indeed, the basic ideas – social equality, liberty, and the autonomy of individu-
als – were not exactly new ideas. But they were always put forth by a minority,
and attacked, pursued, and punished. It was only in the new central seat of the
130 Aníbal Quijano
coloniality of power, in the new historical identity called Western Europe, that
these ideas and proposals received the recognition and legitimacy that led them
to become hegemonic common sense. Citizenship, as a political institution whose
legitimacy will create in the future the legitimacy of all possible political authority,
is founded in turn in the social imaginary created around those demands. And this
institution, to the extent that it was established in the social equality of the indi-
viduals of the species, is a total historical novelty, without precedents. Athenian
citizenship, constantly referred to, specifically excludes the social equality of all
individuals.
We are undoubtedly dealing with a product that is specifically Western
European. But given that it was created in the context of the coloniality of power,
Eurocentric as this may be, this new, specific modernity, with its specific rational-
ity and forms of social existence, could not be anything other than a colonial/
modernity. Consequently, it is a historical phenomenon of inherent and incurable
ambiguity, emerging already created by the paradoxical association in the very
social existence of new forms of domination/exploitation – racism and world
capitalism – and, at the same time, of unimagined patterns of social conflict, with
new social subjects and undreamt of social imaginaries that propose those very
demands for a modernity free of coloniality and of all power as utopias. This
inherent, incurable ambiguity of colonial/modernity revealed itself immediately,
at the very time it was being produced.
In effect, with the industrial revolution the Western Europeans had, finally,
something produced in their own space, something to offer on the world market,
since until then they were simply the merchants and controllers of goods produced
in the Americas. This new power soon pushed them to conquer and colonize the
rest of the world, in addition to the Americas. And in doing so, they unavoidably
betrayed the central ideas and proposals of their rational horizon: they socially
de-equalized – worse, they racialized – the conquered populations. They de-
nationalized and de-identified and/or redefined their identities, and, at the same
time, they destroyed the civilizing productions of the conquered and colonized
peoples. Thus, the histories and identities, the peoplehoods, of the dominated
people were made historically invisible, or at best, for some of the colonized
people, they allowed a certain space that, while visible, was far distant – not only
in space – but, above all, in historical time.
This way, a horizon of historical meaning was installed in which the non-
European, when not completely invisible, was in any event seen as part of the
remote past: the Orient was one of its manifestations. Without a doubt, the opera-
tion of Western European intersubjectivity produced a new, profound historical/
social perspective associated with the very method of producing knowledge. All
this complexity was configured as the specific means of production and of control
of subjectivity/intersubjectivity, which was hegemonically imposed on the whole
universe of coloniality of Euro-centered power.
This intellectual/subjective process shows the deepening of the coloniality of
power under the central domination of what are now the Western Europeans. It
takes into account that race, once America was encountered, had been imposed
as the means of basic and universal social classification of the global popula-
tion. It takes into account, above all, that this basic form of social relations, after
almost three centuries, has established itself profoundly and perpetually as a cen-
tral constitutive element of the epistemic perspective of the Western Europeans.
This perspective revealed itself as a modern rationality and, at the same time, a
racist one, ergo a colonial one. That is exactly what is implied by the category of
colonial/modernity. In other words, without this colonial/modernity, the invisibi-
lization of the numerous and heterogeneous identities that European colonialism
was enclosing, as it expanded, would have been hard to achieve.
Such colonial/modernity allows us to find meaning and answers to the two
questions asked above. In effect, making invisible, from a Euro-centered, colonial/
modern perspective, the identities and historical/cultural products and projects
of the majority of the peoples enclosed within the coloniality of Euro-centered
power makes us see other space/times as a kind of historical vacuum. From this
perspective, one sees only what is European; everything is seen or claimed to
be seen as if it were Europe. Everything else either does not exist, or only exists
as part of a distant past. Or, as after the Second World War, it would reappear in
Latin America cross-dressed as “modernization theory” and “development,” as a
future replica of Europe or everything European. But, at the same time, it is the
hegemony of this same perspective among the victims of the coloniality of power
that leads them to see themselves, and to try to be seen, as if they were Europe;
or, within the debate around modernization and development, as if they would be,
in the future, Europe.
Similarly, seeing oneself as a target, or, worse, pretending to be seen as a
target, implies the self-depreciation of racialized identities and the victims of the
Euro-centered coloniality of power. And this is, without a doubt, the most perverse
effect of racialization and of the perspective of Euro-centered colonial/modernity:
to have submitted, to have taught the victims to look at themselves through the
eye of the ruler and to try to find ways out, not in rebellion, in flight, or in subver-
sion, or in the legitimization of alterity/alternatives as some of the victims have
undoubtedly done, but rather in imitation, in mimesis, as a double submission to
colonial/modernity, and, much worse, as a way of partaking in power. Because,
as is well known, in addition to violence, the principal weapon of power, of all
power, is seduction. But this weapon is even more powerful in the context of the
coloniality of power.
From this perspective, the central historical paradox of Euro-centered colonial/
modernity is a true tragedy of errors. Western Europe,8 as the center of control of
the coloniality of power, produced and finally spread a new, universally hegem-
onic common sense across the globe: social equality, liberty and autonomy of
all the individuals of the species, citizenship and the modern nation-state. At
the same time and in the same historical movement, it did not cease preventing the
victims of this pattern of power from concretely exercising these social relations
and respective social existence.
132 Aníbal Quijano
The subversion of Eurocentrism in Latin America

As is well known, following the independence of the United States from British
colonialism, today’s “Latin American” countries were the next to free themselves
from colonialism, in this case Iberian. After the defeat of the first national/anti-
colonial project, led by Tupac Amaru in 1780 in the Viceroyalty of Peru, it was
the Haitian Revolution (1804) that restarted the historical struggle for the deco-
loniality of power.9 However, it has also been contained, up until the present.
Meanwhile in Spain, the short experience of the first liberal revolution and of the
first Spanish republic occurred in 1810. And, paradoxically, as with most of what
happens within Euro-centered colonial/modernity, these events at the center of the
colonial empire led the controllers or owners of power in the Hispanic American
colonies to look to free themselves from the Spanish empire. The overthrow of
the revolution in Spain and the return of Fernando VII to the imperial throne could
not prevent the culmination of the so-called process of emancipation at the Battle
of Ayacucho in 1824.
For reasons that I have pointed out and discussed elsewhere (see, especially,
Quijano 2000a), political emancipation in the future Latin America produced
something very different from what happened in the United States. In the United
States, the new state represented the majority of the population. A true citizen-
ship was established, and this was expressed in a modern nation-state, the first
in colonial/modern history – even though it was built on the shoulders of black
slaves. Not so in Spanish America, because those who inherited the control of
power in all the new independent countries were none other than those who had
already wielded it or participated in it during the colonial period. They formed, in
addition, a tiny minority imposing its power over the vast majority of the popula-
tion of Indian serfs, black slaves, and racially mixed peoples – all of whom were
socially impeded and legally prevented from any participation whatsoever in the
formation of the new states. This implied a notable historical paradox: the imposi-
tion, in each and every one of the new countries, of an independent state upon a
colonial society.
Latin America was the original scenario of this historical paradox, but the
processes of decolonization around the world that followed, in the strict sense of
political independence with respect to a given colonial domination but without a
decoloniality of power, did not stop – nor have they stopped – reproducing this
peculiar colonial/modern association. Coloniality of power is now found in a dif-
ferent institutional framework: the independent central state.
Nevertheless, the fact that it was the first of the scenarios of this peculiar paradox
of colonial/modernity implied that Latin America was also the first space/time of
resistance to Eurocentrism, especially since the end of the nineteenth century. It is
true that resistance against the imposition of the coloniality of power did not cease
in the “Indies” during the period of Iberian domination itself. The early debates
regarding the emerging Euro-centered colonial/modernity in the Viceroyalty of
Peru, for example, has left names whose recognition is growing, with Felipe
Guaman Poma de Ayala or Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salkamaywa

among the most important.10 But following the defeat of Tupac Amaru and the
containment and practical overthrow of the revolution in Haiti, resistance was
made invisible. After independence, the only protagonists of any possible debate
were – obviously – the intellectuals of the reduced “white” or European minor-
ity that disputed and reproduced itself in the control of Euro-centered colonial/
modernity, whose new institutional framework had to be recognized as a state
that, although not modern/national/democratic, was in any event independent.
In such a context, the debate inevitably followed the tendencies of Eurocentric
debate. In other words, it was between liberals and conservatives and their respec-
tive variants, as in fact occurred during most of the nineteenth century: in the
process of producing a central state that would be at the very least stable, the
tendencies toward which Latin American politicians/intellectuals were inclined
were entrenched in ideas that, during the first half of that century, were practically
indistinguishable from certain material social interests. The civil wars, the coup
d’états, the political instability frequent in almost all of the new states, with the
exception of Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico, sharpened the debate. And in
general in the new countries, Comtian positivism was adopted as a promising
perspective for stability and modernity, for progress. In the case of Brazil, even
the emblematic slogan of the new country was the Comtian promise: order and
progress.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, nevertheless, an anxiety begins to
surface in the Ibero-American debate, to the point of becoming dominant toward
the end of the century: the question of identity.11 This is discussed by the liber-
als, above all, and later in the following century by the radicals. It begins in the
middle of the nineteenth century with the first proposals (1836–1856) to identify
the region as Latin America, rather than as Hispanic America or Spanish America.
These later were seen to be associated with the imperial adventures of Napoleon
III and Maximilian in Mexico and were defeated at the same time,12 a situation
that lasted until the end of the Second World War. In the middle of the fight to end
Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean, José Martí (1979 [1893]) proposed calling
our own space/time Nuestra América – Our America. But this proposal was also
defeated by the conquest and colonization of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines,
and Guam by the United States in 1898, as winner of a war waged against Spain,
by then fully in decline. This war was fought, almost obviously, to prevent the
independence of new countries in the Caribbean, already at that time almost a
mare nostrum of the new imperial power. The search for identity that reappears
during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, under the
name of Arielism, after the book Ariel by Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (1919?
[1900]), is eclipsed by the Mexican Revolution. And starting with the proposals
that follow, which we will discuss below, the anxious quest is still with us.
What was it that gave origin to this search, unresolved up to the present? We
could say that the question, in reality, had already been asked during the colonial
period, first with the prejudice against the creoles on the part of the Spaniards.
134 Aníbal Quijano
Later, more powerfully, with the growth of mixed-race peoples – especially after
the eighteenth century – by then an ample and heterogeneous population socially
classified in terms of a broad range of colors, following the imposition of “color”
as a social category in British/American colonial society, the question of identity
arose.
But it was, surely, the politics of the United States, beginning in the early
nineteenth century, that unleashed the new debate. First, the new Ibero-American
countries resented the appropriation of the name America as exclusively pertain-
ing to the United States of America. Second, the alliance between the United
States and its old colonial metropolis, England, and their cooperation in the
Caribbean as a new imperial power was becoming obvious. This observation can
doubtlessly be found in the beginnings of the history of the name Latin America,
shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century.13 This new imperial power
grew with the conquest of the territories of North America’s Native Americans,
and then with the conquest of the northern half of Mexico, and at the end of the
century with the conquest of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. This
explicit policy of territorial expansion found the countries of the other America
divided, politically unstable, prisoners of civil wars and frontier wars, and without
a doubt fearing that they would be the next victims of the territorial expansion
of this new imperial power. Under these conditions, the controllers of power in
these countries, who obviously saw themselves as genuine representatives of their
countries – especially the intellectuals and politicians of the discontented, reduced
middle strata – tended to think that, in order to defend themselves against this
policy of territorial expansion by the emerging imperial/colonial power, they had
no better option than to make their identity stand out as distinct from that of the
Anglo-Saxons and to form a group with an historical identity accepted by all as
legitimate and authentic.
Indo-America: frustrated decoloniality

Without stability, without a modern nation-state, without financial independence,
without military force, without unity – can common identity serve as a resource?
The fact is that the historical paradox created by independence under the control
of those same people who were in control during the colonial period formed an
authentic historical knot: modernity, democracy, or modern nation-state, identity,
unity were not established as separate questions and problems, but rather were
intertwined, each involved with the others, so that no one could be resolved with-
out the others. Euro-centered colonial/modernity in this America is still expressed
in good measure by this historical knot.
I insist that it is not by chance that this pattern of power was first formed in the
Americas. Following the anti-colonial wars, an identity that was simply an exten-
sion of the colonial one (Spanish America, Portuguese America, Ibero-America)
was not acceptable, was not accepted, but reference to a broader European, Latin
family, opposed to the Anglo-Saxon family, had not prospered. It did not take
long to realize that, in some way or another, that which was not formally visible
nevertheless inhabited an unacknowledged memory, a secret imaginary. Almost
announced in Martí’s Nuestra América, this background of the imaginary in
this America is, without a doubt, what entered into the global spotlight with the
Mexican Revolution, the first great revolution of the twentieth century (1910–
1920). In spite of the final defeat of the most radical sectors and the assassination
of their main leaders (Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa), the central element in
this revolution, that which gave the new state its national/democratic character
and its own imaginary to the new society, was the massive participation of the
population that was called Indian. This opened the way for a social imaginary
that soon was converted into a kind of common banner, among all those who, in
the other countries of the region, were trying to break away from the historical
knot formed by the unresolved questions of modernity, identity, and democracy.
Obviously, this presupposed and still supposes a river bed and a current of deco-
loniality of power. It started to happen in this revolution, but it was interrupted
before it was finished.14 The rest of the story is known.
In spite of this, the impact of this revolution on the imaginary of indigenous
populations on that of salaried workers in the mines and in the fields, and above all
in the middle sectors and the emergent intelligentsia of all the other countries, is
a clear example that in this imaginary the possibility of a great change of internal
power and of independence in the face of the new imperial Anglo-Saxon power
was associated with the major invisibilized and colonized population group – the
Indians, the indigenous people. Because of this, the adoption of an Indo-American
identity, proposed shortly after the triumph of the Mexican Revolution (attributed
to Vasconcelos), became the refrain of an entire generation of intellectuals and
politicians, as well as the explicit banner of the great wave of revolutionary pro-
cesses that shook the other countries of this America, without exception, between
1925 and 1935. This wave was beaten back, and bloody military dictatorships
– most of them sympathizers of fascism – took control of unstable states, with the
exception of Uruguay and Chile, until the end of the Second World War. With this
defeat, the proposal of an Indo-American identity was also out of the running. But
since then it has not stopped being a latent possibility, which now, in the current
debates, is being reactivated, above all with the new movements of “indigenous”
groups in these countries (see Quijano 2004). It was this specific impulse that led
to the early debates on Eurocentric hegemony in “Indo-American” thought. The
new mentality that emerged with the Mexican Revolution produced a language
for resistance to Eurocentrism. A new category is collectively produced to record
that which is resisted and rejected: mental colonialism. In the language of the
Indo-Americans, this means a kind of conformity, a willingness to follow and to
submit – as much in political/social action as in historical/social research – to the
Eurocentric vision of history, regarding the problems and future possibilities of
this America. I do not think that it would be at all inappropriate to suggest that the
watershed which, since Guha (1998), has been called subaltern studies should be
seen as a renewed version, obviously better equipped for historical research and
136 Aníbal Quijano
for theoretical debate, of this generation’s central proposals in the Indo-American

debate. Neither Guha’s nor the previous Indo-American version of this watershed
managed to offer genuine epistemic subversion of colonial/modern Eurocentrism.
But, in any event, it was from within the Indo-American imaginary that a first
moment of subversion of the Eurocentric perspective of knowing and giving sense
to history and to revolution emerged, with the work of José Carlos Mariátegui.15
The epistemic ruptures with Euro-centered colonial/modernity in the present
Latin American debate take Mariátegui, in some ways, as a point of departure.
The return of Latin America and of Eurocentrism post-

Second World War
At the end of the Second World War, the region emerged as a tumultuous and
dynamic scenario of profound processes of historical/social change. A brief over-
view of the decisive societal processes, above all the massive and relatively abrupt
displacement of the rural population toward urban centers that resulted in an urban
population of 70 percent in only a few decades, would include the expansion of
industrialization, not only, and perhaps more than, real production, as a mode
of consumption of industrial products from around the world and as a lifestyle
expressed in the urbanization of society itself and its culture.16 This stimulated
rural uprisings, principally in Brazil and in the countries of the Andean region.
New middle sectors expanded rapidly, as did the salaried workers of urban/indus-
trial activities, including the not very large industrial/urban bourgeoisie. These
new social sectors became agents for change and began to organize themselves
and to mobilize themselves politically, demanding solutions to the old questions
of modernity, identity, and democracy.
This was the context that first allowed a few intellectuals, above all students of
economic history, to advance the critique of Eurocentrism in its two main theoreti-
cal and political versions. Sergio Bagu (1949), Marcello Segal (1953), and Caio
Prado, Jr. (1959) were the first, following Mariátegui, to ask the question of the
reality of feudalism in Latin America, including the colonial period. At the same
time, in philosophical debates, the insistence on the necessity of becoming free
from internal colonialism and of elaborating a philosophy of ideas and of the
history of Latin America was taking form. This demand, first heard in the years
between the wars, reappeared not only in intellectual/political circles and among
writers and literary and art critics, as it had in the past, but also in the schools of
philosophy in virtually all the countries in the region.17
This new turn toward mental, philosophical, theoretical, and political independ-
ence no longer involved only a small intellectual minority in the reduced middle
sectors, as had occurred in the years before the defeat of the revolutionary wave
of 1925–1935, but was a movement in society that expressed the orientation and
the demands of broad and heterogeneous social sectors. This new reality implied
a new identity. But at the time it was not a central question in regional debates. In
some way, the new identity came as a given. Thus, in a rather spontaneous way,
without formal intellectual or political proposals and practically without question,

the term Latin America began to be used collectively as the legitimate identifying
name of all the countries south of the Rio Grande.
At the same time, the creation of the United Nations confirmed or formalized
this option. First, the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) and
then numerous institutions explicitly named Latin American were established
to offer professional preparation to the rapidly expanding middle sectors. These
provided a forum to investigate and debate the questions that popular pressure
asked, as well as the initial questions in the debate – first from academic and/
or political centers in the United States, and shortly thereafter from England and
France. Because of its well-known political stability, Chile was converted into
the seat of virtually all the institutions of this type.18 With CEPAL, a new issue
entered into the Latin American debate and quickly became the central question:
development/underdevelopment.
In a society in which the historical paradox of the association between independ-
ent state and colonial society was still dominant, the new majoritarian currents,
in both debate and the political/social movements, were again demanding the
democratization of social relations and their expression in a modern nation-state.
These demands implied drastic changes in power relationships. Nevertheless, lib-
eralism and socialism once again emerged, formally, as the watersheds of political
debate. However, and also again, in most of the countries liberalism did not find a
citizenship practiced by social majorities. Nor did socialism find an industrialized
society with an organized industrial proletariat and with a hegemonic capacity to
take over control of the state.
Social changes that were necessary for capitalist industrial development with
all of its potential – not to mention those necessary for socialism – in this context
demanded nothing less than a profound social revolution. The Eurocentric read-
ing led most of the protagonists of the debate and of political struggles to again
understand Latin America as if it were Europe. But there could be no revolution
in this Latin America from following the proposals of liberalism, nor those of
historical materialism. The real historical tendencies were a horse too wild to be
controlled with those reins. Many tried, tragically.19
Because of this, the most efficient and concrete political/social practices did
not follow any of these currents. Instead, in many ways, they combined conflic-
tive tendencies: Peronismo, Castrismo, Velasquismo, Allendismo.20 And with the
exception of Cuba, where control of the central state has been maintained, in all
the other cases the historical labyrinths had no exits other than those of violence
against those who controlled and who control Euro-centered colonial/modernity.
The debate did not shake itself free of the hegemony of Eurocentrism and,
to a great degree, remained trapped in the labyrinth formed by the mismatch
between Eurocentrism and the most consistent historical tendencies of reality. It
was precisely this maze-like trajectory that the debate about dependence took. Its
variants and its recent results – in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile – are not therefore
so surprising. In retrospect, it was not an exaggeration to believe that, in the Latin
138 Aníbal Quijano
American debates of the time, most of the currents that supported the idea of
socialist revolution had a discourse and practice in which an ideology of the left
emerged in association with, founded in, an epistemology of the right (Quijano
2000d). Nevertheless, a minority faction in the debates followed the critical path
opened very shortly after the Second World War. It was at the very cutting edge of
this confrontation that Frank’s work was found. And this was, without a doubt, the
context that gave his Latin American work its special global resonance.
Euro-centered colonial/modernity necessarily made its entrance into the new
historical period following the world crisis of the mid-1970s, when the global
defeat of both workers and their rivals for control of the reigning pattern of power
also dragged down their antagonists. The erosion of the very bases of this power
in the original space/time of its creation was due to the emergence of movements
referred to as “indigenous.” Now we can say that the critique of Eurocentrism
resulted in the opening up of a new stream of thought, whose main currents are not
only beginning to wash away the subjectivity/intersubjectivity of the encrusted
foundations of that perspective, but also proposing other options and horizons of
meaning and other perspectives of knowledge. This is the process that the end of
coloniality/decoloniality of power implies. Perhaps it is not unrealistic to suggest
that not only are we at the moment of the most profound and radical crisis in
Euro-centered coloniality of power and its specific horizon of meaning, but also
that we are facing a new horizon of historical meaning that can illuminate the path
to a decoloniality of power.
Dedication
In memory of Andre Gunder Frank.
Notes
1 See Andre Gunder Frank. 2003. “La Dependencia de Celso Furtado,” in La
Dependencia, edited by Theotonio Dos Santos. Rio de Janeiro: Reggen.
2 I do not think it is necessary to dwell upon these questions discussed in numerous
publications following the appearance of my article, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/
Racionalidad” (Quijano 1991). See Quijano (2007a) for a version in English,
“Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Since then, there has been a growing
literature by Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, Agustín Lao-Montes, Santiago
Castro-Gómez, Dale Tomich, Nelson Maldonado, Catherine Walsh, María Lugones,
Edgardo Lander, and Arturo Escobar, among the most important. Some recent articles
appear in Cultural Studies, 21 (2/3) (2007) and in Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel
(2007).
3 For my own contributions to this debate see Quijano (2000a,b). See also Quijano and
Wallerstein (1992) and Quijano (2000c, 2007b).
4 This has been an ongoing debate since the appearance of Oswald Spengler’s (1976)
Decline of the West and Arnold J. Toynbee’s (1933–1961) proposals in A Study of
History.
5 For my proposals regarding these questions, see Quijano (2000a, 2007b).
6 On these questions, see Quijano (2000a,b).

7 On slavery as one of the bases of Western European capital, see Tomich (2004).
Regarding the use of these terms as the specification of the historical experience of an
ample South American population, see Quijano (1993).
8 Obviously, these terms are a metaphor of the geo-history of power.
9 I repeat here what I have already mentioned in other articles. The Haitian Revolution
was the first that was radically and globally decolonizing. In the same historical move-
ment, it dealt with the victory of (1) slaves against their owners; (2) colonized people
against their colonizers; (3) Haitian national identity against that of the colonial
French; (4) “blacks” against “whites.” Unfortunately, the controllers of the coloniality
of power were, are still, very powerful. Between the French colonial empire and the
numerous military interventions of the United States, this victory came to naught. See
Quijano (2005).
10 The most recent version of Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno by Felipe Guaman
Poma de Ayala (1993) was edited by Franklin Pease. Relación de Antigüedades de
este Reino del Perú by Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salkamaywa (1995) was
edited by Carlos Araníbar.
11 The search for identity as a characteristic element of Latin American thought has
already been discussed more than once; see, for example, Gracia and Jaksic (1984).
See also Quijano (1988).
12 For the most complete account of the history of Latin America’s name during the
nineteenth century, see Ardao (1993).
13 The 1836 proposal to call the collectivity of the countries in the region Latin America
is attributed to Michel Chevalier, Consul of France in the Caribbean. See Ardao
(1993).
14 The image and the story are Adolfo Gilly’s La Revolución Interrumpida (2005).
15 See my introduction to Textos Básicos (Mariátegui 1981). See also the prologue to the
Clásicos de América edition of 7 Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana
(Mariátegui 1979).
16 In this sense, see Quijano (1969), reproduced in Quijano (1987).
17 Leopoldo Zea in Mexico, Francisco Romero and Risieri Frondizi in Argentina, and
Augusto Salazar Bondy in Peru are well-known examples.
18 The most influential were the Latin American Economic School (ESCOLATINA);
the Latin American Center for Specialists in Education (CLAFE); the Latin American
Faculty for Social Sciences (FLACSO); the Latin American Center for Demography
(CELADE); and the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning
(ILPES), associated with CEPAL. A generation of middle sectors from all of the coun-
tries in the region was formed in these institutions, and they were also the principal
protagonists in the new debate.
19 Unfortunately, this happened more than a few times, above all in actions that tried to
replicate the success of Castro’s guerrillas, in order to produce a democratic/bourgeois
revolution that the bourgeoisie was expected to support, and which were defeated by,
obviously, the bourgeoisie. I have written about a tragic example in Colonialidad del
Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina (Quijano 2000a).
20 Here Velasquismo refers to the military nationalist-reformist regime of General Juan
Velasco Alvarado in Peru between 1968 and 1975. We should also remember the
short-lived co-government of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), a national union
of mining and urban workers, and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR)
in Bolivia between 1952 and 1953, and, in the same country, in 1971–1972, a kind
of quasi co-government between, on the one hand, the Popular Assembly of all union
and political leadership and, on the other hand, the military regime of General Juan
José Torres, which was in turn the victim of a military coup by General Hugo Banzer.
140 Aníbal Quijano
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Press.
8
Dependency theory and the
aporias of modernity
Lessons from Latin America
John Beverley
It has been almost fifty years since the victory of the Cuban Revolution thrust
dependency theory onto the center stage of Latin American history and policy.
In that time its fortunes rose and fell dramatically (and then moved east toward
China), only to rise again with the resurgence of the governments of the Latin
American “pink tide” in recent years, now, however, in a somewhat chastened,
albeit still compelling form. Why still compelling? The new governments of the
left are, in different ways, seeking to move away from the hegemony of neoliberal
economics and the accompanying focus in the social sciences on civil society
and the new social movements, restoring emphasis on the role of the state and
intra-state cooperation in national and regional economic planning. Why chas-
tened? Chastened because of the question posed to the underlying assumptions of
dependency theory precisely by civil society and the social movements: Planning
to what end? That question involves in turn two goals that are at once inter-related
and antagonistic: modernity (development) and diversity.
In many ways the argument between capitalism and socialism that framed
the Cold War was an argument about which of the two systems could best carry
forward the possibility of a political, scientific, cultural, and economic modernity
latent in capitalism itself. The basic premise of socialism as a modernizing ideol-
ogy, represented by both communism and social democracy, was that capitalism
could not complete its own promise of emancipation and material well-being,
given its inherent contradictions between the social character of the forces of
production and the private character of ownership and capital accumulation.
Freeing the forces of production from the fetters of capitalist relations of produc-
tion – so the familiar argument went – the state socialist or nationalist regimes
would soon overcome these limitations, inaugurating an era of unprecedented
economic growth, which in turn would be the material precondition for social-
ism. The eventually triumphant (although today somewhat frayed at the edges)
Dependency theory and the aporias of modernity 143
response of capitalism was that the force of the globalized free market would be
more dynamic and efficient in the long run in producing modernity and economic
growth.
What was not in question on either side of this argument was the desirabil-
ity of modernity as such. Dependency theory in particular revealed itself to be
somewhat ideologically promiscuous on this point. For if dependency theory was
essentially an explanation of the “underdevelopment” of the peripheral countries
with respect to a supposedly “completed” political, economic, technological, and
cultural modernity in the advanced capitalist countries of the center, then moder-
nity became the norm against which to judge the more or less abject (“lumpen,” to
recall Gunder Frank’s characterization of the Latin American bourgeoisie) condi-
tion of this or that peripheral country or regional formation, and the free market,
import-substitution policies, Keynesian welfare-state capitalism, or socialism
were simply means to achieve that modernity, means that should be evaluated in
the last instance by their pragmatic efficiency in producing this goal.
Jürgen Habermas’s concept of communicative rationality expresses the pros-
pect of a society that is, or that could become, transparent to itself. This is what
he means by modernity. But what opposes the universalization of communicative
rationality is not only the conflict of tradition and modernity – that is, the “incom-
pleteness” of modernity, to borrow Habermas’s (1980) own phrase – but also the
intensification of forms of social heterogeneity and difference produced in part by
the very process of capitalist modernity itself. As Guillermo O’Donnell and other
Latin American political scientists began to notice in the 1970s, in the wake of the
Southern Cone dictatorships, economic modernization in Latin America did not
always sustain secularization and democratization, but seemed to often require
instead, perversely, deeply reactionary and repressive bureaucratic-authoritarian
forms of government.
The basic premise of dependency theory was that the structural position of
the Third World in the world economic order inhibited economic development,
especially industrialization and the formation of a vigorous internal commodities
market, and thus also the maturation of its nation-states. It posited therefore the
need for peripheral states like those of Latin American to “de-link” from the met-
ropolitan economic centers in order to achieve autonomous national development.
The equation between the nation-state and “development” rests on the premise
that the raison d’être of the state is to incorporate the population located within
its borders into its own putative rationality. The population, or sectors of it (and
especially the peasantry, trapped in “rural idiocy,” to recall Marx’s unfortunate
characterization), is said to “lag behind” modernity (expressed as instrumental
reason and industrialization). That lag, in turn, is seen as a consequence of “under-
development,” and underdevelopment in turn as a consequence of “dependency.”
In the context of the colonial and postcolonial world in particular, the
idea of ungovernability expresses the incommensurability between what the
Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) calls the “radical heterogene-
ity” of actual populations and the colonial state’s own rationality, or claim to
144 John Beverley
rationality. Ungovernability is the zone of recalcitrance, disobedience, marginal-

ity, anachronism, interruption, and insurgency within colonial rule (or today within
globalization, which is built over the traces of the European colonial system). The
colonial and then the postcolonial state is molded from below by resistance and
insurgence, which forces it to modify its goals, strategies, and form. As Ranajit
Guha puts it apropos the interaction between peasant rebellions and the British
colonial state in India,
The formative layers of the developing state were ruptured again and again
by these seismic upheavals until it was to learn to adjust to its unfamiliar site
by trial and error and consolidate itself by the increasing sophistication of
legislative, administrative, and cultural controls.
(Guha 1983: 12)1
Ungovernability also “interrupts” the developmental narrative of the transition

from feudalism to capitalism, and the apparently teleological passage through the
different stages of capitalism envisioned by Marx and his followers (recall that
Marx justified the colonization of India because it would mean an end to feudal-
ism). But Marx’s own account of the stages of capitalism, and in particular the
distinction between the regimes of competitive and monopoly capital (or absolute
and relative surplus value accumulation), is also founded on the effects on and
within capitalism itself of class struggle – the century-long struggle to limit the
working day, whose description is at the center of volume one of Capital (Marx
1976). For Marx the economic history of capitalism is not immanent to capitalism,
but is precisely the consequence of class struggle. Class struggle is also a form
of ungovernability that “interrupts” the teleology of capitalist development itself.
Let me develop this point by detouring briefly to consider Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri’s (2000) concept of the “multitude” in their well-known book
Empire, which consciously bids to be something like a Communist Manifesto
for our times. For Hardt and Negri, the multitude is a way of naming an emerg-
ing transnational working class that is not limited to the category of wage labor,
and is no longer bound to the nation-state. We know, of course, that the idea of
the subaltern played a similar role for Gramsci (1971) in the Prison Notebooks.
Beyond its usefulness as a euphemism to placate the prison censors – Gramsci
could say subaltern social groups instead of workers and peasants – the idea of the
subaltern allowed Gramsci to register forms of contradiction and subordination
that were not limited to class in the strict sense of an economic relation of produc-
tion, and that could not be simply conjured away by an appeal to modernity over
tradition. What was at stake politically for Gramsci was the so-called “Southern
Question”: the possible hegemony of communism in a country in which large
sectors of the population were peasants and/or agricultural workers under semi-
feudal conditions.
How much of the radical potential Hardt and Negri attribute to the multitude is,
at least in part, a resistance to coming under formal or real subsumption in capitalist
relations of production, that is, to becoming proletarianized? Isn’t the distance

or incommensurability between the proletariat as a category and the “multitude”
a difference marked precisely by, or as, “identity”? But Hardt and Negri reject
explicitly identity politics in Empire, seeing it as complicit with globalization
in some ways. They appear to be saying instead that the generalized abstraction
of human labor and affect produced by globalization is the precondition for the
appearance of the “multitude.” In this way, their argument, though it appears in a
postmodernist guise, is essentially similar to that of Second International Marxism
or the Mensheviks (to be even more specific, it resembles closely Karl Kautsky’s
well-known idea of “super-imperialism” at the time of the First World War): to be
against capitalism, one must first have to be transformed by it. There can be no
resistance to becoming proletarianized, only resistance from the position of being
always/already subject to capital. But this is in a way to subordinate the struggle
against capital to the time of capital (first capitalism, then socialism). Hardt and
Negri remain trapped within an essentially historicist, and thus also economistic,
conception that equates socialism with modernity.
On the other hand, if what the multitude resists is, to use Hardt and Negri’s own
term, the “interchangeability” that results from the generalized commodification
of human life and nature, then what it – the multitude – affirms are necessarily
forms of cultural and psychic difference, time, need, territoriality, and desire that
are at odds with the present form of capitalism. It would follow then that the
opposition to capitalism at local and national as well as global levels has to be,
in some measure, a struggle against, or to radically modify, the specific form of
modernity that capitalism has created and bequeathed to the versions of socialism
and communism that sought to replace it in the twentieth century, that is, “devel-
opment.” If this is so, then issues of cultural “difference” and “identity” move
from the status of what was called in classical Marxism a secondary contradiction
to become the, or at least a, main contradiction in the contemporary world.
Let me illustrate what I have in mind here by citing summarily two cases, both
drawn from the experience of Central America in its period of revolutionary
upsurge in the 1980s.
The first has to do with the role of indigenous communities in the armed strug-
gle in Guatemala. This is a very complex and much debated issue; I only wish to
make one point about it that I think would be shared by most observers. The domi-
nant forms of Marxism in Latin America from the Russian Revolution well into
the 1960s, including Guatemalan socialism and communism, supposed that what
was called the “Indian question” would be solved through the proletarianization
and acculturation of indigenous peoples, which would take place in the context of
industrialization and cultural modernization. The Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui
argued against this conception in the 1920s, noting, like Marx in his late writings
on the Russian agrarian commune called the mir, that the bases for socialist forms
of property and economic organization in Latin American agriculture could also
be found in both pre-Colombian and contemporary features of indigenous com-
munities, such as the ayllu system in the Andes. It could be argued that both
146 John Beverley
Marx and Mariátegui had somewhat idealized views of communal pre-capitalist

agrarian societies. But a contemporary text of indigenous peasant resistance such
as I, Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú 1984), which is written in class terms from the
perspective of poor and middle (and partially proletarianized) peasants, obliges us
to recognize that the participation of peasants generally and indigenous peasants
in particular in the armed struggle in Guatemala in its period of greatest intensity
in the late 1970s and early 1980s was directed in part against, or to radically limit,
their dispossession, proletarianization, and forced acculturation by what amounts
to a contemporary version of the primitive accumulation of capital. The armed
struggle in Guatemala, which brought into alliance elements of the Marxist left,
the ladino working class, and ladino and indigenous peasants and agricultural
workers alike, required an affirmation of indigenous languages, identity, values,
and traditions that is very much evident in Menchú’s narrative – especially crucial
in this regard is her defense of communal forms of land tenure, as opposed to the
private property forms that state-controlled land reform projects tried to impose.
In other words, Guatemalan indigenous peasants were not fighting against a
dictatorial state and a genocidal army in order to become more proletarianized
than they already were. They were struggling to limit their subjection to capitalist
modernization of agriculture and forced acculturation.2
My second case has to do with a contradiction generated by Sandinista land
reform policy that contributed in no small measure to the Frente Sandinista’s
(FSLN) loss of hegemony in 1990. As the revolution moved into agriculture,
Sandinista policies of land distribution and agricultural modernization began to
encounter resistance, not only from the dispossessed big landowners or rich peas-
ants whose holdings were tolerated but not encouraged, but also from the very
social class that the revolution had drawn on for support in the insurrectionary
stage: the rural poor (many of the recruits to the Contra were poor or landless
peasants). María Josefina Saldaña (1997: 164, 166) has explained this paradox as
follows:
[The] FSLN identified the itinerant proletariat and minifundista formations

with preproletariat or precollective consciousness, and interpreted their
desires for land as petit bourgeois aspirations toward private property [. . .].
The FSLN’s development model intervened in every aspect of [these groups]
lives without ever granting these sectors of the peasantry the political means
for negotiating the terms of the intervention [. . .]. Consequently, the dispos-
sessed and land-poor peasants had no way of lobbying the Sandinistas from
the inside. Of course, this oversight was symptomatic of the party’s funda-
mental disbelief in the consciousness of these two sectors as viable or rational
forms of revolutionary consciousness.
Saldaña (1997: 166) argues that the Sandinistas should instead have negotiated
“between their own progressive, vanguard nationalist vision [of modernization of
agriculture] and the peasants’ ‘conservative,’ but not necessarily anti-revolutionary
demands.” But this would have required an openness to the world view of poor
peasants that contradicted the FSLN’s own efforts to legitimize itself ideo-
logically, partly through an appeal to dependency theory, as a vanguard party
representing the force of historical progress against underdevelopment and a reac-
tionary past. As Carlos Vilas (1989) has shown, a similar problem appeared in the
Sandinistas’ relations with the peoples – several different indigenous groups and
the Afro-Caribbean (and mainly English-speaking) population – of the Atlantic
coast. But here, by contrast with what happened in agrarian policy, the Sandinistas
were able to break away to some extent from a vanguardist, desarrollista, and
“transcultured” (but dominantly Hispanic-mestizo) ethos to allow for and eventu-
ally facilitate the development of forms of linguistic, cultural, economic, and legal
autonomy on the coast. The consequence? A majority of the population of the
coast, which was a hotbed of opposition to the Sandinistas in the early 1980s (so
much so that it was put under military occupation for a time), sensing, correctly,
that the neoliberal model promised by the opposition would be a threat to the
autonomy system the Sandinistas finally agreed to, voted for the FSLN in the
1990 elections, at a moment when the Frente was being deserted by many of its
former adherents.
Both of these cases involve a “cultural” determination that might well have
been seen by classical dependency theory and the left-wing political vanguards
inspired by it, such as the Sandinistas, as part of the legacy of “underdevelop-
ment.” Both, however, also show that the underlying contradiction in class or
ethnic terms was not a lack of but rather a surfeit of modernity. The problem is
not so much that dependency theory subordinated the question of culture to a
purely economic logic of structural dependency and uneven exchange, as Ernesto
Laclau argued in a famous polemic with Gunder Frank (Laclau 1972, 1977). The
opposition between Althusserian Marxism and dependency theory was perhaps
exaggerated by the proponents of both. Already in the 1970s, the perspective that
in a given social formation cultural or political issues might function as a “struc-
ture in dominance” – to recall the Althusserian term – had been incorporated into
dependency and world systems theory in the proposition that, in peripheral socie-
ties whose economies were disproportionately subject to the external market, the
relations of production and the level of development of the forces of produc-
tion were themselves secured and reproduced in part by political and “cultural”
practices (see, for example, Cardoso and Faletto 1979: 101–126). Social control,
including control of labor and prices, was recognized as at least in part an extra-
economic matter, precisely because and not in spite of dependency (in a mature
capitalist state, where everything including labor is more or less subject to a gen-
eralized commodities market, the economy functions “by itself,” so to speak). At
the same time, dependency theory was very quickly absorbed into Latin American
literary and cultural theory, becoming something like a paradigm for the emerging
fields of postcolonial studies and Latin American cultural studies.3
So the question is not whether culture “counted” for dependency theory, but
rather in what way (and what kind of culture). The cultural correlative, so to speak,
148 John Beverley
of economic “de-linking” in dependency theory was the idea of transculturation,

first proposed by the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortíz in 1940 as an alternative
to what he saw as the colonial implications of the idea of acculturation, and then
revised, very much in the light of the infiltration of dependency theory into liter-
ary and cultural studies noted above, by the influential Uruguayan literary critic
Ángel Rama in the 1960s (Rama 1982). Whereas in processes of acculturation a
subordinate culture has to yield to a dominant one, Ortíz argued that in transcul-
turation elements of both cultures come into a dynamic relation of both conflict
and combination.
Transculturation expressed in that way the possibility that the diverse cultural
and linguistic forms involved in Latin America would in their process of interac-
tion come together in a new, “national” synthesis, including both European and
non-Western indigenous, African, and Asian elements. One should distinguish
here between an anthropological account of transculturation as a process of
cultural creolization that actually takes place in all multicultural societies, and
transculturation as a specific cultural program or goal, related to “development”
and the achievement of a Latin American form of modernity. Like dependency
theory, this second, programmatic sense of transculturation stressed the “under-
developed” character of the Latin American national cultures – seen as bound up
with the persistence of colonial and neocolonial forms of dependency and there-
fore of residual Eurocentrism. It singled out the “vanguard” role of intellectual,
artistic, and political elites in creating a more inclusive, dynamic, and representa-
tive national culture. (One of the models Rama suggested for transculturation was
the Latin American novel of the Boom: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes,
etc.)
The goal of transculturation was to produce the idea of a Latin American
modernity that was not simply based on the equation of modernity and forced
acculturation to a European model. Transculturation would function to produce
a different, more representative, state; but it would also be a policy generated,
where possible, as in the case of Cuba, from the state and its ideological insti-
tutions (the public education system, state-run media, museums, libraries, the
canon of national literatures, etc.). But to pose the problem of the indigenous,
the Afro-Latino, the regional, the anachronistic, the peasant, the urban lumpen
proletariat, sexual minorities, and women as a matter of their integration into
(and by) an essentially mono-lingual and state-centered project of economic and
cultural modernization did not always open up a conceptual space to understand
these classes and groups as entities in their own right, with their own “identities,”
demands, values, practices, and historical narratives (see, for example, Beverley
1999). The problem of ungovernability I alluded to earlier returns thus to haunt
the progressive movements that sought to mobilize the oppressed.4
Should we conclude from the apparent failure of state socialism, at least in the
forms it took in the twentieth century, that civil society rather than the state is the
place where the demands of the popular sectors could be expressed? That was
the question posed by the emerging field of Latin American cultural studies. As
I noted, Latin American cultural studies owes its origins to dependency theory;
but it quickly moves away from it in the 1990s. The privileging in postmodern-
ist social theory in general and cultural studies in particular of the concept of
civil society is undoubtedly founded on a disillusion with the capacity of the state
to organize society and to produce modernity in either a capitalist or a socialist
form. But it may not be as clearly separated from the legitimizing discourse of
the national-populist state that it displaces. The idea of civil society in its usual
sense (Hegel’s burgerlich Gesellschaft, which might be more properly rendered
in English as “market society”) is also tied, like the nation-state, to a narrative
of “development,” which by virtue of its own requirements (formal education,
literacy, scientific and technical education, nuclear family units, party politics,
private property, business trade unions, etc.) excludes significant sectors of the
population from full citizenship or limits their access to citizenship. That exclu-
sion is what constitutes subalternity.
It is sometimes argued by cultural studies theorists (see, for example, Canclini
1995) that in societies subject to economic and communicational globalization
under neoliberal auspices the dichotomy of tradition and modernity begins to
lose force, and thus along with it the dichotomy subalternity and hegemony. It is
hybridity that expresses the dynamic of popular culture, rather than subalternity,
“tradition,” or “folk culture.” Civil society is seen as the place where heterogene-
ity and hybridity – that is, “difference” – appears, as against the monological
and homogenizing force of the nation-state. But in seeking, under supposedly
“democratizing” auspices, to displace hermeneutic authority from high culture
and the state ideological apparatuses to commercial mass culture and popular
reception, cultural studies ends up in some ways legitimizing the market and glo-
balization. The very cultural logic that cultural studies seeks to represent points
in the direction of assuming that hegemony is no longer a possibility, because
there no longer exists a common basis for forming the collective national-popular
subject required to exercise hegemony. There are only deterritorialized identities
or identities in the process of becoming deterritorialized.
If there was implicit in the idea of transculturation a quasi-Hegelian narra-
tive of the adaptation of “the people” to the state (and vice versa), a similar but
now post-national teleology operates in the concepts of hybridity/hybridization
and the more recently fashionable idea of “post-hegemony” (see, for example,
Beasley-Murray 2010) in Latin American cultural studies, since they designate
a process – seen as both inevitable and providential – of the dialectical “over-
coming” of antinomies rooted in the cultural and historical past, including the
immediate past of modernity itself (the populist-nationalist, import-substitution
state of the post-World War II era). Cultural studies simply transfers the dynamic
of modernization from the sphere of the state and high culture to mass culture, now
seen as more capable of producing “cultural citizenship.” In this sense, cultural
studies does not break with the values of modernity and does not, in itself, point
beyond the limits of neoliberal hegemony. The idea of transculturation and the
discourse of civil society and hybridity mobilized by cultural studies in response
150 John Beverley
to the “flows” of globalization are, despite their differences, in a way two sides
of the same coin: forms of “modern” rationality in which “traditional” identities
and value systems now seen as anachronistic or reactionary should disappear or
be sublated in a new “mix.”
Even in the heyday of neoliberal hegemony, it was a mistake to pose the social
movements or popular culture against the state, as if they had some kind of spe-
cial authority or power of agency simply by virtue of coming into being in civil
society. But today, with the rise of the governments of the “pink tide,” it is clear
that a different paradigm is needed, one that pays more attention to the interaction
between the state, economic planning, political coalitions, cultural diversity, and
the social movements. The new challenge is to understand the way in which the
social movements have, to borrow a phrase from Ernesto Laclau, become the
State in the new governments of the left in Latin America or are bidding for state
power.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail what might be involved in such
a paradigm shift. But let me conclude with at least a few tentative remarks on
that score. What is radical in political demands built around cultural identity and
diversity is not the desire for “recognition” by the state or to have a territorial
“room of one’s own,” to borrow Virginia Woolf’s metaphor for the women’s
movement – an autonomia.5 Nor are identity demands, as some critics claim,
simply a matter of affirming “culture” and tradition instead of material benefits
and economic equality. Rather these demands propose to redefine the identity of
both the state and the dominant economic arrangements. As a former student who
was active in the Ecuadorian indigenous movement CONAI put it to me once, “as
indigenous peoples, we are seeking to universalize our difference.”
Diversity without equality is what the global status quo, which is written over
the structural inequalities diagnosed by dependency theory, offers. The problem
is how to develop societies where difference and equality are mutually tolerated
and mutually reinforcing. That prospect puts back on the agenda the question of
state economic planning to overcome structural inequalities, a question, to return
to my starting point, posed by dependency theory but banished by the end of the
Cold War. If the choice between capitalism and socialism continues to depend on
which system can better produce modernity, however, then history seems to have
issued its verdict on that score: capitalism. To limit the project of socialism within
the parameters of a normative sense of modernity, even where this is expressed as
egalitarianism that only economic “development” can make possible, is therefore
to condemn it to defeat in advance. The privileging, as in Gunder Frank’s late
work, of the Chinese “path” comes up against the inevitable question (a question
about the Chinese future rather than its pre-colonial past): What will become of the
peasantry? It is clear that “in the long run” development under capitalist auspices
will do away with the peasantry and perhaps with “Nature” itself, as an entity
outside of commodification. But the goal politically of progressive movements
in our time should be to assure that capitalism does not have a “long run.” The
challenge for those of us who continue to see socialism as a necessary horizon for
human development, then, is how to imagine the project of socialism in a way that
does not bind it to the specter of a modernity that, like Godot in Samuel Beckett’s
play, never actually arrives but continues to both enchant and bedevil us.
Notes
1 See Mallon (1995) for a Latin American version of this argument.
2 Menchú puts it this way herself in her book: “[W]e have hidden our identity because
we needed to resist, we wanted to protect what governments have wanted to take
away from us. They have tried to take our things away and impose others on us, be
it through religion, through dividing up the land, through schools, through books,
through radio, through all things modern” (Menchú 1984: 170–171; italics mine).
3 Hernán Vidal (2008) has provided a recent summary of this. Perhaps the best known,
but also hotly contested, application of dependency theory to literary and cultural
criticism was Fredric Jameson’s (1986) essay “Third World Literature in the Age of
Multinational Capitalism,” with its idea of “national allegory.”
4 This was a quandary that Cuban cultural policy in particular often ran into, in spite
of its high-minded intentions (e.g. in its repressive policies toward black nationalism
and homosexuals).
5 Indeed, the current movement in the province of Santa Cruz in Bolivia to break away
from the rest of the country illustrates that in some cases the demand for “autonomy”
and self-determination on the basis of ethnic or regional “identity” – in Santa Cruz
(despite the presence of many indigenous groups in the province) a presumed “mes-
tizo” identity as opposed to the “indigenous” character of the Andean regions of the
country – can be a thinly veiled pretext for a reactionary reappropriation of capital
resources that should belong to the nation as a whole – in this case, the region’s vast
oil and gas reserves. One hopes for a negotiated solution to the conflict, but failing
that, it is clear that progressives need to support the efforts of the Bolivian state to
limit and push back the demands for “self-determination” of Santa Cruz.
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and Change on the Atlantic Coast. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner.
9
Tides of hegemonic change
The atypical trajectory of the 1970s-to-present
B-phase crisis
Jeffrey Sommers and Boris Kagarlitsky
In Andre Gunder Frank’s last years the world demonstrated both perplexing and
predictable behaviors. Gunder believed the global economy was one inter-related
system, but one in which there were inequities of power and efficiency, as dem-
onstrated by the continued existence of arbitrage with almost every commodity
– even in the age of Thomas Friedman’s supposedly “flat world.”1 Gunder also
held that there was a patterned cycle of economic growth and contraction in the
global economy; he related to it the rise and decline of nations, along with the
passing of hegemonies. His thinking on this score was influenced by Nikolai
Kondratieff, and, like him, Gunder recognized the complexity of this system
and rejected any fully mechanistic application of it. Indeed, like Kondratieff, he
understood that the full causes of repeating expansions and contractions in the
global economy were not yet fully understood. The crisis of the late 1960s and
1970s, the beginning of a K-wave “B phase,” was thoroughly understandable to
Gunder. What proved more vexing, however, was the persistence of this phase
beyond the typical life cycle of twenty to thirty years normally exhibited by a B
phase. This suggested either a highly atypical rhythm of economic change or a
hegemonic transition between powers – or hints that the onset of a new long cycle
was upon us and with it a new global landscape marked by different economic
and political realities.
In this chapter we examine the reprise of the 1970s B-phase crisis in the present
downturn, and in doing so hope to divine the meaning of its atypical trajectory.2
We analyze similarities and differences between these last two periods of eco-
nomic contraction and hegemonic degeneration, and suggest possible future paths
and implications for the declining U.S. hegemon and the world. In human affairs,
as in the natural world, all systems break down. New systems come into existence
to solve the problems of dysfunctional established orders. Yet entropy never rests.
Inevitably, new orders that evolve, or ones designed to overcome the defects of
154 Jeffrey Sommers and Boris Kagarlitsky
failed models, succumb to a fresh set of problems requiring new solutions. What
changes over time is the magnitude of crises and the level of systemic reordering
required to right them.
The argument we advance is that order and profitability, and their inter-
relationship, have been maintained over the course of the Age of Political
Liberalism3 only through their periodic reconstruction, given the tendency toward
economic disequilibrium and dissolving social order. Yet each time governability
and profitability are achieved, entropy sets in and the old solutions either stop
functioning or, worse, accelerate the decline. This causes elites to employ both
new and old methods to reconstitute governability and elite prosperity. Like
punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary theory, systemic change often takes place
quickly at transition points that most observers do not foresee. In most instances
hegemonic power can be restored, but, episodically, the depth of crises, matched
by the strength of competitors, leads to hegemonic shift and can result in larger
systemic movements delivering entirely new systems, such as feudalism follow-
ing the fall of the Roman Empire. Lesser, but significant, changes occur with
hegemonic transitions within an order, such as capitalism,4 represented by the last
shift from English to U.S. dominance, or more recently with U.S. power poten-
tially reorienting toward China.5
The underlying forces creating the need for change occur steadily over longer
periods of time. The seeds of each episodic breakdown are the consequence of
contradictions created from the very solutions that were applied to create order
and profitability at the last point of crisis. To be clear, all does not always go
smoothly, and elites do not always have a blueprint to deliver the system back
to governability and prosperity. A combination of experimentation, opportunism,
and planning come together in restoring profits and global governance, in a pro-
cess in which success is never certain and the fix never permanent.
In this sense modern capitalism has crisis built in as a regular feature govern-
ing its development. Crises have often been mistakenly assumed to be cyclical
periods of contraction and reordering that signal the impending destruction of
capitalism. Given some 200 years of industrial capitalism, with episodic crises
(Kondratieff B-phase economic contractions) emerging every twenty or thirty
years, followed by subsequent reorganizations and recoveries, we can observe
that capitalism is not destined to implode with each impending cyclical crisis.
Nevertheless, this does not mean all crises are created equally. Neither does this
mean that the current system is going to last forever. Moreover, some episodic
disturbances, following a Kondratieff pattern, or as seen in the work of Giovanni
Arrighi on hegemonic transitions, may portend larger structural geopolitical and
economic shifts in the global system, leading to new constellations of hegemonic
power. Systemic crises that appear regularly, but less often than cyclical market
recessions, create a set of different problems and opportunities for different class
forces within society. The possibility always remains of a mode of production
dissolving. Yet even if we are not presently at such a moment, economic structures
must substantially change in ways that will generate renewed profits based on
Tides of hegemonic change 155
production if the system is to remain solvent. Over the long term this can happen
only through technological innovation, but organizational innovation or factor
accumulation that puts more hands to work for longer hours to generate increased
surpluses can be effective as short-term solutions. Indeed, in the present we are
now beginning to the see the limits of these short-term repairs. Spatial fixes of the
system are narrowing, given that China’s labor has been almost fully integrated
into global production chains. Africa holds the one last large reserve army of
labor to tap, which China is doing first through its spatial expansion, incorporat-
ing Africa’s raw materials into Chinese-controlled commodity chains. Still, we
will see that there are limits to the application of factor accumulation and spatial
fixes. To investigate the limits on the emergence of an A-phase expansion, we
inspect the resolution of the last B-phase crisis of the 1970s, and how the solutions
applied to it created the entropy of order we observe in the present downturn.
In short, we see an extended B phase lasting from the 1970s to the present. The
return to profitability and growth that normally follows never really happened
with that B phase. The truncated period of manufacturing-productivity growth in
the mid-1990s was short-lived, and economic growth continued thereafter only on
the basis of finance (East Asia excepted).
The Bretton Woods expansion

The Short American Century, like all systems, regardless of how temporarily suc-
cessful, succumbed to the contradictions created to maintain order. The Keynesian
Bretton Woods Order (KBWO) sustained the Pax Americana in the mid-twentieth
century, but five major crises eventually emerged within the KBWO that were
embedded in the logic of this system. They were (1) the crisis of global economic
competition and overcapacity; (2) increasing wage demands that formerly bought
stability but later exacerbated a crisis of profits;6 (3) the democratic momentum
within nations built up during the KBWO that was no longer sustainable given
governments’ reduced ability to redistribute wealth; (4) the North/South conflict
grounded in the crisis of rising expectations in the latter; and (5) the resource
crisis.7
The interwar period and its cycle of world war and economic depression were
clearly untenable. In this environment a new order arose to solve the challenges
posed by economic liberalism and the threat of political radicalism. A coherent
new program had to be implemented. As Abba Eban observed, “men and nations
often behave wisely – once they have exhausted all other options” (FactsOfIsrael.
Com 2002). The post-World War II golden age of increasing prosperity was made
possible by the United States participating in a global, cooperative order, creating
coordinated economies out of the chaos of competing colonial powers. It recon-
structed the world system on a Keynesian foundation to launch the First World
on a high-growth path after a brief flirtation with liberal economic policies that
led to a world recession after World War II.8 Cold War tensions and global radical
democratic and communist movements provided further fuel for a movement to
create growth and stability as a hedge against Red expansion and non-aligned
movements for independence. Indeed, as one Finnish commentator noted, “the
USSR created a workers’ paradise [pause] just not in the Soviet Union, but in
Finland!” This revealed an important truth: the threat to capital from an alterna-
tive model drove Western nations to accept developmental policies and social
democracy that generated broad-based prosperity for many.9
The 1970s crisis and U.S. efforts to restore order

The last B phase of the 1970s emerged from the breakdown of the solutions applied
to the B phase of the 1930s and related wars of the period. The Keynesian Bretton
Woods Order created a system of economic growth so successful that it threatened
the very set of capitalist social relations it was designed to save. The reason for
restructuring away from the KBWO was the generalized crisis of profitability of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Japan, Germany, and other industrialized states had
so impressively rebounded after World War II under the KBWO that they gener-
ated a crisis of overproduction. This was matched by the test of rising commodity
costs as global demand increased and as developing-world oil producers asserted
their power by raising prices. Simply put, the system could produce more than it
could sell given the national development strategies facilitated by Bretton Woods,
Marshall Plan aid, and the disciplining of finance through regulation to serve the
real economy of production. Meanwhile, higher input costs worked further to
reduce profits. These then were the contradictions created by the Bretton Woods
order. It created ideal conditions for national development in states favored by the
United States, but in the process created a crisis of overcapacity resulting from
their successful development, while also generating counter-hegemonic struggles
from the global South. To be clear, only certain geostrategically sensitive nations
were provided by the U.S. hegemon with the best conditions in which to develop.
These states were Japan and its economic satellites along with Germany and the
select rich nations in its zone of influence. These nations were issued an “invita-
tion to develop” (Wallerstein 1979). The success of these states, however, later
threatened U.S. economic dominance and hence the very stability of global order.
Restoring profits and hegemony after the 1970s crisis required the United
States to restructure the global system. Doing so created the neoliberal order that
would undermine manufacturing in the United States. Further, it would ultimately
stall the development of transformational technological change that was being
introduced in Japan in the 1980s, which might have inaugurated an A-phase
expansion in the world system. Under neoliberalism, instead of growth predicated
on technological innovation, profits were made by drawing on the reserve army
of cheap labor in Mexico, then China and East Asia generally. This led to China’s
real great leap forward. Meanwhile, the financialization of the economy led to
successive waves of financial crises starting with the Franklin Bank episode in
1974. This led to the United States bailing out finance at every turn in subsequent
decades. This policy, while serving the interests of the U.S. and global capital in
the short run by creating the leverage necessary to impose structural adjustment
policies, proved ruinous to the U.S. economy in the longer run by removing the
essential element of risk in finance, thereby launching continuing cycles of reflat-
ing financial bubbles to jumpstart the unstable speculative economy. These forces
removed Schumpeterian creative destruction, thus leaving the American economy
ever more bereft of innovation, and ever more reliant on bailouts. In short, it
created the “Minsky moment” realized in the global financial meltdown in 2008.10
The “crisis of democracy”

The 1970s contraction witnessed the rapid decline of American power, or what the
late Samuel Huntington termed the “crisis of democracy” (Crozier et al. 1976).
Huntington meant that the crisis represented a glut of freedom manifesting itself
in several challenges to U.S. hegemony (over profits and political order) from
both within its borders and without. After reigning supreme since the end of
World War II, the United States found itself challenged culturally, economically,
militarily, and politically both at home and abroad. Although America’s counter-
culture was creatively spent after its 1960s peak, political agitation and public
power grew unabated into the following decade. Huntington defined this as not
only a U.S. problem but a global one. He argued that public power needed to be
rolled back globally, and democracy restrained in the United States. This required
an ideological offensive to undemocratize the production of ideas by moving
them out of the public sphere to the private sphere of think tanks. To undermine
the Keynesian order and New Deal government would necessitate a strike from
outside the citadel of government. Too difficult to destroy from within, given the
interests involved, the state would be attacked from without through the private
sphere. Privately funded policy-making institutions would be set up to mirror
those existing in the public sphere in order to attack government bureaucracies
and policies whose agendas increasingly conflicted with private interests. Indeed
William Simon, U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Gerald Ford, said that
leadership business support must be withdrawn from (among others) “America’s
major universities [which] are today churning out young collectivists by legions.”
But business support “must flow generously” to teaching and research centers that
promote correct doctrine (Carey 1997: 96).
In other words, since much of the state had been captured by democratic forces
in the era from the New Deal through the 1960s and 1970s, elites needed to privat-
ize many government functions and contract them out to foundations, think tanks,
and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in order to circumvent democratic
control.11 This assault, adroitly launched with an attack on government in the
1970s, matured by the 1980s. The public was frustrated by declining living stand-
ards presented by the 1970s crisis. Given that the economy no longer produced
increasing standards of living, the only point of attack was against the state itself.
This was ironic in that the 1970s represented the high point of public control in
the entire history of the Unite States, both before or since. As capital increasingly
exercised the exit option – moving abroad – the public’s only point of attack
against falling wages was against taxes and the very benefits the state provided
to it. The state was presented as the reason for people’s eroding living standards:
thus, attacks on the state began with the California Proposition 13 property tax
revolt in 1978 that came to symbolize and model attacks on government in the
1980s and 1990s (Brenner 2007). These efforts were designed to restore elite
power and wealth. Only the crisis of democracy stood in their way.
Restoration: “spatial fixes” and “accumulation through

dispossession” in the 1980s
Pressure was also applied to the United States from abroad. The USSR, flush with
oil money, was emboldened, and supported Third World revolutionary movements
challenging the United States. The Second World outside of the Soviet bloc, such
as the Saudis,12 began de-linking from the First World and planned develop-
ment projects facilitating greater economic autonomy – while, conversely, the
tendency among the Soviet bloc was to integrate further into the Western econo-
mies. Meanwhile, in the United States, stagflation seemed to mark the end of the
American prosperity machine, along with a housing crisis that threatened to bar
entry for many into the middle class, as speculative capital raced into real estate
as opportunities for profit in the real economy of production declined. Moreover,
from the perspective of capital, there was too much economic freedom, with labor
exercising too much power and taking an inordinate share of wealth that reduced
surpluses going to profit.
Nevertheless, the United States temporarily recovered from these challenges
in the 1980s and 1990s. It did so in ways undermining its long-term economic
fundamentals, along with those of some of its competitors, such as Japan. With
its economy and political leadership restored on the global scene, along with the
collapse of the Soviet bloc, the United States was again clearly, but fleetingly,
hegemonic. Well before the new millennium, however, economists and histori-
cal sociologists, such as Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni
Arrighi, and Samir Amin, predicted that American power was far shallower than
most assumed, and that the means to restoring U.S. control appear to have been
mere short-term palliatives rather than measures that would permanently restore
American hegemony. Policies undertaken by George W. Bush, both at home and
abroad, accelerated the American crisis that re-emerged in the new millennium,
with a reprise of many of the conditions experienced in the 1970s. In the Bush
second term the U.S. dollar fell13 and real estate markets collapsed, energy mar-
kets tightened, and American military power was again questioned.
After the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the collapse of the USSR itself,
America remained the only superpower and was the leader of a unipolar world.
Yet it lacked resources, knowledge, and strategies to really fill the void that
emerged after the Soviet Union disappeared. This was true not only for the former
Soviet republics (reconstituted as the Commonwealth of Independent States, CIS)
and the countries of so-called “New” (formerly “Communist”) Europe but also for
some Third World regions where Soviet presence had been important. Although
the United States was still the dominant political influence in these countries,
it could not entirely dominate them; and in some cases the CIS nations proved
more of a liability than an asset to the United States after the Cold War. The
decomposition of the USSR combined with the ineffectiveness of the American
presence in these areas encouraged the rise of regional powers capable of using
this new situation, most notably China and India, but to a certain level Iran and
Pakistan as well. Indeed, as Giovanni Arrighi has noted, the United States created
the space for China’s rise by encouraging its industrialization in the 1980s as a
vehicle for restoring U.S. profits through capturing surpluses from China’s cheap
labor (Arrighi 2009). American neoliberalism worked symbiotically with Deng
Xiaoping’s reforms to bring about a new order. The surpluses from this reserve
army of labor were complemented by a flood of raw materials from the former
USSR onto world markets, thus creating the perfect mix of labor surplus and
cheap raw materials that buoyed U.S. equity markets in the 1990s, and contributed
to global economic growth generally in that decade. This process represented, in
David Harvey’s terms, a “spatial fix” to the crisis of the 1970s that reintegrated
the previously closed-off space of communist states and limited these post-
Soviet states’ access to the national development models that had emerged with
Keynesianism in much the rest of the world after World War II (Harvey 2005).
Further employing Harvey’s concepts, one may say that the appropriation of raw
materials represented an “accumulation through dispossession” of resources once
dedicated to national development, and at fire-sale prices. The fire-sale prices
would not last.
The United States also created a major opening for Iran to return to its historic
status in West and Central Asia. Disabling Iran’s arch-rival in Iraq permitted Iran
to gain significant influence over the region. Indeed, the new-found stability in
Iraq seems to have been chiefly created by the Iranians. When President Bush vis-
ited Iran in 2007, it was done under the cloak of night and in great secrecy, not to
mention with much protection. Yet when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
arrived in Iraq, he walked freely through the streets like a ward boss in Chicago
as if it were his kind of town. Nonetheless, although Iran’s fortunes were much
boosted by the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein, Iran remains dependent on
oil revenues: the combination of oil price decreases, increased domestic energy
demand from its rapidly growing population, and political unrest make its fate
uncertain.
By the mid-2000s, America’s Cold War rival, Russia, had managed to recover
politically and re-emerge as an important regional power, as well as a power in
global energy and finance. This recovery too proved fragile, as revealed in the
global financial crisis of 2008. A replay of the 1970s energy crisis arose with a
vengeance in the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008, followed by a dramatic
reversal of energy price increases. In the 1970s, oil price increases had exacer-
bated the B-phase economic downturn. Over time, neoliberalism unleashed its
own dynamics, resulting in another energy crisis by 2008. It did this by creating
an environment for speculation in energy, given the lack of profits in manufactur-
ing, which reached frenzied levels as profits dried up in finance and real estate
(Mufson 2009). Second, energy prices increased through demand created by the
neoliberal opening for India and China to develop. Lastly, as fuel economy stand-
ards in the United States were undermined by the 1980s, the decline in U.S. oil
demand came to an end. Russia was the chief beneficiary of the run-up in energy
prices in the short term. Moreover, the untapped Russian consumer market enabled
Russia to become the largest auto-manufacturing center in Europe, as German
and East Asian automakers created a major car-producing hub in St. Petersburg.
This represented progress in the real economy of production, not just finance or
raw material export. But the roots of this prosperity are shallow, drawing chiefly
on global demand for Russia’s raw materials, for which prices have historically
proven volatile. Thus Russia’s development appears stalled as well, though not at
such a low level as to make it subservient to the United States.
Latin America’s experiment with autonomy revived in the new millennium.
After flirting with neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, Latin America, led by
Venezuela, again pursued an independent path. Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina,
Uruguay, and others followed suit. This was made possible by the U.S. commit-
ment in Iraq, which prevented the familiar American military interventions in
the South. Autonomy was further enabled when it combined with high oil prices
created by America’s failure in the preceding decades to reduce fuel consumption
and with China’s growth. This led to price increases that increasingly liberated
Latin American energy producers from the constraints of U.S. oversight and the
interference from international financial institutions that had previously kept them
subservient to the Washington Consensus. Simultaneously, the U.S. economy fal-
tered. Inflation returned and the luster of America’s model dulled.
Although there were many similarities in structure to the crisis of the 1970s,
significant differences existed as well. The chief changes were the lack of signifi-
cant political or cultural unrest in America and the challenge posed by the possible
return to the world-historic norm of a dominant China. Moreover, the specter of
deflation haunts the present system in contrast to the 1970s. At the same time,
attempts to restore economic vitality through further rounds of financialization
of the economy also risk hyperinflation, as the Minsky moment is finally realized
because of further bailouts of investors and the fading fear of risk. Each financial
bailout by the United States has removed an element of risk for investors, leading
to ever more reckless speculation that brings the system ever closer to ultimate
collapse. Further, the possibilities are limited for pursuing global integration
through spatial fixes and accumulation through dispossession.
The Minsky moment and the collapse of financialization

The crisis that erupted in 2008 is structural and long-lasting. Its specific differ-
ence compared with other crises of the twentieth century, however, is that the
neoliberal transformation of states, societies, and economies resulted in blocking

essential mechanisms needed to overcome the crisis and enable transition into
a new A phase of rapid economic growth and development. Scientific research,
instead of creating the conditions for technological change essential for entering a
new expansion, was now being structurally subordinated to the short-term needs
of the market.
Unlike crises before the 1970s, which were followed by the deployment of
new technologies that delivered economic growth, the potential of today’s domi-
nant technologies is clearly exhausted, and there are few new ones in waiting to
pull the economy into a new expansion.14 Contrary to the perpetual propaganda
treating innovation as the core of today’s economy (commonplace among pun-
dits rhapsodizing over the “new economy” of the 1990s), neoliberalism created
a deeply conservative system in which factor accumulation (more hands/cheap
labor) replaced innovations as the primary driver of economic expansion. Factor
accumulation permitted both economic growth and profits in the short term, but
its potential is limited by the number of hours that people can physically work
during the day and by the size of the reserve armies of labor that can be integrated
into global chains of accumulation. Moreover, the “spatial fix” to the B-phase
crisis, the integration of the raw materials and markets of the whole world through
an “accumulation through dispossession” into an integrated global system, fails to
address the ecological limits to growth represented by environmental exhaustion
and natural resource depletion.
Nonetheless, in the 1970s the above system of short-term fixes had been
selected by American planners at the Treasury Department who looked over the
precipice of the economic crisis and saw that only massive new investment in
research and modernization could relaunch a new round of economic growth.
Staring over this cliff, however, they also recognized that this strategy would be
accompanied by diminishing rather than increased profits, and would potentially
take the world further down the slippery slope toward socialism and public con-
trol of production.
Instead, American planners rejected this path of transformational techno-
logical advance, and retreated into a financialized world order that would deploy
their comparative advantages of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and
the organizational sophistication of its multi-national corporations to infiltrate
formally controlled nationally protected economies created by the libratory dimen-
sion of nationalism, that itself developed as an earlier response to empires and an
earlier stage of globalization in the nineteenth century. John Callaghan, then head
of the Labour government in the UK, was informed by William Simon at the
U.S. Treasury Department in 1976 that the day of Keynesian national-investment
drives was over, and that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) could enforce
this “new deal” given the UK’s need for loans to pay for inflated oil prices. This
structural adjustment was next imposed on New York City during its late 1970s
debt crisis (Harvey 2007). A debt crisis arose in the Second World (the Soviet
bloc, Mexico, etc.), identifying the next area to be integrated into the new order in
the early 1980s, and again the IMF and World Bank proved to be the instruments
enforcing integration. From here, it was imposed on the Third World in order to
reorient its economies back to export of commodities and ensure debt repayment
to U.S. banks. Structural adjustment’s trajectory, then, was from First to Second
and then to Third World.
In these years Reagan declared that “deficits don’t matter” as the United States
moved from an economy based on production to one living off rents and debts
financed by others through their purchase of U.S. Treasury Bills. Meanwhile,
a class of global oligarchs emerged, accelerating the process of rent-seeking
and asset-stripping in the Second and Third Worlds, where previously national
development strategies had been undertaken to hasten national economic devel-
opment.15 Hereafter, a process of interpenetration of national economies emerged
in which global elites stripped wealth from other nations, including from the now
more open United States.16
The combination of a massive rearmament with dollar seigniorage from petro-
dollar recycling acted to create a kind of demand-and-debt form of Keynesianism
to sustain America’s economy. Yet this new form departed from the original
Keynesian model by curtailing wage growth from below and reversing this flow
to drive money upward to the commanding heights of the economy: it thus made
available, in supply-side fashion, capital for investment in the real economy.
Yet, although the model succeeded in driving money to the top of the economy
and attracting foreign capital to the United States, it failed to create a sustained
renaissance of investment in the real economy and technological breakthroughs.
Instead, the money was put increasingly into speculation – although it directed
enormous resources into production in China.17
Naturally, though, there was some innovation. This took place primarily in two
areas: computers and rapid set-up of new production lines. Military and space-
program spending produced several benefits aside from Keynesian demand.
Research capacities were built into the construction of new research universities
and expansion of ones established during the Cold War. Key technologies such as
the microprocessor chip and the internet arose from the needs of the military/aero-
space sector. Although these were the product of military Keynesianism during
the last A-phase expansion, they found commercial application in the B-phase
contraction with the personal computer and commercial internet. These could
have launched another A-phase expansion had the structures of neoliberalism not
inhibited the development of additional transformative technologies.
The second area of innovation lay with turnaround time for setting up con-
sumer goods production lines. This was important for cultural and political
reasons. As new consumer products could be rapidly developed by the 1990s,
consumption and cultural production reversed course. In the post-World War II
A-phase expansion, big business had needed to instruct the consumer on what
they should want. The high cost and lengthy time for introducing new production
lines meant product diversity was limited, and thus consumers had to be shifted
to products for which development decisions were made far in advance; once
developed, products had to sell in large volumes to be cost-effective. By the 1990s

this pattern had reversed: as production lines could be set up more quickly and
with less cost, business could now follow, rather than lead, consumer tastes. This
created an environment in which lifestyle choices multiplied and were serviced
by the consumer economy that now encouraged diversity. A significant but largely
unexamined question is to what extent this new consumer choice-driven economy
reduced political engagement through multiplying social fragmentation by per-
mitting people to select from an ever-expanding menu of lifestyle choices.
This consumer revolution did generate some additional demand for goods,
resulting in new jobs, as well as some important social restructuring. The result
expanded the middle class in the core countries and even in the periphery. The
question, however, was how to finance it in the neoliberal era of lower wages. The
answer was through factor accumulation (more work), plus credit. The limits to
both were reached by 2007, thus contributing to the current economic crisis. The
economies of the core countries were becoming increasingly parasitical. At the
same time industrial growth in the South – which in contrast to earlier development
models was oriented towards export and based on low wages – remained depend-
ent on Western demand. Although this model has been an economic failure, except
for those at the commanding heights whose wealth increased by multiples, it has
worked to diminish political engagement. This strategy represents both a success
and a failure. It is a success in that it defused political demands from below that
were threatening capitalist social relations up through the 1970s. Ironically, how-
ever, this model also represents a failure in that it removed the push from below
that had worked to advance economic growth and ensure political stability, thus
endangering the very viability of a dynamic capitalist order. Public management,
then, has been the most successful area of crisis management arising out of this B
phase, and its very success is permitting the continuation of rent-seeking behavior
on the part of capital over innovation.
One of the great ironies of this system is also its erosion of American economic
power and the creation of a new competing and potentially hegemonic center in
China. As Giovanni Arrighi noted in Adam Smith in Beijing (2009), the American
drive to recover profits in the B-phase contraction in the 1970s resulted in its push
to open markets for U.S. investment. In the process, the United States paid for
China’s industrialization in order to tap its cheap labor, thus elevating China’s
place in the world system, while taking America down a notch.
Although neoliberalism delivered speculative profits and developed China, it
failed to reorganize the world economy on a platform of strong A-phase economic
growth employing new technologies. To be sure, some technological gains were
enjoyed in the 1990s through the deployment of computers, but the equipment and
training costs make those gains less than they might otherwise appear. Moreover,
although the mid- to late 1990s saw strong productivity gains in manufacturing,
this was not sustained.
Neoliberalism’s “recovery” came at the expense of already diminishing rates
of profit derived from technological innovations. Instead, the system was taken
into an eddy, where radical innovations were replaced by mere improvements

designed not to transform but to reproduce the current patterns of production,
consumption, and social life as they had evolved after the 1970s. In many cases
industrial technology demonstrated regressive movement, when sophisticated
machines failed to compete with cheap labor. The best example of this was Japan.
By the 1980s Japan appeared to be on the cusp of reaching a stage of technologi-
cal innovation such that it could have surpassed the United States in economic
power. Indeed, this was the subject of many books at the time (e.g. Kennedy
1989). However, neoliberalism short-circuited the completion of this connection.
By the late 1980s Japan had developed fully automated factories where the lights
could be turned off for lack of need of a workforce. Impressive robotic technol-
ogy was freeing up human resources that could be deployed to develop further
technological advances.
Japan’s progress, however, was first checked with the Plaza Accords of 1985
that undermined Japanese competitiveness: for the first time since the United
States issued its “invitation for Japan to develop” after World War II, the brakes
were slammed. However, it was neoliberalism that really took Japan down. No
longer was it profitable to continue pursuit of its advanced robotics technology at
the previously accelerated levels18 compared with gains to be realized from follow-
ing the race to the bottom. The spatial fix and accompanying factor accumulation
(produced as responses to the B-phase crisis) now made it more profitable for
Japan to invest in China, South Korea, and Vietnam than to continue revolution-
izing its own industry. Japanese investors also shifted their capital with gusto
into speculation, buying U.S. real estate and American entertainment companies,
while wildly investing in their own real estate with an abandon that has produced
slow growth and technological sclerosis for almost twenty years now.
The Japanese have responded to their crisis by further neoliberalizing, or
privatizing, their economy, while the state has spent lavishly on public works.
This conservative logic is repeated in the anti-crisis measures of all major gov-
ernments, which reduce the struggle against economic difficulties to merely
spending money, which makes the reproduction of current crisis-ridden structures
inevitable. At best one can speak of “minimal” or conservative Keynesianism
represented by spending money on infrastructure projects with some welfare, as
we see in the current responses to the economic crisis.
All this gives us reason to expect the crisis to be not only deep but also result-
ing in long-lasting stagnation and possibly followed by depression rather than
dynamic recovery. Neoliberalism, in this sense, has possibly interrupted the
normal interplay between phases of economic contraction and expansion, by
halting the processes through which transformative technological innovations are
pursued to restore profitability.
Politically and ideologically, neoliberalism was a total success by the mid-
1990s. But it generated its own contradictions. Capitalism regained its global
domination, bringing human societies back to the situation that existed before
1917. But this also led to the revival of problems and challenges typical for the
very same period. In a way, U.S. global hegemony of the early twenty-first cen-
tury resembles that of Britain in the early twentieth century. The problem with
this new situation is that production of goods continues to play the core role in
capitalist economies, and the negative consequences of Western deindustrializa-
tion and financialization started to be felt massively by the late 1990s. China’s
new global ascendancy was very much due to the fact that this country eagerly
and consciously embraced the role of the new “Workshop of the World,” under-
standing that its growing industrial base would sooner or later create conditions
for a technological breakthrough. Furthermore, U.S. power was weakened by the
wars of the 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan, proving that conflicts cannot be won
decisively by high technology, unless there is also a readiness and capacity to
get massively engaged in conventional fighting. In this sense the real strength of
“traditional” armies based on the military technologies and organization of the
industrial age was far from diminishing. In effect, this led to further recognition
and geopolitical influence for China, Russia, Brazil, India, South Africa, and Iran.
Yet this system is very unstable and generates enormous contradictions, poten-
tially leading to social and political explosions. This complicates matters for the
United States. If these regional powers keep growing they will be challenging
U.S. hegemony regionally and globally. But if they prove unable to cope with the
recession and collapse, America will be left to deal with the consequences of the
resulting chaos in the world system. Either way, the United States loses.
Nevertheless, for U.S. elites a new crisis represents not only a challenge but
also an opportunity – and the United States has excelled at seizing past open-
ings. Much depends on which solutions will be taken by America’s leadership
throughout the coming period. If the crisis makes China, India, and other newly
industrialized nations suffer – or if it creates political conditions for protectionism
in Europe and America, or if, finally, it leads to decreasing prices for oil and raw
materials – it might well lead to an economic rebound in the United States and the
West in general. Indeed, “falling demand for overall petroleum products, which
was down 3.4 percent over the last four weeks compared to the same time last year
[February 2008], suggests prices could drop steeply once the dollar-driven oil
investment frenzy runs out of steam” (Whitney 2008). Yet the decline in demand
would have to be sustained and more precipitous for this scenario’s realization.
Are low U.S. wages and a cheap U.S. dollar combined with the decreasing oil and
raw material prices enough to compete with China and other countries of Asia?
Will the West become openly protectionist or will most governments pretend to
believe in the free market while practicing a different policy? A more likely sce-
nario for success might see the U.S. reprise strategies of the early 1980s, but with
less chance of success given a weakening dollar seigniorage.
Conclusion
The current B-phase contraction has displayed highly irregular behaviors for a
K-wave. Beginning around 1970, this B phase has now lasted significantly longer
than a usual K-wave down phase of twenty to thirty years. This suggests an atypi-
cal trajectory in which the normal K-wave pattern has been broken. The world
system appears unable to launch itself on another round of growth given the
structural impediments of neoliberalism that are starving technological innova-
tion. Moreover, factor accumulation and spatial fixes have reached their limits
for generating growth. So far the United States appears unable, or unwilling, to
restore itself on a sustained growth path through changing its economic develop-
ment trajectory. The past decade has seen corporations sitting on cash, refusing
to invest in innovation, and global capital looking for quick speculative gains,
and there are no signs that the situation will change. Following Arrighi’s model
of hegemonic change of power from the Mediterranean to the Dutch, to England,
and then to the United States, China could be poised to position itself to secure
both global leadership and the launch of a new A-phase expansion. Past hegem-
onic shifts were made possible by access to new raw materials and labor permitted
by the inclusion of the Americas in the world system. That model is spent, and any
new A phase must be built on technologies delivering sustainable energy – fuel,
food, and substitutes for extant raw materials. To date, it is simply too early to
tell if China can make this leap from an industrious revolution to technological
transformation.
This state of affairs will continue until economic difficulties lead to social
change capable of breaking the logic of neoliberal economics and unblocking
development, or when the inevitable environmental crisis that emerges from the
spatial fix utilizing ever more raw materials forces a re-evaluation of this model.
But the question then is will it be too late. In either event, we may have entered a
long transitional phase that will take longer to work out than defined by standard
K-waves. The launch to a new system will potentially last a long time if it arrives
at all, and may represent the onset of a new long cycle of several hundred years’
duration as discussed by Gills and Frank (1993). Given the limits of resources,
both labor and material, the transition is likely to be rough, and one which departs
from the over two centuries of political liberalism (that had alternating periods
of economic protectionism and open markets) that has been accompanied by
economic dynamism. Moreover, the crisis will be harder to overcome given
that neoliberal methods employed to resolve the 1970s B phase have obstructed
the path toward an A-phase expansion. Neoliberalism interrupted the cycle of
Schumpeterian creative destruction that contributed to new technological innova-
tions by allowing capital to make lateral moves abroad to employ cheaper labor,
rather than deploying transformational technologies needed to return to profit-
ability. Presently, this trend toward spatial fixes has developed conterminously
with the need for new technologies to overcome emerging resource shortages.
Sustaining the current system of social relations under these resource-constrained
conditions could mean the return to a Malthusian world order and the end of the
Age of Political Liberalism. Whether this will give birth to authoritarianism or
socialism (or the former leading to the latter, or the reverse) will be determined
by the magnitude of future shocks and whether social movements can form in
response to them. Doing so would require a new centripetal force that unites
people previously fragmented by the lifestyle consumer society that arose in the
1990s. It remains to be seen whether a new type of “unity in diversity,” as Andre
Gunder Frank called for, can transgress the boundaries of “diversity in consump-
tion.” It may be that resource shortages provide the very force toward realizing
this goal.
Appendix on Kondratieff waves

In referencing Kondratieff waves, we are examining the structure upon which
accumulation rests and accompanying economic growth permitted by the under-
lying organization of the economy. Different structures of accumulation support
different growth curves (inflected upward or downward in expansion and contrac-
tion phases). The expansion and contraction phases of each K-wave eventually
succumb to entropy and typically result in oscillating patterns of growth and
stagnation every twenty to thirty years. However, periodically, a system of accu-
mulation either becomes exhausted and/or, in conjunction with exogenous shocks,
collapses as a B-phase contraction continues beyond its normal duration and an
A phase cannot be relauched. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills hinted at such
long wave changes of 200–300 years in their The World System: Five Hundred
Years or Five Thousand? We prefer not to rehearse those debates nor periodize
past cycles here. For those seeking to explore this in greater detail we suggest
Ernest Mandel’s (1980) Long Waves of Capitalist Development.19
In the 1920s, when the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff published
his research on the long waves in the capitalist economy, based on studying
international statistics on prices, his work was met with skepticism and critical
remarks from his colleagues. However, long-term market cycles became increas-
ingly suggestive to economists and historians as patterns of economic growth
and contraction matched the Kondratieff-predicted outline. Nevertheless, more
dogmatic applications of the principle rooted solely in mathematics were doubted
by Kondratieff himself, and historical sociologists and political economists who
were among those who found value in Kondratieff’s ideas. Just as Karl Marx
declared he was not a “Marxist,” we suspect Kondratieff would have declared he
was not a follower of “Kondratieffs” as a science, and neither are we.
This fascination with “Kondratieff waves” (sometimes K-waves or just
Kondratieffs) anchored in mathematical determinism proved to be as unproduc-
tive as earlier skepticism, albeit in different directions. When Kondratieff worked
out his theory on capitalist economies having long-term cycles (fifty to sixty years)
of boom followed by depression, the main aim of his research was not to prove
that these cycles existed but to understand why they happened. His approach was
transdisciplinary.
Transition from one phase to another is not a matter of time, as vulgar inter-
pretations of Kondratieff tend to argue, but is the result of a complex process that
involves technological, social, and political change – all these factors were studied
in the initial work of this great economist. So the question is not how many years
should we wait till the next phase begins, but what should happen for it to start.
Kondratieff pointed to the fact that capitalist economies and societies regularly
undergo a dramatic process of change which he called “reconstructions.” These
changes usually involve massive replacement of equipment and technological
change, or rather transition to the new basic technological paradigm (such as from
steam engine to petrol and electricity), but they are also accompanied by wars
and revolutions, change of political regimes, and transformation of ruling social
blocks.
Although the ideas of Nikolai Kondratieff became popular in the West during
the late 1960s, in Russia itself his ideas were almost forgotten. Kondratieff was
arrested during Stalin’s purges and executed in 1938. His works were neither
republished nor studied or even attacked, but were muted. Interest in Kondratieff’s
analysis started reviving in the 1960s after his rehabilitation but it never became
part of Soviet economic mainstream. Some studies of K-waves were undertaken
in the 1970s by the dissident economist Leonid Pavlov, who was trying to figure
out how global economic cycles might influence the fate of the Soviet Union. The
result allowed Pavlov to predict the decomposition of the Soviet system under
the influence of global change and falling prices of exported raw materials.20 The
economic situation of the late twentieth century and the first decade of the new
century sparked a new debate on whether K-waves start becoming much longer,
much shorter, or maybe no longer even exist. This mystery of K-wave behavior
results, however, from a purely chronological and arithmetical approach to them.
In reality it is the capacity of this specific globalized neoliberal economic regime
to sustain and expand itself against all odds that makes the cycle look broken.
However, it seems that by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the
potential for self-reproduction of the neoliberal model is completely exhausted
or is very close to exhaustion. This means that a new great reconstruction is
likely looming on the global scale, accompanied by social upheavals and political
instability.
In the late 1990s interest in studying K-waves in Russia dramatically increased
under the influence of Western authors such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni
Arrighi (even though the latter came to doubt, but not deny, their efficacy) who
became increasingly popular among Russian intellectuals (interestingly enough,
not only among those on the left, but also among Nationalists and Conservatives).
On the other hand, Marxist debates remained for some time completely unaffected
by the ideas of Kondratieff, until the moment when the Institute for Globalization
and Social Movements (IGSO) started developing its own research dedicated to
achieving an understanding of Russia’s role in the world system and its perspec-
tives. In early 2008, young IGSO economist Vassily Koltashov published, together
with a few other colleagues, a paper entitled “Russia in the World Crisis,” based
on studying K-waves: this paper immediately made Koltashov one of the best-
known and most controversial figures in Russian economic debates. Koltashov’s
contribution to the debate was not just in showing the bleak perspective of the
Russian economy (which at that moment seemed to be booming, given high energy
prices), but also in returning to the original Kondratieff ideas about reconstruction
and social change as the condition for launching a new expansionist wave. That
led Koltashov to the conclusion that no new A phase will start globally unless we
see a demise of neoliberalism, and, although this did not seem to be very likely
in the short term, the world economy was entering into a long period of uncertain
transition and instability.
Notes
1 While of course recognizing that decreasing arbitrage was an indicator of globalizing
markets. For discussion of arbitrage and globalization in the early modern world, see
Ronnaback (2009).
2 This analysis compares the different parts of the long B phase from the 1970s to the
present, necessitating a type of comparison of sub-periods throughout the text that
departs from a strict linear chronology to focus on various similarities and differences
at different points in time.
3 This term refers to the period launched by the transatlantic political revolutions from
the late eighteenth century that subsequently diffused to the rest of the world. In the
initial phases it enabled a new regime of accumulation and by the nineteenth century
became the driving force for the political change itself.
4 At the end of his career, Gunder Frank dismissed capitalism as a term lacking any
agreed-upon specificity. The authors use the term for convenience and have a specific
definition in employing it.
5 Regarding a hegemonic shift to a Sino-centric world, one may appropriate the words
of Zhou En-Lai on the effects of the French Revolution: it is “too early to tell.”
6 This was not the original source of the crisis, but aggravated the crisis of profitability
already under way. See Brenner (1998).
7 Of the five crises of the KWBO, the resource crisis was the least embedded in the
logic of that system.
8 Eric Helleiner nicely covers this history in his States and the Reemergence of Global
Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (1994). This recession lasted even longer
in Japan, and was resolved only by the “gift” of the Korean War that both introduced
American demand for its goods and launched it towards prosperity with an “invitation
to develop” that permitted policy autonomy in Japan. For a discussion of Japan’s
economic development see LeFeber (1998).
9 The “normal” capitalism pined for by middle classes in the post-Soviet bloc was,
ironically, as much a function of the existence of the USSR as of anything else.
10 For an explanation of how financial bailouts beginning in the 1970s created ever-
greater risks of financial crises through removal of risk, see Minsky (2008).
11 For an informative essay on the underside of NGOs, see Petras (1997). Also see
Kagarlitsky (2000: 89–92).
12 The authors place the Saudis in the Second World by the 1970s given an industrializa-
tion drive they had undertaken at this time.
13 Yet in 2009 the dollar recovered somewhat as the rest of the world economy floundered.
14 These were electricity and chemicals in the early 1900s; Fordism, synthetics, jet
engines, and television in the 1930s; and information technologies that emerged out
of the U.S. space program and military in the 1960s.
15 With varying results. In addition to the pressure provided by the IMF and World Bank,
there was also the entropy that emerged from many of these nations’ exhausted import
substitution models, which failed to make the leap to global competitiveness. This
particularly applied to the Soviet bloc and much of Latin America, especially Brazil.
16 It should be noted that, although acting as the chief evangelist for economic liberal-
ism, the United States in practice was opened less to foreign penetration than others.
Steel and strategic sectors were often protected. Section 301c was used to save certain
industries, such as with Harley Davidson. Moreover, investments opened to others
included overvalued real estate and entertainment industries sold at inflated prices
before the bottom dropped out, as the Japanese discovered in the early 1990s. Port
facilities and other strategic infrastructure, meanwhile, were off limits.
17 With some exceptions in the post-Carter period. For example, after the Plaza Accords,
there was increased investment in production in the U.S. economy that showed up
as improved U.S. manufacturing competitiveness by the mid-1990s. Yet this was
overshadowed by outsourcing, offshoring, and a disproportionate level of resources/
investment going to the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sectors.
18 Which, if more fully applied, could have led not only to advances in production
efficiency, but also to breakthroughs in related technologies such as microrobots
(nanotechnology), artificial intelligence, etc.
19 For a more cursory review, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave.
20 Andre Gunder Frank came to the same conclusion in 1980 in his book Crisis: In the
World Economy.
References
Arrighi, Giovanni. 2009. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century. London:
Verso Press.
Brenner, Robert. 1998. “The Economics of Global Turbulence: A Special Report on the
World Economy, 1950–98.” New Left Review, 229 (May/June).
Brenner, Robert. 2007. “Structure vs. Conjuncture.” New Left Review, 43 (January/
February, 2007): 33–59.
Carey, Alex. 1997. Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus
Freedom and Liberty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Crozier, Michael, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. 1976. The Crisis of Democracy:
Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. New York:
New York University Press.
FactsOfIsrael.Com. 2002. “Abba Eban, the Father of Israeli Statesmanship, Dies at the Age
of 87.” November 18. Available at http://www.factsofisrael.com/blog/archives/000491-
print.html
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1980. Crisis: In the World Economy. London: Heinemann.
Gills, Barry K. and Andre Gunder Frank. 1993. “The Cumulation of Accumulation.” pp.
81–114 in The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, edited by Andre
Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills. London: Routledge.
Harvey, David. 2005. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Helleiner, Eric. 1994. States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods
to the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kagarlitsky, Boris. 2000. The Return of Radicalism: Reshaping Left Institutions. London:
Pluto Press.
Kennedy, Paul. 1989. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Vintage Press.
LaFeber, Walter. 1998. The Clash. New York: W. W. Norton.
Mandel, Ernest. 1980. Long Waves of Capitalist Development: The Marxist Interpretation.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Minsky, Hyman. 2008. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. New York: McGraw Hill. First
published 1986.
Mufson, Steven. 2009. “Oil’s Puzzling Spring Surge Reignites Debate About Speculators.”
The Washington Post, July 14. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2009/07/14/AR2009071400565.html.
Petras, James. 1997. “Imperialism and NGOs.” Monthly Review, 49 (7): 10–27.
Ronnaback, Klas. 2009. “Integration of Global Commodity Markets in the Early Modern
Era.” European Review of Economic History, 13: 95–120.
UN Watch. 2010. “Google: ‘Internet Censorship Getting Worse, More Sophisticated’.”
April 29, Issue 228. Available at http://www.unwatch.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.asp
x?c=bdKKISNqEmG&b=1314451&ct=835548.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Whitney, Mike. 2008. “Sorting through the Rubble in Post-Bubble America.” Counterpunch,
March 8–9. Available at http://counterpunch.org/whitney03082008.html.
Koltashov, Vassily. 2008. “Russia in the World Crisis.” Levaya Politika, 5.
Part III
Multidisciplinary
developments
10
Connections, connections,
connections!
The Atlantic copper market during the long
twentieth century
Jan-Frederik Abbeloos
In this chapter I show how the focus on connections can offer new insights into
the relationship between national economic development and natural resource
intensity. The popular resource curse hypothesis assumes that the relationship
is often inverse: countries rich in natural resources have a tendency to score
poorly in economic development. In the first section of this chapter I present the
institutional, sectoral, and more structural analyses of the resource problem, with
special attention to the intellectual contribution that Andre Gunder Frank made
in this respect. The perspectives are confronted with each other, assessing the
state-centric analytic focus in all cases. In reaction to this, value chain analysis
is introduced as a way to get a better insight into the transnational and corpo-
rate aspects that characterize every market for natural resources and influence
the economic opportunities of resource-rich regions. In the second section, the
importance of this perspective is illustrated through a preliminary analysis of the
spatial connections within the sphere of the Atlantic copper market during the
long twentieth century and the varying benefits that these spatial connections had
for different regions and states whose economies were strongly dependent on their
copper sector.
It’s all about institutions, sectors, and the system, is it

not?
The idea that there is an inverse relationship between national development and
natural resource intensity was given statistical validity by Jeffrey Sachs and
Andrew Warner in 1995. They stated that, on average, countries with a high
value of resource-based exports to GDP tend to have a lower growth rate. And
since 1998 Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (1988) have noticed a correlation
between a high value of resource-based exports to GDP and civil war.1 These
176 Jan-Frederik Abbeloos
studies highlight both the potential economic and social negative effects of having
a resource-dependent export economy. The studies also generated new research
that critically tested and sought to explain these statistical findings.
An important caveat in the discussion is that resource intensity can be looked
at in two ways. The above studies analyze resource dependence (as noticed by
studying export figures and GDPs), which is not the same as resource abundance.
Countries such as Norway, the United States, or Australia show that resource
abundance does not necessarily lead to dependence, and hence a risk for slow
growth, civil war, or other possible negative developmental effects. The problem
is thus not one of resource determinism as such, but of political economy. This
view helps us to “to banish the bogeyman of geographical determinism,” to use
an expression by Jeffrey Sachs (2005: 58). The idea that rich resources do not
have to be a curse to national development has already been picked up by Time
magazine, calling it one of the “10 ideas that are currently changing the world”
(Powell 2008). However, turning the resource problem into a problem of political
economy does not solve what Michael Ross (1999: 307) has called the most puz-
zling part of the resource curse: “the failure of states to take measures that could
change resource abundance from a liability to an asset.”
In order to solve this puzzle, scholars have identified three different units of
analysis to study and explain the policy failures that turn some countries from
resource-abundant countries to resource-dependent countries.
The first approach emphasizes that the statistical link between resource
dependence and welfare operates through national institutional quality. Christa
Brunnschweiler and Erwin Bulte (2008a: 250) point out that the variable for
resource dependence (value of resource exports to GDP) is a function of the total
economy, which makes the variable endogenous with respect to other variables
that determine national economic performance. The main variable in this respect in
their view is exactly institutional quality. According to Brunnschweiler and Bulte,
resource dependence is more likely to materialize in countries with an unfavorable
institutional (governmental) set-up, in essence presidential and non-democratic
regimes. In these regimes authority is strongly centralized and decision-makers
are not dependent on a stable majority among the legislators, which makes sec-
toral lobbying pressure from resource firms more relevant for policy design than
electoral pressure. Following this, the negative correlation between a high value
of resource-based exports to GDP and low institutional quality does not prove
that resources undermine economic or institutional development; it proves that
the resource sector is the “default sector” on which the national economy falls
back in the absence of decent institutions or in the presence of armed conflicts
(Brunnschweiler and Bulte 2008b).
This position calls for further explanation of how the particular negative insti-
tutional arrangements in resource-dependent countries came about and why, in
some cases, such as the United States, a presidential regime did not hamper the
development of non-primary production sectors. In dealing with these questions
we must keep in mind the warning of Dani Rodrik and colleagues (2002: 24) that
Connections, connections, connections! 177
“there is growing evidence that desirable institutional arrangements have a large

element of context specificity, arising from differences in historical trajectories,
geography, political economy, or other initial conditions.” With respect to the
resource problem, this would lead to the hypothesis by Graham Davis (1998:
225) that “the [. . .] successes and failures of the mineral economies remain idio
syncratic, refuting any broad development patterns.” This does not mean that
contingency necessarily comes out as the crucial variable that explains why in
some countries resource abundance equates with poor institutional and economic
development and in others it does not. It does mean that we need to take this
context specificity into account more strongly when explaining the policy failures
that turn some countries into resource-dependent countries.
A second group of scholars therefore highlights a specific aspect of this context
specificity that has been neglected by the statistical analyses we saw above. Scholars
such as Michael Shafer and Terry Karl put the institutional quality or the state’s
capacity to successfully promote economic development strongly in relation to
the characteristics of a country’s leading (export) sector. Whereas Brunnschweiler
and Bulte state that resource dependence is more likely to materialize in countries
with presidential and non-democratic regimes as they are prone to sectoral lobby-
ing, the sectoral approach points out how different resource sectors put different
demands on the political regime. The further contextualization of the problem
of political economy comes with a new causality because a central assumption
is that sectoral demands actually determine the conditions under which states
can pursue a certain developmental policy (Shafer 1994: 12–19; Karl 1997: xvi,
23–24). According to Michael Shafer, if the leading sector is a mineral industry,
such as in the copper case, the chances are high that it is characterized by a small
number of large integrated firms that place strong demands on the state for protec-
tion during adverse market swings. The state will probably develop specialized
tax authorities to tap the concentrated revenue streams that the sector produces
and specialized agencies to monitor, regulate, and promote the activities of these
critical firms. This can bring about very close ties between the state, the govern-
ment, and the sector, which can set of several negative feedback effects such as
rent-seeking behavior or inflexible (trade) policies that are aimed at safeguarding
the interests of the leading sector (Shafer 1994: 12–15). This approach helps to
understand more fully the downward spiral in which the two states of the African
Copperbelt, Zaire/Congo and Zambia, are trapped after the nationalization of the
local copper industry in the late 1960s. This exactly created the situation of a large
leading national sector that had close connections, even ownership ties, to the
government. Shafer demonstrates in an article how these nationalizations did not
deliver the promised welfare effects because of a local misunderstanding of the
world copper industry, an underestimation of the vulnerability of non-vertically
integrated national producers, and an overestimation of the possible strength of a
copper producer’s cartel (Shafer 1983: 95). Nevertheless, the very task of seeing
how sectors shape the developmental prospects of states signals the limits of the
sectoral approach in taking the world copper industry and the place of the national
sector in it fully into account. As Michael Shafer acknowledges, the approach

treats the leading sector as if it fell full blown from the sky and, by definition, it
looks only at formally independent states (Shafer 1994: 18–19). This of course
creates a double blind spot. First, it fails to appreciate the path dependency of any
pre-independence situation, in both the creation and development of the sector
and political institutions at hand. Second, it does not look at the creation of the
international economy in which all national mineral sectors participate. Taken
together, the sectoral approach can only touch upon the manner in which a partic-
ular regional sector was incorporated in or connected to this international market
and how this shaped the developmental prospects of states. As the third group of
scholars to whom we turn now will argue, the explanation for the political and
economic institutions that are under study up to this point needs to be sought in
the long-term perspective of specialization and in the more holistic perspective of
an evolving world economy.
More structural thinkers such as Andre Gunder Frank or Immanuel Wallerstein
have therefore paid much attention to the political, economic, or social constraints
and possibilities through which societies and national institutions develop. Their
analytic focus has been called neo-Smithian by Robert Brenner as it assumes that
the extent and nature of the international market in no small matter determines
the pattern of national specialization, and thus the leading export sector (Brenner
1977: 45, 53, 86). Contrary to what we then might call the classical Smithian or
liberal viewpoint, these intellectuals do not believe this process of specialization
in reality can lead to an optimal equilibrium in which every country fruitfully
develops its own comparative advantage. This is because the very process of
market expansion and specialization is believed to reflect power differentials
between countries. These radicals, as B. N. Ghosh (2001: xi) calls them, argue that
a problem of development such as resource dependency needs to be related to the
global circuits of power in which societies develop through time. In the context
of this volume, let us take a closer look at Andre Gunder Frank’s interpretation of
how these circuits of power influenced, or in his view determined, the prospects
for national development.
Frank did not find a relation between natural resource dependence and national
development per se but between the level of integration amid core/metropoles and
periphery/satellites on the one hand and development on the other (Kay 2005).
Originally put forward as a critique of the modernization theories of the 1950s
and 1960s, Frank gave up on the temporal duality that distinguishes two phases in
economic development (from traditional to modern) and replaced it with a spatial
duality, one between peripheral and core countries of the world economy.2 It is not
the rhythm of economic development that is considered to be unequal and uneven
across countries, but world economic development itself is seen as a process with
unequal outcomes that are spatially fixed and constantly reproduced through time.
Frank’s personal website, left in place since his untimely death in 2005, still bears
witness to this conviction. At the beginning of the section “Current Research,”
one reads:
welfare and the benefits and DISbenefits derived from participation in a wider
global whole is determined primarily by RELATIONS among people and
within and among “societies” and their PLACE or LOCATION, LOCATION,
LOCATION in the whole system. THAT is what we need to study in the
SYSTEM AS A WHOLE.3
The crux of Frank’s dependency theory was that the world system created
spatial inequalities because it was a capitalist system in which, as his PhD super-
visor Milton Friedman (1970) knew, the only social responsibility of business was
to increase its profits. By 1963 Frank already stated that “underdevelopment as
we know it today, and economic development as well, are the simultaneous and
related products of the development on a world-wide scale and over a history of
more than four centuries at least of a single integrated economic system: capital-
ism.”4 This extreme structural view begs the question of what capitalism actually
is and how and when it is tied to underdevelopment or development. Critics of
his early work were quick to remark that this explanation was actually missing
from Frank’s writings, making his dependency theory more of a tautology than an
explanatory framework.5
However, in later works Frank did make the important fine-tuning that not so
much capitalism but “the process of capital accumulation [emphasis added] is
a, if not the, principal motor of modern history” (Frank 1978: 238). In line with
Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis, Frank did not consider capital-
ism to be a phase in the economic development on the road to a classless society
or a society of high mass consumption. Nor did Frank or Wallerstein follow more
orthodox Marxists such as Robert Brenner and Ernesto Laclau who stressed the
necessity to deflate the concept of capitalism to a defined mode of production,
next to other modes such as slavery or feudalism and the processes of market
exchange (Laclau 1971; Brenner 1977).6 To Frank, capitalism seen as a mode of
production was an ill-suited analytical criterion to understand a process of capital-
ist accumulation, a driving force behind world history that characterized every
mode of production that one would want to distinguish between.7 Dependency
was seen as the consequence of the process of capital accumulation and the
monopolistic market structure this process pushes for. It gets installed once an
external region is incorporated into this capitalist economy and institutions are
put into place that allow for an export-driven economy but not for export-driven
development. Keeping in mind the institutional and sectoral analyses we saw
above, Frank would ask to what extent the export sector but also the local institu-
tions were controlled by the core, assisted in this by the ruling classes of the
peripheral regions. Following Frank’s logic, resource dependence occurs where
foreign capital dominates resource extraction and investors are allowed to repatri-
ate their profits instead of investing them in the local economy. In Frank’s view,
this factor buttressed the development of underdevelopment (Frank 1966).
Towards a new research agenda: it’s all about ownership

and power circuits
The three approaches above indicate more complex units or scales of analysis to
study the resource problem, starting with national institutions and the governmen-
tal system, bringing in the characteristics of the leading sector, and finally taking
them together under the umbrella of a world economy. Along the way, one causal
logic got replaced with another singular logic that is to provide the main explana-
tion for the resource dependence and noticed welfare effects. As the mainstream
thesis of a resource abundance curse is left aside, institutional quality, sectoral
demands, or capitalist accumulation are put forward as the crucial engines behind
particular instances of resource dependence. This need for a singular causal logic
stems from the political agenda that accompanies all of these approaches, hoping
to single out the general obstacle that is responsible for the negative experi-
ences of resource-dependent countries. Although the different perspectives of
these approaches actually prove the overdetermination of the resource problem,
each approach, on its own terms, tries to find “the method in the madness,” as
Shakespeare would have it. This is a laudable and basic scientific attitude. I do not
wish to underline the overdetermination of the resource problem, or point out how
class conflict, technological development, or cultural perspectives can highlight
sides of the problem that would offer a further contextualization of it. Nor do I
simply want to point out that the different causal logics that have in fact been sin-
gled out co-vary in different, context-specific and evolving ways. Whereas Frank,
for example, offers a correct correction on the reluctance of the institutional
framework to take the next step toward the pressures of the world economy in
which societies develop, the institutional approach reminds us of the capacity of
the state to counteract these systemic pressures. More qualitative analyses could
then point out how this power matrix gets played out in different cases.
What I want to discuss here is that the institutional, sectoral, and structural
interpretations of the resource problem risk missing out on two important aspects
of the resource dependence cum development discussion, two aspects that would
offer not only a fuller contextualization but also hopefully a better explanation for
the problem at hand.
The first problem is that the political agenda of the institutional and structural
interpretation forces scholars to address and study the wealth of “nations.” The
quantitative research is characterized by large data sets that attribute different
independent variables to states in order to tackle development as a dependent
variable. And despite his insistence on a world systemic outlook, Frank quite
often looked at the state (see Chile, Brazil) as the central spatial container to
perform his analysis.8 The state-centric approach seems logical, both politically
and scientifically, as the problem under discussion is one of national development
and the state serves as an important and legitimate channel that has the potential
to push for change. But even in the sectoral and structural analyses, this approach
actually creates a blind spot for the power circuits in which states develop and
the international markets of which leading export sectors are a part. It may seem
surprising to point this criticism at a structural perspective such as world-systems
analysis. But as Frank himself reviewed the shortcomings of dependency and
world systems analyses in 1993: “There has been widespread underappreciation
or underestimation of the role of capital accumulation, markets, the profit motive,
‘entrepreneurial elements’, and of long-distance trade for most of world history”
(Frank and Gills 1993b: 301).
Second, the natural resource business is about more than capturing the earth’s
minerals or vegetation. These natural assets are turned into economic commodi-
ties through different production processes that do not need to take place in the
same region or country. From cashew nuts to copper, natural resources sit at the
start of production chains that are often transnational, even transcontinental. In
the case of copper, mining is not smelting and smelting is not refining, and any
discussion of the resource problem should take this production chain into account.
This shifts our attention to the agents that command such a production chain in
which the mining phase, smelting phase, and refining phase are but links in the
wider chain through which the natural resource is carried.9
Taken together, what needs to be analyzed more thoroughly is the role of both
governmental and business agencies in the process of controlling transnational
production chains. This requires that we take these chains as the starting point of
the analysis. This was something that Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins
were already aware of more than twenty years ago. In 1986 they coined the
concept of a commodity chain as “a network of labor and production processes
whose end result is a finished commodity” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986: 159).
Since then, historians such as Steven Topik have embraced the commodity chain
approach, while new concepts have been launched such as value system, (global)
value chains, value streams, and the French filière approach.10 Despite the seman-
tic confusion and subtle differences between these concepts, each one of them
points to the same basic objective, which is to explain why a specific chain of
production is formed and governed as it is through time and on what geographical
scale. Adding to this, important questions are how surplus value is created through
the chain, why more or less profitable parts of the chain are located in certain
geographical areas, and which actors in the chain gain from which activities.11
An important step in the promotion of this type of research was taken in 1994,
when Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz edited a volume on Commodity
Chains and Global Capitalism. The volume expanded on the ideas of Wallerstein
and Hopkins by paying attention to the different types of bargaining power
between producers within one chain and mapping the global distribution of
some commodity chains along the core–periphery axis of world systems analysis
(Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994; Korzeniewicz and Martin 1994). The research
agenda broke through in 2000 when Gereffi, together with John Humphrey and
Timothy Sturgeon loosened the world-systems connection and launched the
Global Value Chains Initiative as a loose network of researchers, activists, and
policy-makers that make use of the value chain concept, a term that encompasses
the key features of commodity chains, value systems, streams, and filières.12 In
contrast to a state-centric approach, the Global Value Chains Initiative promotes
an industry-centric perspective that highlights the linkages between economic
actors across geographic space. States can be direct economic actors but, even
if they are not directly involved in the production process, they remain crucial in
relation to the governance of these linkages. The central task is to see exactly how
spatial patterns and patterns of ownership and control relate to each other. In what
follows I will illustrate the importance of this perspective through a preliminary
analysis of the spatial long-term transformations in the Atlantic copper market
and their developmental impact.
On mining, smelting, and refining: the spatial

transformations in the Atlantic copper market during the
twentieth century
During the long twentieth century the evolution of the copper business was a
complex historical process of political, economic, and technological transforma-
tions that determined where and in which manner copper was mined, smelted, and
refined on a larger scale. The spatial dimension of this process is summarized very
clearly by Philip Crowson (1992: 252):
Patterns of location have largely been the result of creative tension between
various demand based factors, and the effects of supply developments. This
interplay has been influenced by changes in transport systems and costs, and
further modified by political, social, institutional and economic conditions.
An analysis of locational change in the mining industry which ignores any of
these aspects is liable to be lopsided and incomplete.
This explanatory matrix connects local conditions, transnational logics, and

market factors to explain the pattern of location in the mineral industry at large.
With regard to the copper industry, we can say that the creation of an Atlantic
copper economy, characterized by these specific patterns of growing economic and
technological interdependency, took off around 1870. At that point the demand for
copper grew in the industrializing states of Europe and North America in reaction
to the expanding electrification of society. The market did not simply globalize,
it expanded according to the explanatory matrix that Crowson identified above.
The goal in this chapter is (1) to take a closer look at this expansion and (2) to
point out how this expansion shaped the developmental prospects of states in the
copper market.
The main political, economic, and technological transformations occurred
between roughly 1870 and 1930 during what Christopher Schmitz (1986, 1997,
2000) has called the “rise of big business in the world-copper industry.” The rise
of big business is an intriguing historical characteristic of the copper industry as it
was both cause and effect of the geographical expansion of the copper value chain.
The expansion itself could only be realized by firms with considerable financial
and logistic assets that could manage the complex task of placing foreign invest-
ments and setting up the necessary infrastructure with success. Meanwhile the
increasing transportation, transaction, and operational costs that this geographical
expansion implied demanded a further move toward vertical integration within
these firms of all four main stages of the production process: mining, smelting,
refining the copper ores, and (semi)-fabrication.13 This gave the United States
an advantage as the trend toward vertical integration inside the mining firm had
started early here because of the United States’ large and booming domestic
market (which posed logistic challenges but guaranteed sales) (Prain 1975: 33).
This is why the creation of the Atlantic copper business was accompanied by a
geographical shift in the industry’s leading production centers, away from Great
Britain in favor of American firms.14 Inside the United States, there was another
geographical shift from northern Michigan (leading production up to 1883 with
the Calumet & Hecla Company) to the west, where large-scale producers opened
in Butte, Montana (Anaconda Copper Company), Arizona (Phelps Dodge), and
Utah (Kennecott) (Leitner 2004).
The development of the industry during the rise of big business was led by
U.S. companies, in terms of both technology and corporate growth. However, the
pattern of large-scale companies operating in peripheral host economies was also
visible in Europe. As such, the expansion of trade patterns, financial transactions,
or business investments in the copper industry shows spatial patterns that did not
come about ad random. The part of the primary copper output that was not pro-
vided by the United States during the long twentieth century (see Figure 10.1) has
been concentrated in two regions: the African Copperbelt (comprising the former
colonies Congo and Rhodesia) and a South American region concentrated in Chile
and Peru. Economic factors mattered because for many other regions in the world
the deposits were not significant enough to justify the necessary large investments
at that time. But politics mattered as well. The early expansion of the Atlantic
copper market took place during the era of New Imperialism, the period between
1875 and 1914 that Eric Hobsbawm (1987) described as “The age of Empire.”15
Within this context, the copper business expanded from about 1870 along
formal colonial or informal imperial lines as large vertically integrated firms from
Europe and North America prospected and invested in peripheral regions, primar-
ily Africa or South America. This way a dual geographical network of investment
and control became visible in the control of the copper industry of the early
twentieth century. One network connected the United States of America with
South America. The other networks connected Europe with colonial Africa and
the European imperial realm. The networks of control do not coincide with the
networks of trade as the United States has by and large remained a self-sufficient
market, while Chile always acted as a considerable exporter to Europe. Still, the ties
within the networks were strengthened after World War I, when European imports
from Chile and the United States fell sharply as production gathered momentum
in Britain’s overseas empire (notably Northern Rhodesia, South Africa, Canada,
16,000,000
14,000,000
12,000,000
Metric tonnes copper content
10,000,000
8,000,000
6,000,000
4,000,000
2,000,000
Year
Figure 10.1 World and U.S. primary production compared (the line represents
U.S. production and bars represent world production). Source: U.S.
Geological Survey, Online Historical Statistics for Mineral and Material
Commodities in the United States, by Thomas D. Kelly and Grecia R.
Matos. Available at http://minerals.usgs.gov/ds/2005/140/.
and Australia) and in Belgian Congo (Prain 1975: 71–72). Meanwhile the two net-
works used different price-setting mechanisms up to 1978.16 Within the Eurafrican
network, tensions also built up during the interbellum between different states
such as Germany and Great Britain. Both countries, but also junior partners
such as Belgium, wanted to secure their own supply of the strategic copper ore
within their own spheres of influences through the actions of state-sponsored cor-
porations such as the British Metal Corporation, Metallgesellschaft, and Union
Minière du Haut-Katanga.17 However, the Atlantic copper market did integrate as
there were two important bridges between the Eurafrican and American networks.
The first was technological as the main advances in the production process spilled
over from North America to Europe. The second was organizational. According
to Ronald Prain (1975: 91), already before World War I the domestic and export
prices of American producers were considerably influenced by the results of trad-
ing in a few thousand warrants on the London Metal Exchange. The Exchange
played an important role in the standardization of contracts, an essential aspect for
the creation of hedging, speculation, trade, and converging prices.
Within the American and Eurafrican networks, the multinational corporations
commanded a production chain that connected parts of the world economy where
the ores were extracted, the places where they were smelted, and the zones where
the ores were further refined. The refining happened, and still happens, where the
demand was as there are virtually no savings in transportation costs in shipping
refined copper over copper matte, whereas there are some advantages in locat-
ing refineries close to the fabricating plants so that the types of refined copper
produced can readily be adjusted on demand (Mikesell 1979: 26). Therefore
the integrated copper firms set up and commanded a production chain in which
smelters were established at the larger mines in Chile, Congo, and Zambia, but
refineries and especially manufacturing tended to be concentrated in the industri-
alizing countries.
This pattern is clearly visible in Figures 10.2–10.5. The graphs present the
mining, smelting, and refining output of North America, South America, Europe,
and Africa, respectively, and are based on the data provided by the reports of
Metallgesellschaft and the statistical table that Kees Klein Goldewijk prepared
for the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE), an information
gateway of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.18 As we can see,
Africa and Latin America excavate more copper ore but supply the market with
less refined copper. In Europe and North America the situation is the opposite: a
lot more refining is taking place in these regions in comparison to their mining
efforts. North America specialized in refining from 1910 on; in Europe the move-
ment started during the 1920s around the same time that Africa started mining
more than it refined. In South America mining and refining went hand in hand
until the mining output grew during the 1950s.19
These graphs should be seen only as illustrations of the different regional
production mix. They do not say anything about the patterns of ownership in the
Metric tonnes (thousands)
Year
Figure 10.2 North America copper production. Solid line: mine production; dotted
line: smelter production; dashed line: refined production.
Year
Figure 10.3 South America copper production. Solid line: mine production; dotted
line: smelter production; dashed line: refined production.
Year
Figure 10.4 Europe copper production. Solid line: mine production; dotted line:
smelter production; dashed line: refined production.
Year
Figure 10.5 Africa copper production. Solid line: mine production; dotted line: smelter
production; dashed line: refined production.
copper market. In fact, interpreting Figure 10.5 as “African countries exported”

more copper blister than refined copper anodes is rather meaningless as the local
industry was controlled by European firms up until the 1970s. Next to this the
patterns of trade did not coincide with the patterns of control. The surplus of
African copper blister does not fully account for the additional refining in Europe.
But the graphs are important to show that even when policy shifts have taken
place during the long twentieth century, even when the local mining business has
been nationalized, the pattern of specialization in mining or refining remained.
There seems to be a serious path dependency to the spatial patterns that came
about during the early twentieth century through the economic forces of supply
and demand, through the business considerations of the large vertically integrated
companies, and within asymmetric geopolitical networks.
These production chains have important implications for the development of
the regions. First, the mining business depends more on low-skilled labor than the
refining business. This has shaped the process of forming mining communities
instead of a laboring class within South American and African copper countries in
a similar fashion.20 Second, copper is turned into an interesting market commodity
only in its most pure form. The prices that have been negotiated at the London
Metal Exchange since 1876, between American producers up to 1978, at the New
York Commodity Exchange (Comex) since 1978, and at the Shanghai Metal
Exchange (SHME) since 1992 are all for the most pure form of refined copper,
a standard that changed somewhat through time. In any case, these prices do not
apply to the copper blister or matte that is retrieved after mining and smelting the
ore. Although we can expect these prices to follow the same trend, they tend to be
lower than the prices noted at stock exchanges, as the price for copper tends to go
up as copper goes down the production chain. Structural analyses rightly address
the problem of potential declining world market prices for export-driven econo-
mies but they often do not see that copper countries that are primarily engaged
in mining tend to be hit harder than conventional graphs show. Especially after
copper prices started dropping since the 1970s, the outlook for South America and
Africa was far from bright, even if countries such as Chile, Zambia, Congo, and
Peru had nationalized their copper mining business. This nationalization process
separated primary copper production from further processing located outside the
mining regions and still controlled by foreign copper firms. This created a bigger
market for copper concentrate where previously vertical integration had been the
norm. The result was an insecurity for the state-owned companies as the interests
of non-integrated smelters or refiners were not aligned with those of miners. The
nationalizations of the 1970s unfortunately created the conditions for outside
smelters and refiners to play out different mining companies against each other
and force down the price for raw copper, making the difference between the prices
for raw and refined copper bigger. This was a return to the situation before the rise
of big business and globalization, when, for example, Welsh mining companies at
the end of the eighteenth century were confronted with disadvantageous contracts
from Welsh smelters (Allen 1923).
This is not to say that the wave of nationalizations from the end of the 1960s on
did not have any effect or that the developmental trajectory of regions primarily
engaged in mining has to be identical. First of all, the changes in the networks of
control had implications for the networks of trade. Chile increased its trade with
European countries after nationalization while Zambia diversified its trade in
another direction to markets such as Japan, China, and Russia. Second, within the
new international setting, the oppositional trajectories of South America and Africa
are quite striking. At the same moment that South America enjoyed a more outspo-
ken rise in its mining, smelting, and refining output, we witnessed the erosion of
existing African capacity, much like what was happening in North America at the
same time. In both cases the necessary investments were lacking during the 1980s
and the output declined, with the production of new mines unable to offset closures
of existing mines. In North America, the blame was put on the U.S. industry and
it made conscious attempts to regain competitiveness (Crowson 1992: 266). In
Africa, a similar process did not occur within the state-owned enterprises. In these
regions, the control of production was “much more than a commercial exercise,” as
Ronald Prain (1975: 53) noted. National, political, and social implications became
equally important factors that had to be weighed against the competitive behavior
of the copper business. Nowadays, the African Copperbelt has again turned to pri-
vatization as the road to development. Within a context of growing Asian demand,
rising prices, and a new wave of foreign investments, primarily from China, both
institutional and structural analysts are wondering to what extent Congo and
Zambia will this time be able to bear the fruits of this growing interest.
Conclusion
welfare and the benefits and DISbenefits derived from participation in a wider
global whole is determined primarily by RELATIONS among people and
within and among “societies” and their PLACE or LOCATION, LOCATION,
LOCATION in the whole system. THAT is what we need to study in the SYSTEM
AS A WHOLE which is greater than the sum of its parts and which shapes the
relations among the parts and the parts themselves.21
I recall these words by Andre Gunder Frank because it helps us to streamline

the conclusion of this chapter around three points. First, the emphasis that Frank
places on the relations among people and societies to explain the welfare effects of
participating in a wider global whole (say, an international or in our case Atlantic
economic zone) is very crucial. The belief that the local can be understood only
in connection to the wider arena, especially when talking about resource depend-
ence, is a central insight and cornerstone of the world or global history discipline
of which Frank himself was a strong supporter. As Patrick Manning (2003: 3)
pointed out, the study of connections, of spaces of flows rather than spaces of
places, is a defining characteristic of the world historical approach.
However, and this is the second point, the encasement of these relations within
“the system as a whole” risks reducing the study of these relations to an illustra-
tion of a dynamic that is actually located on a different systemic scale that is
“greater than the sum of its parts” and can hence not be proven by looking at
the relations as such. To Frank, this dynamic was capitalist accumulation. This
divided the world into peripheral and core states and created inequality within
these states. Just like in the sectoral and institutional approaches we discussed,
Frank’s search for a singular causal logic to explain the negative experiences of
resource-dependent countries downplays the fact that institutional arrangements,
sectoral demands, international circuits of power, and the game of capitalist
accumulation co-vary in context-specific circumstances. A number of influencing
variables could surely be added to the list. Orthodox Marxists, for example, will
frown upon the neglect of class analysis in this text, making the potential for
institutional and sectoral development and market specialization a function of
class conflict (turning Frank upside down). A more substantivist position would
stress the cultural or social embeddedness of the economic sphere and how this is
neglected in all the approaches we discussed, even in the institutional one.22 All
these different aspects point to the overdetermination of an economic problem
such as resource dependence and its welfare effects, giving weight to Graham
Davis’ (1998: 225) argument on the idiosyncratic nature of the successes and
failures of the mineral economies, refuting any broad development patterns. Be
that as it may, this still leaves us with the question of how to understand the wider
arena in this respect, and “just what the structures and limits of the connecting
mechanisms are,” to quote Frederick Cooper (2001: 189).
This is why, and this is the third point, the proposition of this chapter was not
to underscore the overdetermination of the resource problem but to point to the
state-centric filter that all three approaches apply to weigh the variables that are
taken into the analysis. Even when a holistic or sectoral approach is advocated,
the analysis often circles back to the level of the state and its agency, both for
political and for epistemological reasons. This actually hampers the attempts to
find out the structures and limits of the connecting mechanisms that Cooper talks
about, or the LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION that Frank hammered upon
in the quote. This is why the connections themselves should be put up front in
the analyses. In the case of the resource problem, what needs to be analyzed
more thoroughly is the role of both governmental and business agencies in
the process of controlling transnational production chains in which the mining,
smelting, and refining of the copper ore are but nodes in a wider, and geographi-
cally extensive, chain. In this view, states, but also firms or classes, shift from
units of analysis to different agents that influence the connections under study. A
preliminary analysis of the spatial connections within the sphere of the Atlantic
copper market during the long twentieth century illustrated the potential of this
perspective, pointing out the path dependency that these spatial connections had
for different regions and states whose economies were strongly dependent on
their copper sector.
So, in conclusion, this contribution is based on Andre Gunder Frank’s impor-
tant lesson that economic activity does not simply “globalize.” The expansion of
trade patterns, financial transactions, or business investments shows geographical
patterns that do not come about ad random, but are shaped by political, cultural,
and economic-geographical factors. The world economy therefore is more than
an unstructured whole of different flows of goods, people, and ideas. But at the
same time, this chapter is also a call to take these flows seriously and to deduct the
patterns that they display instead of making them subordinate to the functions of
a global system. The World or Global History discipline seems to offer promising
new ground to take a fresh look at this question of connections and connecting
mechanisms, even if the discipline is marked by “high productivity but topical
lacunae, conceptual weakness and limited consensus,” to quote Raymond Grew
(2006: 879). Indeed, world history is no new master narrative in reaction to the
linguistic turn or world systems analysis 2.0. This forces researchers to come up
with new conceptual tools and analytic frameworks when performing a world
historical study. This chapter hopefully illustrated these challenges by present-
ing the perspective of value chain analysis as an alternative to more state-centric
frameworks.
Notes
1 Contrary to Sachs and Warner, who notice a direct correlation between the value of
resource-based exports to GDP and economic growth, the value of resource-based
exports to GDP is but one significant factor that in Collier and Hoeffler’s view con-
tributes to the chances of a civil war outbreak. Other significant factors are initial
income, ethno-linguistic fractionalization, and initial population size. For a broader

discussion of the Collier–Hoeffler model see, amongst many other reviews of this
model, Cramer (2002).
2 The liberal and socialist interpretations of modernization theory are still represented
clearly in the different manifestos of Marx and Engels (1998 [1848]) on the one hand
and Walt Rostow (1960) on the other hand.
3 Quoted from Andre Gunder Frank’s official website (http://www.rrojasdatabank.org/
agfrank/research.html). A similar statement is found in Frank and Gill (1993: 302):
“The important issue is the position in the world system, and how, when, why, and
where that position does or does not change and permit or deny [. . .] the benefits (and
costs) of development in and of the world system as a whole.”
4 Quoted from On Capitalist Development (p. 43), written in 1963 but published in
1975. In 1967 Frank repeated that “it is capitalism, both world and national, which
produced underdevelopment in the past and which still generates underdevelopment
in the present” (p. vii).
5 See the reviews of Packenham (1979), Griffin (1970), and Street (1970).
6 In his 1998 ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age Frank (again) reacted to
this type of Marxist critique: “My answers in short are that there is class in the world
economy, but the class struggles between the ruling and ruled classes have never
been the motor force that Marx attributed to them – when he took off his historical
materialist hat. The state and culture, and indeed class struggle itself, require much
more analysis as being themselves dependent on the structure and dynamic of the
world economy and system” (p. 43).
7 What separated Frank from Wallerstein was his belief that the process of capitalist
accumulation and core–periphery dependence characterized all of human history,
even before the “Rise of the West” from the sixteenth century onwards gradually
unified the political and economic rules by which the game of capitalist accumulation
was played (Frank and Gills 1993a: 3–4).
8 In a similar vein Christopher Chase-Dunn states in his book Global Formations (1998:
310) that “some world-system processes must be studied by examining smaller units
of analysis such as nation states or transnational firms,” and he continues that “studies
of the effects of location in the core/periphery hierarchy on national development
must use countries as the unit of analysis.”
9 In this paper I do not look into the fact that the copper mining business is also more
than just the copper mining business. During the refining stage some valuable by-
products are recovered that can make the business in a particular region attractive.
Copper ores in South Africa and Philippines are rich in gold, in Chile and the United
States they are rich in silver, in the Congo and Zambia they are rich in cobalt, and in
Canada they are rich in nickel and zinc.
10 For a review of the differences between the concepts mentioned here see Kaplinsky
and Morris (2001). Steven Topik has co-edited two important volumes of historical
research in which the commodity chain concept is used (Topik et al. 2006; Clarence-
Smith and Topik 2003).
11 Different answers and sensitivities have already been developed. Whereas Wallerstein
and Hopkins emphasized the different modes of labor control that production chains
are supposed to connect, researchers such as Raphael Kaplinksy or Gary Gereffi focus
more on the governance of the networks of production, explaining the spatial patterns
of the chain in terms of differential access to capital, resources, and technology by
producers (Gereffi et al. 2005; Kaplinsky 2000; Wallerstein 2000).
12 “A value chain describes the full range of activities that are required to bring a
product or service from conception, through the different phases of production
(involving a combination of physical transformation and the input of various pro-
ducer services), delivery to final consumers, and final disposal after use” (Kaplinsky
2005: 101). More information on the Global Value Chain Initiative is available at
http://www.globalvaluechains.org.
13 The complex treatment of the geologically specific porphyry and strata-bound ores
in South America and Africa meant that companies had to come up with the right
technology within the firm to treat the ores themselves. The integration of smelting
had the additional advantage that it eliminated market transactions with outside smelt-
ers that could play out different mining companies against each other and force down
the price for raw copper. Further integration from smelting to refining can be seen
as an additional form of risk aversion, as short-run prices for refined copper (up to
99.95 percent purity) were more stable than those for smelted copper (“blister” copper
of around 93–98 percent purity). Of course the entire growth of big business in the
copper industry depended on the expectation that the rise in copper prices would make
extensive prospecting and the sunk costs of setting up smelting and refining plants
worthwhile.
14 Roger Burt (1995) analyses the shift within the European market toward Great Britain
as the geographical center of the copper production during the eighteenth century
in “The Transformation of the Non-Ferrous Metals Industries in the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries.” Jonathan Leitner (2001) discusses the subsequent loss of
Britain’s hegemony in the copper market in favour of Chilean and later U.S. firms in
“Red Metal in the Age of Capital: The Political Ecology of Copper in the Nineteenth-
Century World-Economy.”
15 A descriptive account of the wave of New Imperialism can be found in Palmer et al.
(2007: 629–675).
16 A discussion of the need for and functioning of the double pricing system is found in
Agostini (2006).
17 The fascinating yet complex relationship between the interests of British and German
politicians and entrepreneurs in the copper business within a context of imperial mis-
sions and European “Grand Designs” is discussed in Ball (2004). The strengthening
between Belgian politics and Belgian business in Congo with regards to the mining
industry is addressed by Vellut (1982).
18 Information about the HYDE project and the data is available at http://themasites.pbl.
nl/en/themasites/hyde/productiondata/metals/index.html.
19 Around the same time two additional zones become important in the world economy.
Asia saw a remarkable growth in copper refining from the end of the 1950s, carried
primarily by Japan’s industrialization. Within the Soviet Union, industrialization of
the copper sector was strongly promoted and mining kept up with refining until more
copper was refined than mined.
20 For a review on the South American experience see Taylor (1999). On the African
experience see Fetter (1999).
21 Quoted from Andre Gunder Frank’s official website (http://www.rrojasdatabank.org/
agfrank/research.html).
22 For a fuller treatment of this point see Benton (1996: 277–288).
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30 (4): 885–886.
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64 (3): 337–342.
Topik, Steven C., Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank (eds.). 2006. From Silver to Cocaine:
Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–
2000. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Vellut, Jean-Luc. 1982. “Hégémonies en construction: articulations entre Etat et Entreprises
dans le bloc coloniale belge (1908–1960).” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 16
(2): 313–330.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. “Commodity Chains: Next Steps.” Review: A Journal of the
Fernand Braudel Center, 23 (1): 197–199.
11
ReOrienting Iran
Following Gunder Frank’s advice one decade at
a time
Kevan Harris
In 1992, Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein wrote

that the Iranian Revolution, under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
presented a “great difficulty” for anti-systemic movements of the present era.
One the one hand, these movements “often regarded the Islamism of the Iranian
mullahs as part of a cultural defense of the Third World against Western cultural
imperialism.” On the other hand, they were “dismayed . . . when the Iranian
leadership suppressed one after the other Iranian movement of the ‘traditional’
antisystemic variety” (Arrighi et al. 1992: 240–241). Today, a consensus on the
historical trajectory of Iran after 1979 is no closer. Such ambivalence toward post-
revolutionary consolidation, however, is not unique to the Islamic Republic of
Iran. The curtailing of liberties and indiscriminate persecutions of Iranians during
the Khomeini regime recalls similarities with the Chekist waves of arrests and
executions during the Russian Civil War. Echoing the Soviet Union, Iran had its
own Kronstadt rebellions by self-organized worker councils that had occupied
abandoned factories and workplaces after the Revolution (Bayat 1987). These
were quickly suppressed by the state, under the auspices of wartime emergency,
and replaced with pliant organizations. During the final years of Iran’s war with
Iraq, show trials of Iranian political prisoners were broadcast on state television,
with the accused tearfully recanting their crimes and pledging allegiance to the
nation (Abrahamian 1999). If members of anti-systemic movements subsequently
engaged in “embarrassed shuffling” of feet, then perhaps this was less because
the Iranian Revolution “came to incarnate a strategy of total otherness” as sur-
mised by Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein (1992: 240–241), but rather that it
contained characteristics of world-historical social revolutions that anti-systemic
movements often observe but frequently forget. In fact, as Ervand Abrahamian
(1993) has argued, “Khomeinism” can be read not as a medieval throwback to
the seventh century, nor as an anti-liberal challenge to Western modernity, but as
ReOrienting Iran 197
a populist, paternalistic, and ad hoc regime that resembles many of the caudillos
and jefes of Latin American states. More importantly, the Iranian regime’s outlook
on the world has been decidedly dynamic over the last three decades. Indeed, as
I shall argue, when Iran moved from the 1980s war period into the economic and
political reconstruction of the 1990s, and then into the current era of reintegration
with non-Western markets, it followed a practical and strategic path that Andre
Gunder Frank’s historical sociology had earlier taken theoretically. The “shuffling
of feet” that the subject of Iran induces in anti-systemic movements, then, may
be analogous to the reception by these movements of the intellectual shifts within
Frank’s own lengthy career.
The debates on the causes and nature of the 1979 Iranian Revolution are quite
contentious and still unresolved. It has been argued that, because of lack of politi-
cal reform, the modernization programs that the Shah implemented in the 1960s
undermined his social support among newly emerging middle classes, a theory
that Henry Kissinger himself echoed during the events of 1979 (The Economist
1979; see also Abrahamian 1982; Milani 2004). Others identify the main source
of Iranians’ grievances as the social dislocation brought about by the enormous
internal economic swings of the 1970s (Foran 1993; Keddie 2006). Finally, there
are those who see in Shi’a Islam an ideological form that catalyzed and pushed
the Revolution through to a logical outcome of theocracy, once state power was
achieved (Moaddel 1994). Almost all accounts, however, agree that themes of
independence and self-sufficiency were the main demands of the revolutionary
bloc that took power. Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first President of Iran after
the Revolution, had written earlier that oil revenues were not being used for the
benefit of the people but rather were advantageous to the “dominating [Western]
economy” as the Pahlavi regime “forfeited the Iranian economic independence
. . . in exporting the national wealth and importing industrial goods” (quoted in
Dabashi 1993: 376–377). Gunder Frank, in the late 1970s, also discerned that Iran,
although a “new serious candidate for [an] intermediate economy,” experienced
an “instant boom . . . quickly deflated by the recession” (1981: 40–43), as was
occurring in many middle-income states at the time. Because of its reliance on the
West for military aid and capital goods, the Shah’s dream of becoming the “fifth
world power,” Frank wrote, was “never more than a delusion of grandeur” (p. 47).
The perception by many Iranians was that their country was suffering from
a warped modernization, or, in the parlance of the 1970s, dependent capitalist
development, in which the rewards of any economic gains were highly skewed
toward an extremely limited circle around the Shah and a few wealthy families
(Pesaran 1982). The constitution of the Islamic Republic, written in 1979, con-
tains articles that specifically mention “the elimination of foreign influence” and
the achievement of “economic independence” as state goals. It is no exaggeration
to say that the Iranian constitution is probably one of the political documents
that has been most influenced by dependency theory. Gunder Frank’s own work
was circulated clandestinely among opposition activists and intellectuals in the
1970s, and the themes of Frank’s work from the 1960s were certainly mirrored
198 Kevan Harris
by the growing discontent of Iranians. There, as in Latin America, a large portion

of Marxist thought usually portrayed Iran as trapped within feudal relations of
production (see Abrahamian 1982 for a partial intellectual historiography of the
twentieth-century Iranian left). The particular form of state developmentalism that
the Shah implemented was supposed to transform these relations into capital-
ist forms, but the results were decidedly uneven and forced some to re-examine
long-held Marxist dogma. Albeit hesitantly, the trajectory of social movements in
Iran between the Mossadeq era of the early 1950s and the revolutionary upheavals
of 1979 moved toward a coalition that, although disagreeing on much, eventu-
ally identified the main impediment to the country’s progress as its linkages with
Western states. Although it is debatable how much Iran “de-linked” of its own
volition after 1979, and how much it was forced to turn inward because of inter-
national military and economic pressure, many individuals inside and outside Iran
thought that this new relationship with the outside world was the most significant
aspect of the Iranian Revolution.
Frank, however, had already reconsidered this line of thought several years
earlier. In 1974, he wrote, “the once revolutionary new dependence theory [may
be], . . . if not bankrupt, . . . at least short of ready cash to meet the immediate
economic, political, and ideological demands of revolutionaries faced with the
formulation of strategy and tactics” (p. 90). Frank also realized that “much of
the ‘dependent underdevelopment’ thesis was accompanied by the corollary of a
mythical opposite ‘independent development’ possibility” (p. 100). As he noted
in the late 1970s,
though structural impediments to development and dependence certainly are

and remain real in the Third World, the usefulness of structuralist, depend-
ence, and new dependence theories of underdevelopment as guides to policy
seems to have been undermined by the world crisis of the 1970s. The original
sin . . . of these conceptions of dependence . . . has always been the implicit
and sometimes explicit notion of some sort of ‘independent’ alternative for
the Third World. This theoretical alternative never existed in fact.
(in Amin et al. 1982: 135)
Furthermore, as Third World developmentalism continued to provide less than

stellar results for its populations, Frank predicted that “new populist movements
increasingly based on nationalism and religion are likely to occur” (p. 143). As
Val Moghadam (1989) argued ten years later, the Iranian Revolution contained
this distinct fusion of populist nationalism on religious foundations.
In pointing out that the only proper framework to discuss capitalist develop-
ment was through a global lens, these shifts in Frank’s theoretical and political
thought coincided with the world-systems perspective of Immanuel Wallerstein
and Terence Hopkins. Frank (1996: 32–33) believed that “not dependence theory
but the analysis of the world crisis of capital accumulation was . . . on the analyti-
cal and theoretical agenda,” and predicted that the crisis of the world economy in
the 1970s would be shifted onto the global South in the 1980s through balance
of payment deficits and a steep decline in the terms of trade. This, coupled with
a virulent nationalism, would lead to renewed interstate warfare in the global
South (in Amin et al. 1982: 136–137). Iran’s trajectory after the Revolution is
deeply interconnected with the world economic patterns that Frank highlighted.
Lowered demand caused by the early 1980s world recession led to a collapse
in petroleum prices and, therefore, rapidly falling state revenue for Khomeini’s
regime. Furthermore, nothing represented the divisiveness within OPEC more
than the war between Iraq and Iran (1980–1988), cheered on by the United States
as it supplied both sides. Notably, though, Iran was forced into economic self-
preservation at about the same time that most states in the global South decided to
re-enter the world market. In retrospect, given the generalized decline of income
in middle- and low-income states, which I will address in this chapter, Iran’s
autarkic position may have been less catastrophic than assumed at the time. As
Frank (1996: 19) later wrote about the 1980s, “not development but rather crisis
management has become the order of the day in much of the South and the East.”
For Iran, wartime mobilization and defense mandated state involvement in the
economy, promoted as a “campaign for self-sufficiency.” Through strict rationing
of basic goods, highly controlled import and export trade, and manipulation of the
exchange rate, the Khomeini regime kept the economy functioning. Furthermore,
it enacted land reform and rural education programs that extended social wel-
fare into the countryside. Mosques housed consumer cooperatives to distribute
rationed foodstuffs and discourage black market price gouging. By 1983, Iran
had reduced its foreign debts to $1.1 billion from the pre-revolutionary level of
$15 billion even as it paid for military expenditures and welfare programs (Hiro
1987: 238–239). These actions cannot be attributed to ideology alone, although
this is the conventional wisdom applied to the war by both critics and supporters
of Iran. Instead, the 1979 Revolution created a social mobilization that had to
be sustained and channeled by the new state if it was to survive the Iraqi war
machine onslaught. As journalist Dilip Hiro (1991: 112) noted at the time, while
Iraq waged a “capital-intensive” campaign against the Khomeini regime, Iran’s
defense forces relied on a “labor-intensive” strategy out of necessity. This in turn
required a promise of social support for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers
who both volunteered and were conscripted into the war and their families. The
various revolutionary organizations that emerged in this period of state consolida-
tion, such as the Martyrs’ Foundation, the Foundation of the Oppressed, and the
Construction Jihad, became institutional vehicles for an unplanned yet increas-
ingly expansive state agenda (Maloney 2004). What occurred in Iran during the
1980s, then, was not an anti-modern putsch consumed by an irrational religious
ideology but a consolidation of a revolutionary bloc that realized it had to pro-
vide social welfare if it was at all to receive the necessities for warfare. In just
one example, when the state decided to allow prices of rice to fluctuate in 1983
because of complaints of low profits by merchants, demonstrations broke out
in the poor areas of southern Tehran, and the government quickly reintroduced
200 Kevan Harris
rationing of rice at subsidized prices (Hiro 1987: 246). This welfare–warfare alli-
ance, needless to say, is a hallmark of Western state formation in the first half
of the twentieth century (Marwick 1974; Halperin 2003), and its occurrence in
Iran should not be any more mysterious for scholars than these earlier examples.
Khomeini himself made a statement in January 1988, shortly before his death, that
the exigencies of the Islamic state “outweighed” the prerogatives of Islamic law
(Keddie 2006: 260).
Gunder Frank, meanwhile, was reassessing the role of states in the world
economy altogether. “The world economy existed prior to and always was largely
beyond the control of (national) states,” he wrote in 1989.
[R]eality increasingly undermines both the supposed fact and the perception
of state power in the face of increasingly powerful world economic forces.
These are . . . beyond the control of any state, including those of the United
States and Japan, or the Soviet Union and China, and a forteriori of any
European and third world state.
(in Amin et al. 1990: 154)
After Khomeini’s death and the end of hostilities between Iran and Iraq, many
speculated about the new leadership of the Islamic Republic, with Ayatollah
Khamene’i assuming the role of Supreme Leader and Hashemi Rafsanjani as the
President. The Economist magazine, for example, considered Rafsanjani to be
the equivalent of the USSR’s Gorbachev and South Africa’s de Klerk, in that “all
three recognise that the system they took over cannot be left as it is, because in
one way or another it is heading for collapse” (The Economist 1989). However,
Iran’s economic policy during the 1990s was quite different from the Russian or
South African paths. Iran did not pursue a rapid and dramatic shift in economic
liberalization along the lines of Yeltsin’s shock therapy or the African National
Congress’s GEAR. Instead, in its first five-year plan (1989–1994), it advocated
for limited privatization of state-owned enterprises, normalization of exchange
rates, and massive public works projects for reconstruction as well as infrastruc-
tural investment. It was also during this period that the government actively
campaigned for increased usage of birth control by married couples, in an effort
to reduce birth rates from the high levels of the war years, which had produced a
worrying postwar “baby boom.” A combination of urbanization, increased public
health initiatives in rural areas, and expansion of female education led to rapid suc-
cess in lowering birthrates, which puzzled demographers inside and outside Iran
(Hoodfar and Assadpour 2000; Abbasi et al. 2002). The World Bank, eager to give
advice on the Iranian economy, tied plans for liberalization to the promise of loans
equaling $850 million. The United States, however, rejected any loan package,
blocking it in 1994 (Behdad 2000: 114), which had the unintended effect of not
locking Iran’s policy options into a straightjacketed set of structural adjustments.
This later became fortuitous as Iran’s attempt to create a single exchange rate led
to inflationary pressures on basic goods, with public protests erupting in 1992 and
again in 1994 (Behdad 1995: 118–121). Given the expectations of the population
for government subsidization of basic consumption, Iran quickly changed course
on the more drastic elements of its liberalization policy and returned to a multi-
tiered exchange rate, which it held until 2002.
Iran was not unique in experiencing austerity protests related to prices of basic
goods, which was a widespread phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s in the global
South (Walton and Seddon 1994). More unusual was that Iran, unrestricted by the
conditions of multilateral financial institutions, responded to these protests with a
pragmatic mix of continued social welfare alongside its creeping liberalization of
state-owned industries. In addition, Iran saw increases in per capita incomes and
life expectancy as well as decreases in both male and female infant mortality and
illiteracy during the 1990s (Salehi-Isfahani 2009). President Rafsanjani engaged in
a realpolitik foreign policy worthy of Kissinger himself, as Iran navigated through
the ripple effects of the break-up of the USSR and the subsequent rise in ethnic
conflict on their borders in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Through its cautious
reform measures, Iran placed itself much more on the Chinese path of selective
experimentation than the Russian path of wholesale transformation. Given the
track records of these two paths, in retrospect Iran chose wisely; Rafsanjani might
arguably be compared with Deng Xiaoping in this regard. This, however, was
deeply connected to its continued political ostracization by the United States
under the Clinton administration’s policy of dual containment, begun in 1993, and
then the passage of the Iran–Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 (Keddie 2006: 265). If
the United States had chosen to publicly engage Iran after the first U.S.–Iraq war,
events might have proceeded quite differently.
A common assumption about Iranian economic development is that the
Khomeini regime is wholly to blame for its post-revolutionary economic woes. In
an interview about the twenty-ninth anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, political
scientist Abbas Milani had little praise for Iran’s recent past. When compared with
Taiwan, Korea, and Turkey, he said,
The state of [Iran’s] economy cannot be compared with the economies of

those states . . . Iran missed an historic opportunity for leaping forward and
becoming a developed country of the 21st century. This was the main con-
sequence of the revolution . . . In order to assess the consequences of the
revolution, we ought to compare Iran with similar countries in 1975.
(Radio Free Europe Report, February 11, 2008)
Below, I take Milani’s suggestion seriously, and compare Iran’s gross national
income per capita (GNIpc) with that of other middle-income countries that
showed equal promise during the 1970s, as well as other oil-producing states in
the global South.
Table 11.1 presents for fourteen countries real GNIpc in five-year averages
from 1960 to 2005, indexed to each country’s 1970–1974 average and ranked
from highest to lowest GNIpc during that period. Many of these fourteen countries
202 Kevan Harris
Table 11.1 GNI per capita: five-year averages for selected countries*
1960–4
1965–9
1970–4
1975–9
1980–4
1985–9
1990–4
1995–9
2000–4
2005
S. Africa 61 77 100 110 136 115 115 107 91 139
Mexico 61 81 100 122 143 96 155 140 202 228
Turkey n.a. 41 100 162 106 101 141 140 134 212
Brazil 53 64 100 165 138 134 154 227 142 195
Iran** 40 54 100 164 104 80 88 93 111 134
Malaysia n.a. n.a. 100 142 170 143 190 230 206 252
Algeria 69 68 100 177 219 204 124 94 110 160
Syria 66 78 100 155 173 92 65 58 71 83
Tunisia 57 68 100 149 144 116 134 153 154 181
Nicaragua 56 99 100 114 94 71 31 55 58 66
S. Korea 47 57 100 207 256 395 722 880 925 1,222
Morocco 81 84 100 133 108 93 110 115 112 139
Egypt 87 93 100 102 111 119 112 162 160 143
India 87 98 100 100 103 103 85 100 114 155
Sources: World Development Indicators 2007 (World Bank 2007) for all countries except Iran,
whose income figures are from the Central Bank of Iran (2007). World Bank national income data
for Iran in the 1980s are incomplete and economists therefore often use CBI statistics (see Salehi-
Isfahani 2009).
Notes
n.a., not available.
* Adjusted to base year 2000 U.S. dollars and indexed to 1970–4 period = 100 (absolute declines
in GNI per capita from previous period denoted in bold). 1970–4 was chosen as the index period
because earlier time series data for Turkey and Malaysia were not available.
** GNI per capita for Iran was calculated by converting GNI data from the Central Bank of Iran into
constant 2000 U.S. dollars from 1997/1998 constant Iranian rials (conversion ratio used: 1,000
1997/1998 rials = 0.35 2000 U.S. dollars).
were described at one time or another as “miracle” economies, a concept that

Gunder Frank frequently derided. Of the fourteen countries selected, thirteen of
them experienced absolute declines in real GNIpc – denoted in Table 11.1 in bold
– at some point in either the 1980s or 1990s. The late 1980s was particularly disas-
trous for these countries as a group. Lastly, South Korea, whose GNIpc underwent
a tenfold increase over three decades, is distinctively the only country that saw
absolute increases in each period. Gunder Frank, of course, would not have been
surprised by these findings. In the early 1990s he wrote,
If export led growth has been efficient [in South Korea] and in Taiwan, it is
. . . thanks to the prior increase in the equity of the distribution of income
and the domestic market. These improvements were due to the land reforms
forcibly imposed by the United States after the war . . . They make these NICs
more of an uncommon experience than a model that can be copied.
(Frank 1996: 34)1
As Frank had predicted in the 1970s, the recurrent discovery of states on the preci-
pice of an economic “miracle” – Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, India, and Iran – foretold
little about future economic prospects and did not guarantee any “leaps forward”
of the kind that Milani believes was possible for Iran. Had the 1979 Revolution
not occurred, Iran’s wealth levels would most likely have still stagnated because
of the world economic crisis and oil slump of the 1980s, leading to further political
instability of the Pahlavi regime and the likelihood of renewed and even increased
repression by the monarchy. Interestingly, although Milani places Turkey in the
category of “successful” states along with the likes of South Korea and Taiwan,
Table 11.1 illustrates that Turkey followed the more general path of most middle-
income states in the world economy, experiencing absolute declines in per capita
income in the 1980s and then a real increase only beginning in the latter part of
the 1990s. Turkey’s GNIpc returned to its 1970s levels only in the mid-2000s.
Because of Iran’s “baby boom” in the 1980s, its GNIpc has not returned to its
1970s levels, but its overall GDP has surpassed its earlier 1970s peak, as has
occurred in many middle-income countries because of recent commodity price
rises. Iran is less diametrically opposed to Turkey’s trajectory, as Milani asserts,
than it is simply a poorer country exhibiting a similar pattern as Turkey for the
entire period from the 1970s to the present. As this relationship has generally been
the case since the Ottoman and Safavid Empires ruled West Asia in the sixteenth
century, Frank would not be surprised that little has relatively changed.
So far, I have compared the shifts in Gunder Frank’s theoretical development
with Iran’s post-revolutionary trajectory. Frank moved from early conceptions
of metropole and periphery and revolutionary national development (1969,
1970), to forms of “new” dependence theory and the relevance of new social
actors (1974), to an emphasis on the world economy and the limitations of states
as anti-systemic forces (see Frank 1996 for a memoir of sorts). Iran entered an
autarkic period during the 1980s, in all likelihood more imposed from without
than brought forth from within. During this time Iran went against the grain of
1980s orthodox economic policy, expanding agricultural output at the expense
of the industrial base inherited from the Shah’s modernization agenda. This was,
however, a necessary change as wartime mobilization demanded industrial pro-
duction concentrate toward defense measures. By the 1990s, this industrial base
was run by a mix of state and parastatal actors that operated for two purposes.
First, state-owned enterprises functioned to provide jobs along patronage lines
established during the war era. Employment was purposefully kept above efficient
levels as these enterprises operated as part of the Iranian welfare state (Saeidi
2001). Second, import substitution, which had begun under the Shah, expanded
204 Kevan Harris
in the 1980s and 1990s, due in part to the U.S. embargo. This had the effect
of forcing Iran to convert its military-industrial production lines into consumer
products as well as continued manufactures in heavy industry. While the global
South was abandoning import substitution in the 1990s, Iran was embarking on
a state-led effort to do just this (Amid and Hadjikhani 2005). Partly because of
social pressure to maintain employment levels and keep prices of basic goods
at low levels through subsidization of both production and consumption, fear of
socio-political instability made Iran choose not to pursue the drastic liberalization
and privatization measures that were the mantra of 1990s economic orthodoxy.
Although the Third World state is limited in its ability to climb the wealth
ladder and change its position in the world economy, as the world-systems per-
spective has stressed, the state can still have a major effect on living conditions
within its borders. The economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (2009) collected pov-
erty rates before and after the Revolution from various sources using a constant
real poverty line over time equal to the cost of a basket of goods supplying a
minimum of 2,200 calories per day. Rates for urban and rural citizens were col-
lected separately, giving a poverty line in 2004 of $2.71 purchasing power parity
(PPP) dollars a day for rural individuals, and $3.84 PPP dollars a day for urban
individuals. Although gaps in the data exist, we can see a decline in poverty levels
in the postwar period (1989–present) for both groups (see Figure 11.1).
Although these data should be taken with precaution, the general trend is
straightforward. After the war era, a substantial portion of Iran’s population
moved out of poverty toward rates that dropped below the Pahlavi era. Moreover,
poverty declined throughout the late 1990s, even as already low oil prices fell to
their nadir in 1999. The often-assumed correlation of oil and commodity prices
with increased “populism” in the global South, most recently put forth in Thomas
Poverty headcount (0.50 = 50% of
total urban or rural population)
Figure 11.1 Poverty rates in Iran before and after the Revolution. Source: Salehi-
Isfahani (2009).
Friedman’s (2006) analysis of “petro-politics,” does not hold for contemporary

Iran. As Salehi-Isfahani (2009: 13–14) has summarized the effects on Iran’s social
policies on poverty reduction,
These policies improved the lives of the poor by building infrastructure and
by providing social protection. After the Revolution, electricity, safe water,
health and education services were extended to most rural and poor urban
areas. In 2004, 95.1% of rural households in the lowest expenditure quintile
had electricity and 79.4% had piped water, compared to 37.0% and 31.0% in
1984. Ownership of refrigerators and gas stoves had increased from 12.7%
and 21.0% in 1984 to 80.4 and 75.8%. Similar increases had taken place in
poorer urban areas. An ambitious health and family planning program, started
in 1989, brought basic family health to most rural families. By 2005, almost
90% of the rural population was served by rural Health Houses. Schooling
was extended to nearly all rural areas raising educational attainment of the
rural families. Considerable social protection was also offered through a vast
system of subsidies and the labor market (minimum wage legislation and
job security legislation). Vast subsidies for food, fuel, and medicine, though
poorly targeted, greatly benefited the poor. Semi-public charities that had
sprang up after the Revolution . . . provided direct assistance to the very poor.
The dispatch of these basic consumer goods and social services toward the
lowest strata of Iranian society is one of the most unexamined consequences
of the 1979 Revolution and the policies of the Islamic Republic. In fact, the
International Monetary Fund (2004: 17) itself reported that “increases in the
efficiency of human capital resources through education investment appear be
an important explanatory factor of Iran’s growth.” Of course, Iran’s economy
experienced many problems endemic to the global South: double-digit inflation
and unemployment, commodity price volatility, and balance of payments crises.
However, Iran has consistently shown that it is willing to use the levers of the state
to counteract world economic pressures that exacerbate these problems as they
relate to basic welfare and economic stability.
Frank’s final works considered the implications of the rise of East Asia, and
especially China’s reintegration with the world economy. In 1996, he wrote,
In [the 5000-year-old] world system, sectors, regions and peoples temporar-

ily and cyclically assume leading and hegemonic central (core) positions of
social and technological “development.” They then have to cede their pride
of place to new ones who replace them. Usually this happens after a long
interregnum of crisis. During this time there is intense competition for leader-
ship and hegemony. The core has moved around the globe in a predominantly
westerly direction. With some zig zags, the core has passed through Asia, East
(China), Central (Mongolia), South (India) and West (Iran, Mesopotamia,
206 Kevan Harris
Egypt, Turkey) . . . Then, the core passed on to Southern and Western Europe
and Britain, via the Atlantic to North America, and now across it and the
Pacific towards Japan. Who knows – perhaps one day it will pass back all the
way around the world to China. (p. 41)
Frank’s older conceptions of dependent states and surplus transfers to core

states were subsumed within a re-articulated vision of the world economy in the
very long durée. Any development policy for states within this system, therefore,
“must identify and promote some selected ‘comparative’ advantage within the
world economy, . . . to find one or more niches in which to carve out a temporary
position of ‘comparative’ monopoly advantage in the international division of
labor” (Frank 1996: 45). Although not contradicting Wallerstein’s operationaliza-
tion of the capitalist world economy, Frank’s extension of its lifespan backwards
for five millennia implied that any rumors of its death were greatly exaggerated.
Instead, the politics of the world economy, Frank insisted, are over the distribu-
tional equity and efficiency of global economic processes.
Iran’s economic policy in the last decade reflects the growing appreciation of
recent shifts in the world economy that Frank surmised were occurring. First, it
has concentrated on manufacturing goods that fill niches in the West Asia regional
economy. As Table 11.2 shows, Iran’s economy has been moving from simple
manufactures such as textiles into higher value added goods such as refined
petroleum products and motor vehicles. The latter is an interesting example of
the Iranian state’s economic policy. Iran’s automobile manufacturer, Iran Khodro,
was founded in the 1960s in partnership with European manufacturers. Under the
Islamic Republic, though, Iran’s tariffs on auto imports reached almost 100 per-
cent. In the 1990s, Iran Khodro negotiated technology transfer agreements with
leading European and Asian car makers such as Renault, Peugeot, and Hyundai.
Today, Iran Khodro is the leading auto producer in the Middle East and North
Africa region, with 68 percent of its components produced domestically (Malm
and Esmailian 2007: 42–43). Major export markets for the Samand, Iran Khodro’s
most popular car, are Russia, Turkey, and parts of Latin America. Furthermore,
Peugeot and Renault build their cars inside Iran in partnership with Iran Khodro
Table 11.2 Sectoral share in manufacturing in Iran (percent)
1995 2003
Spinning, weaving, and finishing of textiles 8.2 2.6
Refined petroleum products 1.9 10.7
Non-metallic mineral products 9.8 9.6
Basic iron and steel 9.9 10.1
Motor vehicles 5.8 13.5
Source: UNIDO (2007).

to get around the high tariff walls and gain access to the national market (The
Wall Street Journal 2006). At least with regards to auto production, then, Iran’s
developmental strategy is strikingly similar to the Chinese strategy of using the
national market to lure international capital, and then applying state pressure to
extract concessions. Iran’s auto industry is by no means as competitive as Chinese
automobile manufacturers, however, and Iranian manufacturers rely heavily on
government-subsidized energy inputs. Still, as Samir Amin (2007) recently stated,
“Iran is one of the few states of the South (with China, India, Korea, Brazil, and
maybe a few others, but not many!) to have a national bourgeois project.”
A second and related shift in Iran’s economic policy has been the reorienta-
tion of its trade flows away from Europe and towards Asia. As Table 11.3 shows,
during the 1970s Iran’s major trade partners were in Europe. This remained the
case after the 1979 Revolution and into the 1990s. Yet by 2004, almost 80 percent
of Iranian exports, of which half are non-oil, flowed to Asian markets. Meanwhile,
a steady increase in imports from Asia illustrates that the U.S. embargo has little
effect other than to shift purchases of consumer goods toward Asian manufactur-
ers, as one can easily observe by visiting the Tehran bazaar. These changes are
not just related to the rise of China as a workshop of the world, but represent
Iran’s reinsertion into the trade flows of East, Central, and West Asia that often
formed the lifeblood of Frank’s 5,000-year world system. Iran cannot pursue the
financial entrepôt strategy of the gulf princedoms such as Dubai or Qatar, nor is
it allowed to engage in economic integration with Europe as occurred in Turkey
(The Washington Post 2007). Instead, Iran must increasingly rely on the global
South to realize its own interests, supplying natural resources and intermedi-
ate goods where it can be competitive. Former Foreign Minister Manouchehr
Mottaki, himself educated in Bangalore, has explicitly deemed this a “Look East”
strategy (The New York Times 2008).
Table 11.3 Iran’s exports and imports by region
1974 1984 1994 2004

Exports by percent of total America 8.6 7.7 3.5 1.7
Europe 58.6 74.4 50.8 17.0
Asia 29.0 17.6 44.7 79.7
Africa 3.3 0.2 0.6 1.4
Oceania 0.5 0.2 0.4 0.2
Imports by percent of total America 22.1 8.6 9.9 3.1
Europe 50.9 56.5 55.9 50.4
Asia 24.4 29.8 30.6 45.5
Africa 1.2 0.4 1.3 0.6
Oceania 1.4 4.7 2.3 0.5
Source: Central Bank of Iran (2007).

208 Kevan Harris
In conclusion, Iran has been following Gunder Frank’s advice one decade at
a time, albeit perhaps only indirectly. Or, more accurately, one can suggest that
Iran’s socio-political trajectory has tracked the intellectual trajectory of Gunder
Frank. The “reorientation” presented here suggests a resolution to the contradic-
tory interpretations of the 1979 Iranian Revolution presented by Arrighi, Hopkins,
and Wallerstein in the opening paragraph. Iran’s experience since the Revolution,
although it may have made certain social scientists and activists uncomfortable,
does not radically diverge from the general experience of portions of the global
South during the last three decades, a period that humbled most anti-systemic
movements and forced rethinking of long-held orthodoxies on the political left.
Iran has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a regional power more adept
at geopolitical maneuvering than the United States. Such power, however, brings
a greater desire for domestic and international stability, and consequently an
opening of possibilities for internal change. As the “baby boom” generation, born
amidst revolution and war, comes of age and replaces the aging cadres of the
Iranian regime, the next three decades may be more decisive for Iran’s future than
the last three decades. Andre Gunder Frank, during his long career, remained at
the forefront of theories of both development and the world economy and self-
criticism and re-examination of orthodoxies both left and right. It is his constant
questioning of the wisdom of the day that still inspires us, and by his example
this chapter has engaged in “reorienting” a country whose history continues to be
misunderstood.
Note
1 See also Castells (1992) and Cumings (1999) for similar perspectives.
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12
The Korean developmental state
and its neoliberal transition in
the world system
Hae-Yung Song
From the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most influential theorists of
world system theory, I draw what I believe are the most important insights for a
critical assessment of the prevailing literature on the Korean developmental state
and its neoliberal transformation as well as for an alternative reconstruction of the
Korean state and its form transition. The insight that I would like to derive from
world system theory specifically for the purpose of this chapter is that capitalism
is a world system and therefore the notion of national development should be
problematized.1
[C]apital has never allowed its aspirations to be determined by national

boundaries in a capitalist world-economy, and that the creation of ‘national’
barriers – generically, mercantilism – has historically been a defensive
mechanism of capitalists located in states which are one level below the high
point of strength in the system . . . In the process a large number of countries
create national economic barriers whose consequences often last beyond
their initial objectives. At this later point in the process the very same capital-
ists who pressed their national governments to impose the restrictions now
find these restrictions constraining. This is not an ‘internationalization’ of
‘national’ capital. This is simply a new political demand by certain sectors of
the capitalist classes who have at all points in time sought to maximize their
profits within the real economic market, that of the world-economy.
(Wallerstein 1979: 19–20)
With the ascendancy of globalization discourse in recent years across different

disciplines, in terms of global finance, global governance and global civil society,
the assumptions attached to national development seem to have been challenged.
212 Hae-Yung Song
However, as the notion of national development itself has remained unchallenged,

current debates on globalization formulate the relations between nations and ‘the
global’ as antagonistic, suggesting that the world is moving from a system organ-
ized on the basis of the former to one organized on the basis of the latter. This way
of conceiving relations between nations and ‘the global’ further re-enforces, rather
than transcends, the concept and the proposition of national development: the new
global mode of development can only be identified in comparison to and in con-
trast with what supposedly has been the dominant mode of development before
globalization allegedly took place, a presupposition that implicitly or explicitly
refers to the national form of development. In other words, a concept of national
development functions as the ultimate reference point of globalization. The more
today’s globalness is emphasized, the more the period of pre-globalization is
identified with the national. This means that the concept of national development
itself has hardly been questioned and its challenges fall back into the very same
framework that takes for granted the notion of national development.
The pervasiveness of the notion of national development is also apparent in
critical approaches such as (state-centred) Marxism. State-centred Marxists often
propose, as a means to challenge capitalism, reorganizing capital–labour relations
and distributing surplus value in a more benevolent and equitable manner within
the boundary of the nation-state. However, these ways of resolving capitalist
contradictions, from the vantage point of world system theory, are still confined
within the capitalist framework.
The fact that all enterprises are nationalized in these countries does not
make the participation of these enterprises in the world-economy one that
does not conform to the mode of operation of a capitalist market system:
seeking increased efficiency of production in order to realize a maximum
price on sales, thus achieving a more favorable allocation of the surplus of
the world-economy. If tomorrow U.S. Steel became a worker’s collective
in which all employees without exception received an identical share of the
profits and all stockholders are expropriated without compensation, would
U.S. Steel thereby cease to be a capitalist enterprise operating in a capitalist
world economy?
(Wallerstein 1979: 34)
As Wallerstein rightly suggests above, seemingly nationally oriented social

formations remain overdetermined by the forces of the world system of capitalism
even if the entire economy within a national territory was owned either by the
state or collectively by labourers rather than capitalists, insofar as the nationally
owned enterprises, states themselves in some cases, are compelled to produce
competitively and efficiently within the world system of capitalism. By the same
measure, mercantilism is to be understood in the world capitalism context as a
defensive system deployed by capitalists of (semi)-peripheral states, namely in
catch-up or late development economies. This is a powerful critique of those
The Korean developmental state and its neoliberal transition in the world system 213
views, including state-centred Marxism, that confuse state or collective owner-

ship of the means of production with the transcendence of capitalism, and of those
mystifying state-organized production and exchange relations as an alternative
to the market economy. According to world system theory, what are believed to
be national forms of development led by states of the mercantilist variety can be
defined only in relation to and in the context of the (hierarchical) world system
of capitalism.
Drawing these theoretical and historical insights from world system theory
that problematizes the concept of national development, I will critically assess the
main literatures on development in relation to the case of South Korea (‘Korea’
hereafter), such as developmental state theories, neo-institutionalism and state-
centred Marxism, paying due attention, amongst others, to their taken-for-granted
understandings of national development. I will highlight that these approaches
are not only untenable theoretically and historically but politically conservative
entailing elitist implications for social change. Based upon the critical appraisal of
these literatures, I will propose an alternative reading of Korean development and
the concept of the Korean developmental state and its neoliberal transformation
by reconstructing a social and economic history of Korea. Accordingly, this chap-
ter will be organized in two main sections. The first will uncover the prevalence of
national developmentalism in these literatures on a theoretical level. This will be
followed by an alternative reinterpretation of Korean development in the postwar
period and the formation of the Korean developmental state and its form transition
beyond the notion of national development.
Developmental state theories: a challenge to the market

The case of Korea has been the centre of discussions on development. Because of
its rapid economic development during the postwar period, much scholarly effort
has been invested in identifying how and why Korea has been able to leap from
being one of the poorest countries in the world to being a highly industrialized
country. Divergent propositions have been made regarding this matter. On the
one extreme, the World Bank argued that the success of the Korean economy was
thanks to the minimum intervention of the state in the economy or because state
intervention conformed to free market principles.2 On the other extreme, it has
been proposed that the rapid growth of the Korean economy was possible because
of the active intervention of the state in the economy, in particular with the help
of the state’s far-sighted industrial plans and efficient allocation of investment
resources. The latter account, here referred to as ‘developmental state theories’,3
positions itself as a critique of the former, the advocation of the minimal state
and free markets. By challenging the World Bank propositions, or more broadly
neoliberal views that the prevalence of the free market has been the key to the
success of the Asian (Korean) development model, developmental state theories
stress the crucial role played by the state, which they refer to as the developmental
state, which prioritized national development by going against the dictates of free
214 Hae-Yung Song
market rules. Moreover, developmental state theories suggest that what character-
ized the developmental state foremost and what allowed it to achieve rapid growth
was its autonomy from interest groups, especially from the capitalist class. The
developmental state, being in possession of the discretionary power to allocate
financial resources, was able to direct and discipline enterprises so that they invest
in certain strategic sectors under a long-term development and industrial plan.4 In
this way, developmental state theories brought the state into centre stage as the
main factor that permitted rapid development of Korea (Asia) by transcending
sectoral (class) interests and pursuing the general goal of national development.
It might appear that the neoclassical/neoliberal, market-centred approach
clashes with developmental state theories that posit the state as an important agent
of development against the market. In spite of this difference on a surface level,
they share in important ways the same methodological presuppositions in that
they both see state and market as separate entities. In developmental state theo-
ries, state autonomy is understood as a situation in which the state can formulate
and implement developmental policies without being influenced by any fractions
or interest groups. In other words, as long as the state is not biased towards any
particular segments of society, state neutrality or policy autonomy is secured,
and this is what characterizes the developmental state model. This proposition,
however, is a repetition of, rather than a challenge to, the neoliberal framework.
In very much the same way that the market is assumed by neoliberals to be a
self-regulating mechanism, neutral towards social and power relations, allocating
and organizing resources most efficiently, for developmental state theorists the
developmental state is what makes the national economy prosper, insofar as it
exists above and beyond any sectoral interests. Developmental state theory is thus
merely the simple inversion of neoliberal or neoclassical claims that the market
can achieve optimal results when it is left to be free from social or political inter-
vention. By dichotomizing the state and the market, developmental state theories
take the state–market dichotomy as given rather than inquiring into why state (the
political) and market (the economic) assume such parcellized forms in capitalism,
in a similar way that neoliberalism does so. Without such inquiries, they avoid
having to confront the questions of capitalist development, of the capitalist nature
of the state and of class contradictions intrinsic to capitalist development. No less
than free market advocates do, developmental state theorists reduce class conflict-
ridden processes of capitalist development to class-neutral national development,
something that is to be achieved by the implementation of the right policies by
state elites who are not to be swayed by class over national interests. In this way,
the absence of questions of class contradictions inherent in capitalist development
in developmental state theories is replaced and enforced by their preoccupation
with the national development.
Developmental state theories’ problematic understandings of state–market
relations are closely linked to the manner in which they frame current discus-
sions on neoliberalism and globalization in equally problematic ways. While any
inquiry into the capitalist state is precluded, the state is simply taken as a unitary
actor interlinking the national (the internal) and the international (the external). In
this framework, the state either appears to deliver national development by shield-
ing the national economy from the forces of a globalizing economy, or becomes
powerless so that it is forced to abandon national development. Debates on the
current transition of Korean state and economy are significantly informed by such
dichotomous views of ‘the internal’ and ‘the external’: the dividing line between
what is seen as ‘the developmental state era’ and its (neoliberal) transition is
defined in terms of the degree to which the state is (supposedly) autonomous
vis-à-vis global (i.e. supposedly ‘external’) market forces. Within this conception,
the Korean state is depicted as an entity that was insulated from global (‘exter-
nal’) market forces in the developmental state period, which allowed it to pursue
its industrial policies ‘autonomously’, whereas in the era of the dominance of
neoliberalism state autonomy has been surrendered to ‘external’, non-national
capitalist forces. Here, the world economy is believed to exist externally to a
national economy. The external is seen to be either a power-neutral environment
that can be exploited for the benefit of national development or one that plays a
seesaw game against the state, hindering and enhancing state policy autonomy
from the outside. This methodological framework further affirms the national
characteristics of the developmental state, which are to be emphasized against
the external global economy. It ignores that the supposedly ‘external’ is the world
system within which a particular type of capitalist state, namely the developmental
state, emerged in the context of ‘late development’. It projects a static concept of
the world system as an external as well as rigid structure imposed on the national
from the outside rather than a dynamic concept that would relate the world system
to concepts of class and social struggle. It was indeed the global context of the
Cold War that has, for instance, favoured and, to a large extent, determined the
developmental path of Korea in the postwar period, namely a capitalist path rather
than any alternative path,5 and confined the ways in which domestic social and
class needs, demands and struggles were expressed and materialized.
Institutional linkages of the state and the market

Most prominent amongst those who have recognized the issue of the state–market
dichotomy as a conceptual problem in urgent need of attention are so-called
(neo)-institutionalists.6 On the one hand, Ha-Joon Chang refers to ‘institutionalist
political economy’ to criticize the state–market dichotomy assumption of neoclas-
sical economics. Peter Evans and Byeong-Cheon Lee propose the concepts of
‘embedded autonomy’ and ‘the state in society’, respectively, to bridge the state
and the market.7 A parallel that can be drawn from these three authors is that
they recognize the problems of assessing the state and the market as separate
and antagonistic entities, thereby seeking to link them. To summarize their main
common themes, first, although recognizing state autonomy and its disciplinary
power over capital as a key feature of the developmental state, institutionalists
present a more sophisticated theory of the state compared with developmental
216 Hae-Yung Song
state theories. They understand the tension and limits imposed on the state as the
arena of conflicts, thereby proposing that the efficacy of the state is determined
not only by its internal/organizational/bureaucratic coherence and structure but
also by its relation to civil society. Guided by this framework, they trace the suc-
cesses of the developmental state not only in terms of its autonomy as detached
from class interests, but in its cooperative relations formed with (private) actors
in society. This dual nature of the developmental state, autonomous from society
and immediate class interests on the one hand, and related to society and economy
on the other, is expressed with terms such as ‘embedded autonomy’ (Evans) or
‘the state as an entrepreneur/conflict manager’ (Chang) or ‘the state in society’
(Lee). Second, they regard the state and the market not only as institutions that
are themselves socially and historically determined, but also as being interlocked
with each other as well as with other various forms of non-state and non-market
institutions. In this theorization, those categories hitherto considered to be out-
side the realm of inquiry of economics, such as norms, values and obligations,
are incorporated in explaining market relations and behaviours. In so doing, the
dimension of informal institutions and non-state/market elements is integrated
into state–market formal relations, and the ‘political’ and ‘social’ characters of
‘economic’ relations are stressed. Beyond developmental state theory’s simplistic
understanding of the success of economic development as a result of state inter-
vention per se, institutionalists assess diverse forms of state intervention, different
paths of development and success or failure of development in relation to what
formal and informal institutions are in place and how they are related. If develop-
ment is understood in this way, the rapid development of the Asian (Korean) cases
is attributable not to state intervention in the economy as such but to the ways in
which the state and the market (businesses) are related through interlocked net-
works of informal and formal institutions. With the emphasis on the importance
of institutions in development, institutionalists take the international environment
not only as a constraint but also as offering opportunities for developing (i.e.
‘late-industrializing’) countries, depending on what institutions are crafted and
implemented (by the state) to maximize the benefits that can be reaped from the
global economy.8
In spite of the relative sophistication of the institutionalist approach, it fails
to address the questions of state–market relations adequately and fails to over-
come the limits of developmental state theories. Institutionalists characterize
the developmental state on the one hand as being autonomous from class inter-
ests and wielding disciplinary power over capitalists. On the other hand, they
accentuate the state’s linkages with society, in particular with private actors who
share the same developmental goals. The dual characterization of the develop-
mental state as autonomous from but closely linked to society cannot but result
in self-contradictory propositions. For instance, Chang criticizes the neoliberal
proposition of separating the state from the market. However, to reject the neo-
classical indictment of the state’s rent-seeking behaviours, Chang argues that the
state needs to be autonomous, that is, able to command its own resources, in order
to fulfil developmental goals. He depicts the state as a guardian or manager of
class conflicts, standing above sectoral interests. This suggests that the successful
developmental state was and should be above society, and that it can be assigned
such a coordinative role because it stands outside society. This understanding
also flows from his problematic understanding of the concept of the political. The
political is equated with state affairs, and he understands the market to be of a
political nature, and to be inseparable from the political only because the market
requires the state, as the latter sets up the terms of market entry and the boundaries
of what legitimate market activities are. This point of view further reinforces the
state–market dichotomy instead of transcending it because the market is under-
stood to be political only to the extent that the state intervenes in the market. In this
way, institutionalists link state and market only externally and retain the notion
of the state as autonomous and neutral in terms of class interests as postulated
by developmental state theories. Furthermore, the linkages between the state, the
market and society in the institutional framework are articulated on a personal
level of connections between state elites and private (business) actors. Evans’s
(1995: 50) notion of ‘the embedded autonomy of the state’ points to ‘a set of con-
nections that link the state intimately and aggressively to particular social groups
with whom the state shares a joint project of transformation’. Chang (2000: 11)
finds the linkage between the state and the market in ‘various “informal” channels
of influence on the business sector’. Lee’s (2003b: 50–51) concept of ‘the state in
society’ refers to states’ ability to mobilize mass consent to national development.
Institutionalists reduce state–society linkages to nothing more than actor-level
interactions between state bureaucrats and capitalists. As a result, the question
of labour is either absent (Evans) or understood as one question amongst those
that need to be dealt with as a part of ‘conflict management’ (Chang), or labour is
regarded as having been oppressed in the course of capitalist development having
devoted itself to national development (Lee). Development is seen neither as the
expansion of capitalist social relations nor of class contradictions and antagonism.
Rather than advancing on developmental state theories, institutionalism continues
to take state autonomy for granted and simply emphasizes cooperative relations
between the state and capitalists, the latter representing the market or indeed
society.
The institutionalists’ superficial attempt to link state and market, and the exclu-
sion of labour and class questions from discussions of capitalist development, are
also evident in their static understanding of the transformation of the develop-
mental state. To begin with Chang’s assessment, he attributes the dismantlement
of the developmental state to the decisions of policy-makers to abandon certain
industrial policies. He fails to provide any systematic explanation of why and
how such industrial policies have been abandoned other than that policy mistakes
have been made. In his explanation, state bureaucrats and policy-makers gave in
prematurely to pressures of capitalist demands for financial liberalization when
218 Hae-Yung Song
they should have upheld national developmental goals. Similarly, the causes of
the Korean financial crisis of 1997–1998 are simply seen in the dismantling of
particular institutional arrangements that prevailed during the developmental
state period, such as the Economic Planning Board and state-controlled finan-
cial systems. Policy failed because the orientation of state elites switched from
national to global. In this kind of theorizing, Chang at least implicitly portrays
the developmental state and economic development in the pre-crisis period as
non-contradictory processes whereas the post-developmental state period is seen
as one in which global (financial) capital and its imperatives drive the economy.
Contrary to Chang, Lee offers a critical assessment of the developmental state,
arguing that the financial crisis was an expression of the problems and contra-
dictions of the previous development model itself. He is particularly attentive
to personally tied and corrupt state–capital relations, what is often referred to as
‘cronyism’, as the origins of the crisis. However, with the question of the state–
market dichotomy unresolved, he reduces the problems of Korean development
and its crisis to undemocratic relationships between the state and Korean business
groups. He maintains that, although negative political aspects of the authoritarian-
ism of the developmental state can be corrected by democratization, its positive
ability to achieve economic development can be attained anew as long as the right
institutions are put in place. In so doing, he reduces the causes of the financial
crisis to the special path of the Korean developmental model alone,9 and fails to
take into account that the authoritarian state was inseparable from the fact that
Korean capitalist development itself was conditioned by its positioning in the
world system of capitalism and the interstate system. His rather naïve view that
transparent corporate practices and democracy will correct the ills of Korean
capitalism, however, ironically resembles that of neoliberal institutions, such as
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,10 which he initially set out
to challenge.
Although the institutionalists’ attempt to overcome the problems of the state–
market dichotomy is to be acknowledged, I would like to argue that they fail to do
so adequately because they are still bound to the notion of national development.
While emphasizing institutional connections between state and market, their
leaving intact of the state–market dichotomy is in continuity with, rather than a
departure from, developmental state theories.
Limits of state-centred Marxism: beautifying the

developmental state
Not even most of those who declare themselves Marxists, whom one would sup-
pose to be more attentive to the contradictions of capitalist development and of
the capitalist state, challenge the basic assumptions that developmental state theo-
rists make about the developmental state: to be autonomous from class interests
domestically and independent of the global economy externally. The problematic
understanding of the developmental state prevails amongst state-centred Marxists.
They either take for granted the conventional definition of the developmental state
without qualification or understand it as a variation of capitalist development,
namely state-led as opposed to market-led. For instance, Robert Brenner (1998:
150) plainly adopts the framework of developmental state theories, attributing the
rapid growth of the East Asian economies to the developmental state and the close
network formed between state, firms, banks and industrial policies. Peter Gowan,
a vigorous critic of U.S. ‘financial imperialism’, maintains that U.S. imperialism
compels development models of Japan and the East Asian countries to converge
into neoliberal ones. In this transformation of the developmental to the neoliberal
state, he says that ‘the pattern of Japanese capitalist expansion has been different
in the 1980s and 1990s simply because Japanese capitalism has been far more
genuinely productive as a national capitalist system than the capitalism of the
Atlantic world’ (Gowan 1999: 127). This statement suggests that he also shares
the proposition of the classical theme of the developmental state that the Asian
economies under the developmental state were geared towards national develop-
ment and therefore more productive than other capitalist development variations.
David Harvey further segments different kinds of capitalist development. He
does not raise the issue of the developmental state directly, but his understanding
of state-led development can be drawn from his conceptualization of what he
refers to as ‘the new imperialism’. His differentiation of U.S. imperialism into
‘hegemony-based imperialism’ in the period 1945–1970, and ‘neoliberal imperi-
alism’ in the period 1970–2000 is linked to his famous distinction between capital
accumulation as ‘expanded reproduction’ and as ‘accumulation by dispossession’.
The period of ‘New Deal imperialism’ is characterized by accumulation of capital
through ‘expanded reproduction’ wherein ‘profits were reinvested in growth as
well as in new technologies, fixed capital, and extensive infrastructural improve-
ments’ (Harvey 2003: 57). Neoliberal imperialism, on the contrary, corresponds
to the era of financial volatility and speculation detached from production, turning
to a predatory (violent) mode of capital accumulation that is ‘accumulation by
dispossession’.
The contemporary Marxist discussions examined above identify neoliberalism
with departure from hitherto nationally oriented development and a shift from
industrial or production-based development to finance-dominated development.
In this differentiation of forms of capitalist development, one kind of capital-
ist development, national development, is believed to be more productive and
egalitarian and thus less ridden by antagonism. However, this way of demarcating
different kinds of capitalist development based upon the extent to which they
are national and productive flows from the assumption that capitalism is organ-
ized nationally rather than as a global system, thereby affirming the notion that
the pre-neoliberal era was one in which the national mode of development pre-
vailed. Instead of the contradictions of capitalism being examined organically
and holistically, it is suggested that capitalism is divided between production and
finance, national and global, and state and market forces, and one side of these
pairs of concepts is favoured over the other. In so doing, these Marxists beautify,
220 Hae-Yung Song
implicitly or explicitly, what is supposed to be the dominant mode of development

(the mode of capital accumulation) in the period before neoliberalism. State-led
development is considered naturally to be the alternative to market-driven devel-
opment insofar as neoliberalism is understood as a process in which the market
takes over the state. In this respect, state-centred Marxists fail to provide what one
might have thought is the aim of Marxist critique, namely to challenge capitalism
rather than supporting one variety of capitalism over another. Similarly to the
developmental state theorists and institutionalists, state-centred Marxists juxta-
pose state-led development with market-determined development as antagonistic.
The projection of state-organized development as an alternative on the grounds
that historically it was more productive and benevolent than other forms of
development means to de-historicize the material and social conditions within
which particular modalities of capitalist accumulation and forms of state emerged.
This de-historicization, combined with the elevation of one kind of capitalism
over others, precludes an open-ended consideration of the possibilities of social
change by confining alternatives to the current form of development to a limited
number of policy or planning choices made by (state) elites, including possibly
those in leadership positions in the organizations of the labour movement. This
ahistorical and elitist conception attached to the concept of state-led development
is also closely linked to flawed conceptualizations of the developmental state.
Being impressed by the developmental state in terms of its guiding (or planning)
role for the economy and its achievements in terms of economic growth, the
developmental state is elevated to a desirable type of the state in comparison to
other types. As a consequence, the contradictory and conflict-ridden capitalist
characteristics of the developmental state are neglected, while its ability to plan
and achieve national development is magnified. As a result these theorists fall
back into patterns of arguments that are characterized by the same kinds of limits
as in the developmental state theories. State-centred Marxists fail to conceptualize
the developmental state as a by-product of rapid capitalist development in catch-
up economies and downplay the class contradictions embroiled in it, perhaps in
more acute and violent forms than in earlier developments, in the world system
of capitalism.
A critical assessment of the three approaches to Korean development and its
neoliberal transformation reveals that the fundamental shortcomings of these
theories are closely related to their failure to question the notion of national
development. They reduce neoliberalism to a move from ‘the national’ to ‘the
global’, and the history of Korean development to a seesaw game between the
state and the market as well as between internal and external forces. In such an
impoverished framework, the transformation of the Korean developmental state
appears more as an outcome of national–global conflicts than as a reflection of a
shift from one mode of class and social domination to another. In what follows,
on the basis of the critique developed up to this point, an alternative reading of the
Korean developmental state and its transformation is proposed.
Reconstructing the Korean developmental state and its

transformation
If the Korean developmental state and its transformation is to be understood
adequately beyond the limits of the prevailing literatures assessed above, the
formation of the developmental state needs to be assessed historically in relation
to capitalist development itself. The state is an integral part of capitalist social
relations and, therefore, has to be explained in line with the development of capi-
talist social relations. In reconstructing a social and economic history of Korean
development in this light, the primary aim of the chapter is to focus on two aspects
of Korean development. One is the way in which Korean capitalist production and
social relations were laid as dynamic processes of which not only domestic social
forces but also the imperialist forces of Japan and the United States were insepa-
rable parts. From this, it is to be emphasized that Korean capitalist development
is not a nationally contained process but is constituted and confined, at the same
time, by the global dynamics of capitalism. A second aspect is the material and
social conditions in which the developmental state emerged in the postwar period
in the course of intense class wars. This will highlight that what are supposed to
be the defining characteristics of the developmental state, neutral in terms of class
interests and independent of external forces, reflect, however, not the absence of
class interest and its independence from the external, but the very class power
(im)balance and the positioning of Korea in the interstate system and the world
system of capitalism in the postwar era.
Contrary to the view that has often been projected on Korean development, as
the outcome of well-crafted, national-level state policy, the development plan and
its implementation by the developmental state were framed by, on the one hand,
the geopolitical importance of Korea during the Cold War, especially in the U.S.
containment of communism in East Asia, and, on the other hand, Korea’s relations
with and location in the global economy. The conditions of Korea’s transition to
capitalism, namely primitive accumulation, were laid as dynamic processes of
which not only Korean social forces but also the imperialist forces of Japan and
the United States were integral parts. Primitive accumulation of Korea itself was
intrinsically related to that of Japan, itself a late-development country in the global
capitalist context. Korean capitalist transition was first confined by the interests of
Japanese capital. During the Japanese colonial period, Korean industrial develop-
ment was purposely oppressed until the mid-1920s and later actively pursued in
a way that would have served the Japanese imperialist war effort in the 1930s
and 1940s. After the liberation from Japan, the direction of development was in
turn prescribed by the limits of U.S. resources and interests. Korea first started
its industrialization by processing U.S. aid goods, such as rice, sugar and wheat,
and then by producing low-end consumption goods. This level of industrializa-
tion based on low-end technology was due to the context of the Cold War, which
allowed Korea to become the site to which the declining industries of Japan were
222 Hae-Yung Song
relocated, as opposed to other peripheral countries. The construction and export

boom that allowed Korean development to take off was further circumscribed
by the Vietnam War and the U.S. opening of its market to Korean exports in
return for the low-cost participation of Korean soldiers in the war. Further, a shift
of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) to export-led industrialization in the
1960s was not a policy choice taken by rational state bureaucrats, but enforced
by the drying out of U.S. aid, a compulsion when ISI was not a viable possibil-
ity. In this way, the autonomy of the Korean developmental state was restrained
and conditioned by its location in the global economy and the interstate political
system. Moreover, the authoritarian developmental state is essentially related to
the low level of capitalist accumulation and technology of Korea in the hierarchy
of global capitalism, in which profitability was primarily secured from cheap
labour and long working hours, namely through the means of absolute surplus
extraction. In other words, an oppressive anti-labour regime of the developmental
state that exercised extreme labour discipline and control was in part inherent in
the particular location of the Korean economy and the kind of production that it
was specializing in.
In parallel with this, policy autonomy of the developmental state was confined
by class power relations domestically, in which there was no endogenous capitalist
class, after being purposely oppressed by the Japanese colonial state and capital
under Japanese colonial rule, while the traditional landlord class failed to transform
itself into the new capitalist class. The formation of the capitalist class was medi-
ated by the state in the process of privatizing state-vested properties seized from
Japan. The new Korean state, under the auspices of the United States, more or less
gave away the properties to a small number of people who used to be the manag-
ers of the properties and Japanese collaborators, but it denied social or collective
forms of ownership and management. There was intense antagonism between
anti-capitalist social forces and the state and the ruling class. The Korean state,
with the help of the U.S. occupation army, exterminated anti-capitalist movements
including guerrilla, peasant and labour unrests. More critically, with the defeat
of left movements during the intense civil war that took place between 1950 and
1953, the conditions for capitalist transition were laid in a way that favoured the
emergence of the state dominating society, being armed with a physical force of
coercion and anti-communist ideology. This is the historical and material condi-
tion in which state-led development or the developmental state emerged.
From this historical assessment of selective aspects of early capitalist develop-
ment in Korea, it can be suggested that the capitalist transition of Korea is a very
part of global capitalism and was conditioned by dialectical interplays of domes-
tic social forces and imperialist powers. Contrary to what is assumed by most
literatures examined earlier, the autonomy of the Korean developmental state
was restrained by its location in the global economy and the interstate political
system. Korean development was largely defined by how and when it developed
in the global system of capitalism, and the timing of development and location
of the Korean economy in the world economy in turn prescribed the rise of the
authoritarian political regime itself and the manner in which social demands were
expressed and accommodated. Moreover, what is supposed to be the essential fea-
ture of the developmental state, neutral in terms of class interest, is not a sign of
its detachment from but a reflection of the class power balance and constellation.
The developmental state sprang in the context of the state taking precedence over
society as a result of intensive class and social struggles by which left-wing and
radical anti-capitalist social movements were effectively exterminated after de-
colonization and the Korean War. The world economy and the interstate system
is, however, not a structure that existed externally. Imperialist Japanese and U.S.
forces constituted a powerful force in class struggle, thereby to a great extent
determining the direction of modernization and the social content of the Korean
capitalist state.
If the origins and nature of the developmental state are interpreted in this way,
its transition can be understood neither as a reflection of a move from a national
to a global-oriented economy nor as being triggered by external or internal forces,
whether the focus is on elite-level strategies or class struggle. The transformation
of the developmental state, or a move from the developmental state to a neoliberal
state as some argue, is associated with the rise of the new modality of class and
social domination as a product of a complex interplay between new material and
social forces, both global and domestic.
Heightening pressure for the liberalization and de-regulation of the financial
markets since the 1980s originated both externally and internally. On the one
hand, the structural crisis of the Western economy in the 1970s translated into
financial liberalization within their economies and pressure for liberalization of
other developing countries. On the other hand, Korean capital, in particular con-
glomerates (chaebols), pressed the government to de-regulate the financial market
as a way to access cheap credit and invest abroad more freely. Faced with the
rising real wage levels caused by heightened labour militancy since the 1980s as
well as democratization movements, capital operating in Korea increasingly found
it difficult to resort to the previous super-oppressive forms of labour exploitation.
In the face of deteriorating profitability, capital in Korea tried to deter crisis by
foreign borrowing and investing in automation, which, however, increased rather
than resolved the problems of profitability.11 The financial crisis of 1997 was an
expression of this contradiction, a combination of both external and internal fac-
tors, both of which are fundamentally problems of global capitalism.
To generalize, since the financial crisis, the Korean economy has shown three
main tendencies: dependency on exports deepened, with the increase of the ratio
of exports relative to GDP,12 growth rates in different sectors of the economy
became increasingly disharmonious, and dependency on import of production
(capital) goods increased.13 However, this dependency in the real economy went
hand in hand with heightening dependency on foreign financial capital as well as
benefitting (large-scale) capital. Neoliberal reforms in Korea have been pushed
forward under the banner of the fight for democracy and untangling the corrupt
relations between the state and businesses. However, these reforms strengthen
224 Hae-Yung Song
the chaebol structure even more. Most underperforming banks and chaebols –
financed previously by state-guaranteed debt, which underlines the very problem
of the developmental state model – were nationalized and taken over by the state
amid the crisis and were rescued by the insertion of an enormous amount of public
money (200 billion U.S. dollars) and then sold to foreign firms on extremely
favourable terms (thereby subsidising chaebols and foreign companies with
public money).14 Three out of eight commercial banks are currently owned by for-
eigners and four out of the remaining five have foreign shareholders owning more
than half (Jeong 2005: 36). In 2005, the foreign market share in banking was 21.8
per cent, more than in Mexico (20 per cent). By 2007, the foreign sector’s market
share of the banking sector accounted for 18 per cent, and foreign ownership of
the stock market (KOSPI and KOSDAQ) accounted for 30.9 per cent, up from
18.5 per cent in 1989 (Korea Herald and Korea Institute of Finance 2008: 54).
The liberalization of financial markets and a shift to a market-based finance
system produced mechanisms in which firms increasingly raise their investment
funds through issuing shares in the stock market. This financial reform further
benefits Korean chaebols because only highly recognizable firms, mostly chae-
bols, are able to raise capital through the stock market because investments,
whether domestic or foreign, are concentrated on these firms. A total of 5.3 per
cent of shareholders possess 82.2 per cent of the total shares, mainly foreign
investors and chaebols (Lee 2005: 50–51). Meanwhile medium and small-sized
firms as well as individuals have difficulties accessing credit and investment
funds. Financial liberalization in Korea in this way is expressed as the consolida-
tion of the chaebol structure through further capital concentration and through
the alliance between foreign financial capital and chaebols. In parallel, invest-
ment in production stagnates, and it mostly concentrates on electronics industries,
which take up more than half of the total investment (Lee 2005: 51). The export
boom also does not translate into generating employment as chaebols employ
fewer people and export-driven chaebols employ labour-saving technology and
management with an increase in capital export (Lee 2005: 50–51). The profits of
chaebols are also secured in large part by squeezing the small- to medium-sized
outsourcing companies, implying an increase in the chasm between chaebols and
small- to medium-sized firms as well as between labourers employed in the dif-
ferent sectors (Lee 2005: 51–52).
As there had been no welfare system in place in Korea or welfare had been
subordinated to economic growth – Korea’s ‘developmental welfare regime’ had
the lowest level of welfare expenditures amongst Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) members – an increase in poverty and
instability in employment created more dramatic consequences for the poor and
the vulnerable than in the developed countries. There was a drastic increase in
unemployment and in the rate of suicide after the crisis caused by bankruptcies
and personal debts. The democratic governments introduced welfare schemes and
increased welfare expenditure after the crisis, and their scope has been extended.
However, this increase in Korea was a reaction to mounting public resentment
to neoliberal policies and to the increasing level of poverty, which threatened to

endanger the reproduction of society itself. In this sense, the introduction of wel-
fare schemes was a way to facilitate further neoliberal reform. Moreover, the
figure itself is still one of the lowest not only by OECD standards but also in com-
parison with poorer countries,15 while more than 50 per cent of the employed are in
precarious and casual employment with no or little pension and welfare benefits.16
The post-crisis restructuring processes suggest that there are no conflicting
interests between the internal and the external and the state and the market as
such. Those foreign companies that were to take over Korean firms and banks
wanted to have labour laws and regulations relaxed just as much as their Korean
counterparts did. While there is a unified interest of capital against labour, the
state is not a blameless victim that had to surrender to external forces. The gov-
ernment moved promptly to turn around a relatively labour-hegemonic situation
since the Great Struggle in 1987 and the withdrawal of the anti-labour legislation
in the face of the general strike of 1996. It formed the three-party talks between
state–capital–labour for the first time in Korean history in order to gain ‘conces-
sions’ from labour in the name of ‘fair sharing of restructuring burdens’. The
policies undertaken by the Kim Dae-Jung government and the following Roh
Moo-Hyun government had obvious class implications that favoured capital at
the expense of labour. The neoliberal state does not mean the transition from an
interventionist to a non-interventionist, nor from a national to a global state. It is a
capitalist state no less than the developmental state had been, with the clear inten-
tion of and interest in subordinating labour to capital accumulation. However, the
way in which the Korean state embodies its class contradictions and contents has
been transformed in the course of the post-crisis restructuring of the economy.
Rationalizing the effects of financial liberalization and chaebol reform have
helped the Korean state to increasingly assume the appearance of an objective and
neutral party, freed from personal and crony relations with individual capitalist
interests. Here the state appears to be further detached from exploitation that is
taking place in the ‘economic’ sphere; class domination is assured more by means
of economic rather than by extra-economic, state oppression. Democratization
facilitated this shift in the relations between state and capital, state and society,
and capital and labour, transforming the ways in which social and class domina-
tion are attained. If the apparent separation between the state and the economy is
the form that social relations assume in capitalism, what democratization brought
about in Korea was, then, not the real detachment of the state from capital, but a
shift in the mode of class domination, as a form more conducive to ‘the normality’
in capitalism, assuming more ‘objective’ relations between state and capital and
state and society at large.
Conclusion
My primary aim in this chapter was to address, both theoretically and empirically,
the limits of the prevailing literatures on Korean development and the Korean
226 Hae-Yung Song
developmental state, which conditions the way in which its transformation

is formulated. I have aimed to highlight how pervasive the notion of ‘national
development’ is across different theories and political perspectives, and even
among those claiming to challenge mainstream approaches, and how all these
positions take national development for granted and thus prevent an appropriate
understanding of development and neoliberalism.
The limits of current studies on the developmental state, evident across main-
stream theories, developmental state theories, institutionalism and state-centric
Marxist discussions, require an alternative perspective that looks at development
as a global process in which class struggle and imperialist forces interplay with
each other. For this, we need to learn from world system theory that posits capital-
ism as a global system and thereby denies ‘national’ development. It offers thus
a crucial theoretical framework required today for assessing the world economy
and global relations as a totality. It allows us to look at the success and failure of
development and underdevelopment, both in the context of the totality of global
relations, and reminds us of the lesson that our aspirations for social change should
aim at achieving a new global system rather than a national and state-centred one.
Notes
1 Although recognizing the important contributions of world system theory, its short-
comings also need to be briefly addressed. To limit the focus to the work of Immanuel
Wallerstein, the major shortcoming of world system theory seems to be its understand-
ing of the fundamental aspects of capitalism, which is defined as the system driven
by ‘seeking maximum profits’ in the market. This view focuses on commercial or
exchange (market) relations of commodities as essential characteristics of capitalism
rather than production relations: the way in which surplus value is produced by wage
labour, a commodity itself. As a result, world system theory is unable to capture the
historical specificity of the capitalist mode of production, value relations and the par-
ticular mode of class and social domination in capitalism. Similarly, it also presents
an inadequate understanding of the capitalist state, which is understood to be replaced
by the world state as a way to resolve the problems of the global system of capitalism,
rather than the state being derived from capital as a political form of social relations,
which cannot be replaced or resolved, logically and by definition, unless the capitalist
economy itself is overcome. Nevertheless, the world system theory is significant in
de-mystifying the notion of national development and provides an important insight
against, in particular, statist and state-centred Marxists who idealize state capitalism
and nationally organized capitalism as superior to other types.
2 See World Bank (1993). It must be noted that, although the World Bank typically
opposed state intervention, it has increasingly become receptive to the ideas of market
imperfection and market failure. Likewise, in the 1993 report, although the World
Bank attributes the rapid economic growth of Asian economies to minimum distortion
of the markets, it at the same time recognizes the diversity of policy and develop-
ment experiences. This change in orthodox economic thinking is closely related to
and translated into the recognition of the positive role of state interventionist policy
in Asian economies. This has been referred to as the rise of the ‘post-Washington
Consensus’ as opposed to the ‘Washington Consensus’. For a critique of post-Wash-
ington Consensus, see Fine (2001). Also, for a summary of the changing proposition
of the World Bank on the Asian economy, see Lo (1999).
3 The developmental state theories refer to work by Amsden (1989, 1994), Johnson
(1982, 1987, 1995, 1998) and Wade (1990, 1992, 1998a,b).
4 Johnson, who coined the term ‘developmental state’, first postulated the develop-
mental state as one that implements policies conforming to the market. Then Wade
shifted it to one that means the state governs the market (in his ‘governing market
theory’), which is further developed by Amsden to a form of state that disciplines
market actors, namely capitalists, by imposing ‘political’ and non-market prices, in
her famous phrase, by ‘getting prices wrong’.
5 However, even if Korea had undertaken a so-called ‘socialist developmental path’ after
de-colonization this would not in itself have constituted non-capitalist development.
6 In my discussion of (neo)-institutionalism I focus on the work of Evans (1987, 1995;
Evans et al. 1985), Chang (1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002a,b, 2003; Chang and
Yoo 1999; Chang et al. 1998a,b) and Lee (2003a,b).
7 In spite of the fact that the three authors are called institutionalists in this chapter, it
must be noted that there are differences amongst them, and some of their writings are
consciously developed against the others. For instance, Byeong-Cheon Lee develops
his theoretical framework of ‘developmental dictatorship’ as a critique of Evans’s
‘embedded autonomy’. See Lee (2003a: 120. It has to also be added that there is no
clear-cut dividing line between developmental state theories and Evans’s theorization.
Alice Amsden, introduced as a developmental state theorist earlier in the chapter, is
also attentive to the close personal relations between the state and market actors (busi-
nesses), what she names ‘reciprocal relations’ (see Amsden 1989: 9, 20). However, as
the term ‘embedded autonomy’ denotes, Evans explicitly aims to emphasize the con-
nectedness of state and society, which justifies my considering him an institutionalist.
8 Evans says that the role of the state is increasingly important, in particular in the
context of late development. Having witnessed the rise of the Asian economy, he says
that ‘dependent’ development is possible and development is of a particular coun-
try’s own making. He argues that development is a matter of exploiting development
opportunities by placing the right institutions in a power-neutral environment. Chang
understands particular state–bank–chaebol relations as the key to Korea’s success,
whereas Lee attributes the state’s right industrial policies and institutions (a parallel
pursuit of openness and protectionism or the combination of ISI and export-oriented
industrialization) to Korea’s rapid industrialization.
9 A full discussion of capitalist crisis theory in general and the origins of the Asian
financial crisis of 1997–1998 is beyond the scope of this chapter. The main point that
needs to be made here is that the crisis must be understood in the context of the crisis-
prone general tendency of capitalism and how the latter is manifested specifically
in the context of Korea, in the interplay of classes and social forces. Confining the
causes of the crisis only to Korean specificity, usually defined as crony relations, cor-
ruption and illegitimate corporate practices, rather than to capitalist dynamism itself
as generating permanently possibilities of crisis, is misleading.
10 To state the shortcomings more specific to institutionalism, contrary to the apparently
higher complexity of its approach to development compared with developmental
state theories, it has politically conservative underpinnings. In institutionalism, with
its emphasis on the state’s connection with market and society, the developmental
state appears even more legitimate in the context of developmental state theories. In
Chang’s ‘institutionalist political economy’ approach, the role of the state, described as
that of an entrepreneur and conflict manager, is defended on the basis of the allegedly
‘public’ nature of state elites, by asserting the ‘constitutive’ function of institutions as
shaping and influencing values and norms. Chang concludes that if the ‘right’ institu-
tions are inserted, a society can have state bureaucrats concerned about public interests
and development. Now, state autonomy assumes a much more positive appearance,
being accorded moral rationales. Similarly, when Lee explains the secret of the rapid
economic growth of Korea in his concept of ‘Korean developmental dictatorship’, he
228 Hae-Yung Song
characterizes it as one that had a great degree of ‘mass’ appeal and thereby relied on a
popular consent and the self-devotion of the working population. The institutionalist
approach to the state and the market becomes much more ‘harmonious’ in its empha-
sis on their ‘institutional’ and ‘personal’ linkages. It reduces state–market relations
to one between state elites and capitalists that can cooperate for development, which
effectively evades labour questions, thereby capitalist exploitation and class conflicts.
11 According to a study by Seong-Jin Jeong (2005: 16–18), there has been a tendential
fall of the rate of profit in the manufacturing sector from the 1970s to the financial
crisis, from 16 per cent in the early 1970s to 12 per cent in the 1980s. In particular, the
decade 1986–1996, just before the financial crisis, was marked by a steep decrease in
the rate of profit, sliding to 6.7 per cent in 1996 from 16.3 per cent in 1986.
12 The attribute of exports to GDP was 13.8 per cent in the 1970s, and increased to 39.7
per cent in 1987 and 49.7 per cent in 1998. As of 2002, it was 40 per cent. See Jeong
(2005: 38).
13 The proportion of imported raw materials and components used in the heavy and
chemical industries had decreased from 1970 to 1993, from 42.9 per cent to 23.7
per cent. However, after the financial crisis, it increased again to 32.1 per cent. For
further details see Jeong (2005: 40). The dependence of Korean industry on Japanese
technology is persistent and has even increased since the crisis.
14 Foreign investment in Korea dramatically increased from 0.7 billion U.S. dollars in
1990, to 2.8 billion in 1997, 5.4 billion in 1998 and 9.3 billion in 1999. However, it
decreased again dramatically to 3.2 billion in 2003. It means that the explosive inflow
of foreign investment was not for new investment but was for buying up Korean firms
through mergers and acquisitions, devalued and badly in need of cash flows amid the
financial crisis. See Hart-Landsberg and Burkett (2001: 422).
15 As of 1998, the so-called neoliberal states of the United States and the United
Kingdom spent 20.02 per cent of GDP on social welfare. In the case of Korea, before
the Kim Dae-Jung government of 1997 the figure was 6.46 per cent, which increased
to 8.7 per cent in 2001. See Sonn (2006: 251).
16 The proportion of low-paid employed, earning less than two-thirds of the average
income, increased from 22.9 per cent in 2001 to 25.9 per cent in 2005. This is the
highest level amongst OECD members, even higher than in the United States (18.1
per cent). See Lee (2005: 56).
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13
Watershed management in
the wake of transnational
migration
Honduras
Carylanna Taylor
Residents of a Honduran village, when asked by a Peace Corps Volunteer why

they continued to attend talks on sustainable resource management but chose
not to implement the farming practices taught, responded simply – there was not
enough labor. My 2007 and 2009 observations and interviews in the area told
the same story. Even compared with a 2001 visit, there are fewer young men,
fewer hands to do the backbreaking work of building terraces or digging rain-fed
irrigation ditches.
Residents of “Aguas Blancas” continue to express interest in watershed con-
servation and management.1 They state the importance of protecting the area
surrounding their water source to ensure the continued provision of potable water
to the community. They acknowledge that, since 1987, their land falls within a
wide ring of inhabited but regulated land that protects the cloud forest at the core
of Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park (PANACAM by its Spanish acronym).
Residents of this “buffer zone” accept that their actions are important to the provi-
sion of water to neighboring cities and of electricity to the nation via hydroelectric
generators fed by streams originating in their villages, even while they fight to
bring electricity to their homes. Similarly, despite conflicts over just compensa-
tion for land appropriated by one of the municipalities that co-manages the parks,
they see residents of the city less as competitors than as an extension of their
community: the place where their children go to school and their produce is sold.
Because of extensive outmigration to Honduran cities and abroad, particularly the
United States,2 they simply have insufficient labor to keep up the time-intensive
farming practices that many had adopted during the height of PANACAM’s envi-
ronmental education and agricultural extension programs in the late 1990s. In the
larger buffer-zone village of Santa Rosa, even several former agricultural exten-
sion agents have dropped all soil conservation measures except for not burning
scrub brush prior to planting. Hiring day laborers at five dollars per day is simply
Watershed management in the wake of transnational migration 233
not a viable option when little cash income is to be derived from corn or bean
crops meant primarily for subsistence.
A centuries-long process of colonialization and underdevelopment has shaped
land and capital distribution in Honduras, pushing small farmers from the easily
degraded slopes while large-scale production of cattle and sugarcane for export
dominates the more fertile valleys. That hillside farming households earn less than
a dollar a day and yet supply more than 80 percent of the nation’s staple crops,
further reflects their position at the periphery of the world system. As Stonich
(1993), Blaikie and Brookfield (1988), and Diaz (1985) have discussed the role
of dependency on capitalist markets and land degradation in the development
of underdevelopment in Honduras, I will not go into that history here. Instead,
I focus on how the most recent manifestation of those processes, transnational
labor migration, is affecting the ways in which households and villages manage
their resources, potentially leading to further environmental degradation, dimin-
ished capacity of subsistence agriculture, and greater reliance on markets for food
and agricultural inputs. In Santa Rosa well over one-third of households have a
nuclear family member living abroad. With an even higher rate of international
and domestic outmigration, more than half of the households in Aguas Blancas
have emigrant members. These villages reflect a national trend of significant tem-
porary outmigration to Honduran cities (San Pedro Sula, Tegucigalpa), Mexico,
Spain, and especially the United States (New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas,
and California), where networks of emigrants serve to facilitate future emigration
from the communities of origin. The transnational extension of family and com-
munity networks is particularly evident among several hundred emigrants from
Santa Rosa and Aguas Blancas who have concentrated on Long Island, New York,
alongside other Hondurans, El Salvadorans, and Dominicans.
Most emigrants from the area send at least some money or goods home to their
families of origin. Remittances range from gift boxes at holidays, to help with
unexpected medical bills, to regular biweekly deposits of U.S.$150–200 meant to
cover day-to-day expenses of children, parents, and/or siblings. Some also regu-
larly send money to pay for maintenance of farms and cattle. Their investments
directly and indirectly affect the use and management of natural resources on
their properties and in their surrounding watersheds. For example, two brothers
on Long Island send money to two younger brothers still living at home in Santa
Rosa to care for the cattle that the U.S.-based brothers are slowly accumulating.
Three siblings from another transnational family, all residents of the United States
for more than a decade, send money to their parents so that they can rent pasture
and a shredder for their and their parents’ ninety-plus cows. A dishwasher on Long
Island sends money back to his wife in Santa Rosa so that she can pay laborers
to harvest coffee. The cost of labor is high enough and his U.S. earning potential
low enough that he plans to return to Honduras in time to harvest this year’s crop
himself, knowing that, given his age and the current immigration climate, he is
unlikely to make a fourth trip North.
Although complications from lost labor were mentioned again and again in
234 Carylanna Taylor
interviews with Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa farmers, the socio-economic
environmental impacts of remittances are less obvious to those on the ground
and merit exploration. Because both villages lie within the borders of a national
park that is grappling with how to conserve park watersheds using diminishing
financial resources, they also face the challenges of community-based watershed
management initiatives. These challenges include determining the limits of “com-
munity” in the context of villages comprising many transnational family networks
and taking into account the impact of emigration on the distribution of wealth,
status, and power within a given village community.
Migration and economic remittances finance economic and social capital: the
possessions, funds, and social relations that increase an actor’s ability to advance
their interests (Bourdieu 1977). By increasing economic and social capital, remit-
tances appear to be creating a new class of rural “non-poor” (Ravnborg 2002).
Some families are recording more material gains from migration (houses, vehi-
cles, land), separating themselves from poorer community residents, and adding
an intermediate layer of non-poor in the highly stratified rural hierarchy. Their
resource use and agricultural practices, shorthanded here as watershed-impacting
practices (WIP), differ from those of their neighbors and create new considera-
tions for conservation and development efforts.3 For example, non-poor tend to
use more pesticides but burn less. Non-poor are also more able to use remittances
to hire labor as imperfect substitutes for emigrated family members. Households
with emigrants often either rent out land owned by emigrants or use remittances to
rent pasture or land for corn and beans. Depending on hired labor and cultivating
rented land often corresponds to a shift away from more sustainable agricultural
practices (Jansen et al. 2003; Loker 2004; Ravnborg 2002).
Also flowing within the transnational family networks are ideas and values
generated in the emigrants’ new residences that can impact how remitted funds
are spent and further affect the livelihood strategies in their households and com-
munities of origin. Like economic remittances, these social remittances (Levitt
1998) affect the distribution of economic and social capital among village resi-
dents as well as watershed practices.
Taking an anthropology-centric approach, in this chapter I develop a “political
ecology of transnationalism” framework to look at some of the dynamics by which
the interaction of remittances, emigration, and watershed resource management
play out. The chapter draws on ethnographic research among Honduran hillside
farmers to explore the relationship between transnational flows of labor, funds,
and ideas and on-the-ground practices that impact the ways natural recourses are
used, managed, and distributed. Through a review of the experience of emigra-
tion, remittances, and distribution and use of resources in Honduras, I suggest that
remittance-driven changes in such practices may exacerbate inequalities among
watershed residents and deepen dependency on remittances, migration, and mar-
kets. Andre Gunder Frank’s notion of underdevelopment opened my eyes to the
painful irony that is the impetus for this project: the pursuit of wage labor in more
developed regions is rooted in the same historical processes that have resulted in
inadequate access to quality land and in labor becoming the nation’s top export.
The exodus of labor and subsequent transfer of remittances in turn further modify
the relations of those who remain with their natural resources, threatening their
ability to feed themselves and spurring even greater outmigration and depend-
ency on local and international markets for food and inputs to produce food.
Frank’s career-long interest in anthropology (Frank and Dalton 1970) included an
appreciation for ethnographic studies such as this that unveil the lived experience
of underdevelopment. He also appreciated anthropology’s holism – in this case
looking for local manifestations of global processes through an updated political
economy that considers connections between culture, environment, and economy.
Emigration and remittances among hillside farmers

A political ecology of transnationalism perspective highlights that the dynamics
I outline are embedded in contemporary and historic inequalities that drive land
distribution and environmental degradation. Over two million Hondurans (more
than a quarter of the country’s population) live on the steep hillsides that make
up 85 percent of the country’s farmed land and produce over 80 percent of basic
foods (Jansen et al. 2003). Over 90 percent live on less than U.S.$1 a day (Pender
and Scherr 2002). Meanwhile, the fertile valley floors are dominated by wealthy
landowners producing cattle ranches, bananas, melons, and other exports.
The colonial legacy of inequitable land distribution endures in Honduras: the
country’s basic foods are cultivated on the least fertile lands, with the steepest
slopes, greatest population density, highest susceptibility to droughts and floods,
and least amount of development and credit assistance for growers operating at
subsistence level (Julin Mendez 1986; Jansen, Pender et al. 2003). People living
on the laderas are neglected by policy and have failed to benefit from macroeco-
nomic reforms.
Inequitable land use and growing rural poverty have resulted in migration,
landlessness, urbanization, and escalating pressure on tropical forest areas in the
remainder of the country (Stonich 1989; Chapman 1965).4 The growing demand
for fertile soils as the agriculture frontier expands up hillsides and into forests
results in erosion and combines with increased chemical inputs and cattle to pro-
duce unsustainable changes in agricultural production (Jansen et al. 2003; Loker
2004; Ravnborg 2003). Jansen (1997) and Ravnborg (2003) note that there are
varying levels of poverty and kinds of production strategies among ladera farm-
ers: producers adapt their livelihood strategies to a set of relations and production
circumstances (biophysical, socio-economic, structural, etc.).
Rural to urban migration in Honduras has long operated as an alternative
livelihood strategy, and as an escape valve for rural population pressure and
underemployment. Over the past two decades, some 23 percent of the population
has migrated internally, most to the free-trade zones around San Pedro Sula and
Tegucigalpa where foreign companies have established factories or maquiladoras
(Amaya 2007). Outmigration from rural communities is augmented by increasing
numbers of teens and young adults going to live with relatives in nearby and
major cities for secondary and postsecondary education, often made possible by
money sent by parents or siblings who have emigrated to urban areas or abroad,
especially to the United States.
Nearly one million Honduran emigrants reside in the United States, sending
home approximately U.S.$935 million each year.5 These remittances are equivalent
to 21 percent of the nation’s GDP and equal two times the sum of official devel-
opment assistance and foreign direct investment (Inter-American Development
Bank and Multilateral Investment Fund 2006; Solimano 2004). Economic remit-
tances to Honduras are among the fastest growing in Latin America and subsidize
the basic necessities and livelihoods of those remaining in this second poorest
nation of the Americas (Sladkova 2007, 2008). Domestic emigrants benefit from
and add to transnational income streams (Amaya 2007).6
Hillside farmers in Honduras spend economic remittances on food, home
repair, health, education, and, to a far lesser degree, farm maintenance (Agencia
de Cooperación Denesa 2005). In my study area, spending remittances on “farm
maintenance” includes hiring laborers, purchasing chemical inputs such as her-
bicides and chemical fertilizers, purchasing, feeding, and pasturing cows, and,
less frequently, buying or renting productive land. As with building homes in
their communities of origin, for those emigrants who do not trust the stability of
Honduran banks or for those whose legal status prevents investing in the United
States, such earmarking of funds serves to consolidate investments for an eventual
return. (see Cohen 2001 for similar experiences among transnational emigrants
from Mexico.) All of these practices carry potential consequences for correspond-
ing watersheds.
Dynamics of the study site

Reflecting a global trend toward the decentralization of conservation efforts,
Honduran national policies place responsibility for the rural drinking water
supply in the hands of village-community water councils. In turn, development
and conservation organizations treat the water councils as the principal agents
of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM): each organiza-
tion is responsible for the small watershed which feeds the spring or stream that
provides community drinking water (Taylor Bahamondes 2007a; República de
Honduras 2006; USAID 2005). This is the case in my study site, Cerro Azul
Meámbar National Park. The 20,000 hectare zoned park is co-managed by four
municipalities, the national forestry service, and a Honduran non-governmental
organization (NGO) that takes care of daily operations. The NGO, Aldea Global,
recently finished a participatory process to rewrite the park management plan,
reorienting conservation efforts along its three watersheds, which feed two major
hydroelectric projects in central Honduras, the Francisco Morazán (“El Cajón”)
Dam and Canaveral Hydroelectric Project on Lake Yojoa.
Refocusing the management plan on community-based microwatershed
management mandates an even greater role in watershed conservation to each

of the sixty-four villages and hamlets located in the buffer zone surrounding the
nationally vital, water-generating cloud forest at the park’s core (Aldea Global
2007). Aldea Global spent the first half of 2009 working with each community
to self-define the boundaries of their microwatershed in an attempt to strengthen
commitment to the conservation of forests, soil, and water within and beyond the
park’s borders.7
Agricultural options in the park buffer zone are limited as the terrain is too
steep to plow and as it is over 50 percent forest and protected by park regulations
(Pfeffer et al. 2005). Households in the hillside villages of my study area make
their livelihoods by growing staples (corn, beans) and cash crops (coffee, yucca),
gathering forest products (honey, resin, wood), and performing carpentry, truck
driving, and off-farm wage labor. Local farmers impact their microwatersheds
directly through the application of chemical fertilizers, burning or incorporating
crop stubble and weeds, the use of green/organic manure, and erosion control
measures that affect soil structure.
I have chosen to focus on Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa because they are
experiencing high rates of emigration and an influx of economic remittances while
playing an ongoing role in park management. Aguas Blancas’ microwatershed lies
within the larger Lake Yojoa watershed. It encompasses all of the sixty-household
village, including the spring and stream that provide the village drinking water,
farmland, and residences, before flowing into the small river that leads to the lake.
With 450 households, Santa Rosa provides a counterpoint with a more diverse
economic base. The village draws its water from a microwatershed within the El
Cajon watershed.
Aldea Global works with multiple other institutions involved in the management
of the park:8 its major concerns for buffer zone co-management are deforestation,
fire control, erosion, and application of chemical agricultural inputs, especially
pesticides (Aldea Global 2007). It tries to promote “conservation” activities in
buffer zone communities and alternative, socially and environmentally sustain-
able economic opportunities such as ecotourism and organic, shade-grown coffee
production.9
Aldea Global and the other co-managers also aim to support communities in
improving their roads, schools, and basic services and in obtaining titles for buffer
zone residents’ land, although they often fall short in practice, particularly in the
provision of electricity. Environmental education programs targeting school chil-
dren, community members, and park visitors talk about the roles and resources of
the park (protection of cloud forests and biodiversity) and emphasize the role of
managing the watersheds and forests of the buffer zone to protect the community
water supply.
In an era of declining funding for conservation and global trends in privatization
and decentralization, park management is looking to place much of the onerous
work of park conservation in the hands of the communities that became part of the
park’s buffer zone when it was established in 1987. In 2009 Aldea Global carried
out a project of microwatershed delineation in which community water councils

were asked to define the borders of the microwatersheds for which they were will-
ing to take the responsibility of protecting. This responsibility included boundary
marking, educating about acceptable activities within the area surrounding the
community’s water source(s), and reporting transgressions such as cutting, burn-
ing, hunting, or new farming to park authorities, the local police, or one of the two
military brigades stationed in the park. There was no real recourse in enforcement.
Lives have been lost in the past for reporting cutting and fires, making watershed
protection a risky proposition. The imposition of conservation responsibilities on
buffer zone residents in the context of limited involvement from park manage-
ment raises serious concerns for the future of community-based management in
the area. Of more immediate concern to this chapter is understanding the degree
to which “community based” includes transnational emigrants and the funds and
ideas they remit.
While documenting community water council activities throughout PANACAM
in 2007, I stayed with the president of the Aguas Blancas water council and his
family. Since my first visit in 2001, the family had amassed a second coffee plot,
a little general store, a new house with guest rooms for tourists, a second house
for his mother, and electricity. All were made possible by funds remitted by his
two eldest sons, one working for a horse show in Florida and the other in retail
in New Jersey. “Javier’s” middle children have all emigrated domestically: a
daughter goes to middle school in Taulabé, a son studies computer technologies
at a Siguatepeque high school, and another goes to the university part-time while
living and working with his older brother in a maquiladora in San Pedro Sula.
Each generation of emigrants makes it possible for the next to “get ahead” and for
parents and youngest siblings to stay in Aguas Blancas. Out of caring for relatives
in their villages of origin and out of a desire to return “home,” if only to visit or
retire, transnational emigrants continue to express concern for the family farms
and community conservation and development projects.
In Aguas Blancas a pair of families with successful emigrant members have
accumulated substantial material wealth (new houses, vehicles, a small store,
refrigerators, cell phones, computers) while others who have had repeatedly failed
migrations are worse off than before, in some cases opting out of community-
subsidized electricity for their small adobe homes. Social capital accrues to
families of successful migrants through formal schooling, informal education
activities, and increased social status derived from education and relative wealth.
Over time, this dynamic deepens divides between the relatively capital rich and
capital poor, with corresponding repercussions in community and natural resource
management. For instance, in Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa, this has translated
into a disproportionate number of community leaders coming from transnational
families.
Understanding how these divides in social and economic capital and impacts
on watershed management and watershed-impacting practices are related
to migration and remittances – and how they may contribute to community
(under)development and dependency – requires an approach that fuses place-

based ethnography with a broader view of historical and global trends.
Political ecology of transnationalism

To understand how transnational emigration (outmigration) affects family and
community relationships with natural resources, this chapter links two rich
bodies of anthropological (as well as sociological and geographical) theory and
scholarship: political ecology and transnationalism. This effort sits at the intersec-
tion of trends toward a more contemporary, interdisciplinary, transnational, and
environmentally concerned anthropology that was foreseen by Kearney (1995)
over a decade ago. Focusing on the distribution of power within human/environ-
ment relations, political ecology (Bryant 1997; Peet and Watts 2000; Robbins
2004; Stonich 1993, 1995; Wolf 1972) provides a theoretical framework to
consider the historical, political, economic, and environmental factors operating
on local, national, and global scales that shape household watershed-impacting
practices. Among the political economy lessons, the dependency school insight
that “peripheral” countries such as Honduras have been (and are being) under-
developed through their relationship with the core is key (Cardoso and Faletto
2008 [1979]; Frank 1969, 2000). Biersack and Greenberg (2006: 17) find a
complementary relationship forming between transnational studies and political
ecology, a relationship that is developed here into a multi-scaled political ecology
of transnationalism.
Transnational migration has received a growing amount of attention in the
literature since the 1990s (Cohen 2001; Conway and Cohen 1998; Edelman 1998;
Glick Schiller et al. 1995; Kyle 2000; Sheridan 1995).10 A transnational approach
to migration is meant to simultaneously ground and traverse sites or phenomena
often conceptualized as “local,” “global,” and “national.” It compares historically
emerged boundaries with unbounded arenas and processes such as transnational
flows of people, funds, and ideas between the Honduran and U.S. nation-states.
Levitt (1998) contributes the concept of the “transnational social field” as a way to
conceptualize the space within which communities and families of international
and domestic emigrants function. Remittances create and reinforce communities
or networks across transnational social fields, bridging the multiple boundaries of
core and periphery. Anthropological and sociological ethnographies of transna-
tional families add nuance to understanding local manifestations of these broad
processes (Levitt 2001; Olwig 2007; Schmalzbauer 2008).11 A “transnational
political ecology” framework encourages a continued focus on human–envi-
ronment relations within transnational social fields and on any resulting (re)
production of inequality.
Research linking emigration and environment has traditionally focused more
on environmentally related causes for emigration. For instance, increases in rural
outmigration in Latin America have been blamed on government policies making
peasant agriculture untenable (Jenkins 1977), lack of land or titling (Lopez and
Valdes 2000), and environmental conditions (Hugo 1996). The few research-
ers studying the impact of emigration and remittances on sending-community
resources or resource-impacting practices note the paucity of empirical research
on the subject (Adger 2002; Appleyard 1989; de Sherbinin et al. 2007). Two stud-
ies from environmental and natural resource economics are notable exceptions.
Adger (2002) works within a political ecology framework to assess the impacts
of emigration and remittances on resource-depleted coastal communities in
Vietnam. Aryal (2005) shows that outmigration and remittances indirectly reduce
incentives for labor-intensive land conservation, an insight supported by my work
in Honduras.
Discussion of remittances and environmental conservation in the academic
literature is limited to dynamics with indirect impacts on conservation, such as
consumption, construction of houses, purchase of agricultural land, poor caretak-
ing of rented parcels, or imperfect substitution of hired labor for family labor.
Although the implications of remittance expenditure for conservation is not a
prominent focus of academic scholarship, their role in rural development has been
recognized in project literature since the 1970s (see, for example, Suro 2003),
including the expenditure patterns cited above for rural areas near PANACAM
(Agencia De Cooperacion Denesa 2005).
In rural Honduras, remittances tend to increase dependence on formal markets
for agrochemicals and staple foods, as remaining farmers shift toward cash crops
and substitute pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for lost labor (Stonich 1995).
Cohen et al. (2005) cautions that migration and remittances may be positive
forces in maintaining migrant households of origin. Whether remittances are, on
average, a source of development or underdevelopment for households and com-
munities is an active debate to be explored further below.
All of these impacts of transnational migration have implications for con-
servation and rural development initiatives, encompassed here as watershed
management. Drawing heavily on political ecology, the body of scholarship
around community-based natural resource management illustrates the importance
of attending to issues of power and control over resources, equitable participa-
tion, and locally managed decision-making processes in watershed management
(Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Brosius et al. 1998, 2006; Nygren 2004, 2005).
CBNRM scholars treat communities not as homogeneous entities, but rather as
comprising individual actors with competing interests. Communities, and by
extension CBNRM, are seen to operate within local, national, and global flows
of people, money, and ideas (Agrawal and Gibson 2001). In her work with
Dominican migrants, Levitt (1998, 2001) has shown that, although they may be
rooted in shared places of origin, family and community networks are not isolated
or spatially confined but rather operate in transnational social fields (Levitt and
Glick Schiller 2004; Schmalzbauer 2008).12 Unfortunately the nuanced scholarly
definition of community (which allows for a community capable of spanning spa-
tial boundaries, migration, and remittances) is often not shared by those behind
CBNRM projects (Taylor Bahamondes 2007a).
In addition to economic remittances, across these transnational social fields

flow social remittances: “the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that
flow from host- to sending-country communities” (Levitt 1998: 927). Social
remittances impact home countries through entrepreneurship, community devel-
opment, and political integration. Social remittances carry the potential to change
the distribution of “social capital,” the social relations that increase the ability of
an actor to advance his or her interests (Bourdieu 1977). Economic and social
remittances act as sources of social capital by increasing social status, including
that gained from greater access to information and external resources, affecting
who gets to make decisions in the management of community natural resources.
Capturing transnational flows and their impacts on

capital and practices
This chapter is informed by 2007 predissertation research on PANACAM
watershed-related policy and projects and the 2009–2010 dissertation research
that grew out of it.13 By focusing on one PANACAM buffer-zone village and
four transnational families that stretch from it to the United States, the disserta-
tion sought to capture how transnational economic and social remittances affect
watershed-impacting practices among Honduran hillside farmers and to trace the
resulting unequal distribution of economic and social capital.14 In 2007, I inter-
viewed park managers and community leaders to document the range of watershed
management projects and concerns affecting the park and its residents. Migration
surfaced as a pervasive, understudied factor in watershed management and use.
The 2009–2010 research proceeded in four phases. Phase I began with four par-
ticipatory group interviews in order to develop a village-wide survey designed
to (1) determine migration patterns and histories, (2) identify uses of monetary
remittances and the content of social remittances, (3) record watershed-impacting
practices and participation in community WIP activities, and (4) understand in
general terms the distribution of economic, social, and symbolic capital within the
community. In Phase II, the open- and closed-ended question household survey
was administered to thirty-one households with follow-up surveys administered
to the eighteen families engaged in agricultural activities. During this period four
households receiving economic remittances from abroad and three households
without international emigrants were chosen to reflect varying combinations of
economic capital, social capital, and emigration experiences.
Phase III included multiple in-depth interviews with resident family members
and those who have emigrated to Honduran cities. Heads of household were asked
to keep “remittance diaries” to record the receipt and expenditure of migradol-
lars as well as to track migration- and environment-related phone conversations
with emigrant family members. These diaries were continued by phone during the
third phase of the project spent interviewing and observing transnational family
members and exploring networks of Aguas Blancas-area emigrants in the United
States (Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Long Island, New York). In the final stage
of the project the experiences of Aguas Blancas and the case-study families were
compared with those of other villages in and around the park through several con-
sultations and town hall-style meetings held with members of other park villages
and with park managers. Extended home stays with transnational family members
were an essential component of participant observation in both the United States
and Honduras.
The contrast of community, emigrant, park, and transnational family networks
also responds to calls to conduct multiple levels of analysis, providing insight
into powerful macro-level forces such as decentralization and dependency (Frank
2000; Massey 1987, 1990; Nygren 2005): the result approaches an “ethnogra-
phy of the world system” (Marcus 1995).15 The project develops the relationship
between transnational studies and political ecology into a multi-scaled “political
ecology of transnationalism” to integrate the political, economic, and environmen-
tal factors that shape household and community watershed-impacting practices.
By showing that, in the wake of emigration, watershed use and management is
unbound, the project will provide empirical evidence to challenge the dangerous
misconception of community as a spatially bound village – a misconception that
underlies many community-based conservation and development efforts.
The research project was also designed as an opportunity for residents of Aguas
Blancas and co-managers of Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park to consider the
possibility of emigrated family members as potential stakeholders, suggesting the
need to consider the role of social remittances and inequalities in social and eco-
nomic capital in watershed-impacting practices and conservation leadership. It is
also an opportunity to confront how these dynamics potentially increase depend-
ency on migration and remittances.
Migration and remittances affect watersheds and

watershed-impacting practices
A key insight from a political ecology of transnationalism approach is that seem-
ingly unbound processes stretching across transnational spaces share very real
consequences in specific places. This section uses existing information on the
park and region to identify some of the pressures of emigration and remittances on
park watershed and watershed-impacting practices at the household and village-
community levels. Although little has been written explicitly on the environmental
impacts of remittances, it is clear that they are difficult to predict because of the
number of confounding variables. Describing a coastal ecosystem in Vietnam,
Adger (2002) shows that impacts on mangroves are mediated by education, con-
sumption, income inequality, and investments in alternative businesses associated
with remittances. Pressure on forest and farm land in Aguas Blancas and Santa
Rosa is mediated by similar factors.
Using satellite imagery, Pfeffer et al. (2005) have shown that in the buffer zone
of Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park, where Aguas Blancas is located, lower
population density from substantial outmigration corresponds to an increase in
coffee production with less land farmed and more food purchased. The amount
of fallow land decreases as lands once used for staple crops are used for shade
coffee or revert to protected, untouchable forest.16 Coffee cultivation has several
environmental advantages over corn or beans: existing trees are conserved and
new ones planted for shade-grown coffee, soil erosion is lower, fallen leaves are
left as mulch, and fewer agrochemicals are used. Increased coffee production also
brings environmental impacts. In some areas, the increased availability of cash
income from remittances or increased sales increases the application of pesti-
cides, potentially impacting the water supply. In Aguas Blancas, the pulp left over
from stripping the flesh of the coffee berry from the bean washes into the village
stream, depriving the water of oxygen needed to sustain aquatic life. In Santa
Rosa, coffee is sold as berries, displacing this kind of pollution from the village’s
microwatershed.
Many studies of migration and conservation are based on the assumption that
depopulation is good for the environment. In PANACAM there is empirical evi-
dence tying depopulation and environmental recovery; however, it is inaccurate to
assume depopulation is the only – or even primary – consequence of emigration,
as remittances and resulting inequalities between households act as confounding
variables. Recognizing that it is tricky to predict the impact of labor/population
size, Pfeffer et al. (2005) suggest that lower population density and competition
for resources in PANACAM may result in less opposition to conservation pro-
grams. However, as the Peace Corps volunteer found in Aguas Blancas, there may
be insufficient labor to implement the programs.
My interviews with farmers in Santa Rosa suggest that outmigration has made
labor-intensive investments in land management and improvement less attractive,
including conservationist methods such as composting, terracing, or live fences.
Pender (1999) showed a similar effect from an increase in off-farm opportunities
and rural wages. Purchased inputs (pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers) substitute for
time, especially where the fallow cycle is shortened because of land scarcity, as is
the case within the buffer zone of the national park (Loker 2004: 136). Increased
availability of cash through remittances makes purchase of these chemical inputs
more tenable. Shorter fallows, labor scarcity, and more chemical-intensive prac-
tices degrade soil and foster dependency on purchased fertilizers, herbicides, and
pesticides.
Emigration also creates a market for labor and rented land, both of which tend
to have more negative, long-term environmental impacts (especially from ero-
sion and agrochemical use) than does family-owned land with family members as
laborers (Jansen et al. 2003). Increased renting of land and hiring of laborers have
been associated with a decline in long-term sustainable land use practices (Jansen
et al. 2003). Of those hiring outside labor in Santa Rosa, only those who could
draw on other family members (brothers, uncles, nephews) and close friends with
similar work ethics had confidence in the quality of work performed. Even then,
$5 per day labor is prohibitively expensive for such labor-intensive practices
as terracing or maintaining a rain-fed irrigation system. When paid by the day,
weeding by hand or hoe is far more expensive than buying and applying herbicide
with a backpack sprayer.
With land rental comes a decreased knowledge of the land being farmed and
less impetus for investing scarce labor and capital in long-term projects; land
owners are more likely to reclaim improved parcels for themselves. Renting
farmers, when they rent land in exchange for clearing fallow lands, benefit from
improved soil quality, but often the land is a marginal parcel with degraded soil
that requires extra fertilizers and urea to be coaxed into production.
As suggested above, remittance- and migration-financed economic, physical,
and social capital are creating a new class of rural “non-poor” whose resource use
and agricultural practices sets them apart from their neighbors. They create new
issues for sustainable agriculture: for example, non-poor tend to use more pesti-
cides but burn less (Jansen, Pender et al. 2003). To the extent that the non-poor
hold a greater extent of land and larger numbers of cattle than their neighbors,
and to the extent that they are more likely to participate in community leader-
ship, their watershed-impacting practices are disproportionately represented in
community natural resource management. Ravnborg (2003: 1934) uses a political
ecology perspective to show that farmers’ natural resource management practices
are also shaped by the broader social relationships and norms that govern how
resources are controlled and accessed. These relationships and norms shift under
transnational migration and remittances.
Through increased spending on houses, water, electricity, and other community
development projects, migradollars can change the status of one community rela-
tive to another and relative to local authorities, increasing its ability to negotiate
for scarce government and NGO resources (Durand et al. 1996; Goldring 1998,
2004; Taylor et al. 1996). The poorest communities in PANACAM are those that
are the farthest from the Pan-American Highway, which acts not only as a vehicle
of commerce but as a means of ready access to domestic and transnational migra-
tion. Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa have enjoyed a remittance-driven material
and educational prosperity not felt in the more isolated eastern side of the park.
Availability of road, water, and electricity infrastructure mirrors this prosperity.
Emigrants also directly impact watershed management practices by funding
infrastructure development such as potable water systems. In Aguas Blancas and
Santa Rosa, emigrants with homes in the villages invested directly by paying fees
assessed to each tap in the new system and by hiring day laborers to stand in for
their mandatory labor contributions. Emigrants also helped relatives meet their
own labor and fee requirements. A handful from Santa Rosa donated directly to
the project.
Jones (1998) cautions that although remittances at first decrease interfamilial
inequality in the sending community – and rural-to-urban inequality – the divi-
sions between families eventually increase. This has certainly been the case in
Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa, where families without remittances have less
secure income and little cash income necessary for modern amenities, secondary
education, and health care. In Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa the strongest leaders
also have multiple children in the United States. Both have been singled out by
Aldea Global to receive extensive environmental and agricultural education,
increasing their status through knowledge, visibility, and connections.
Even from this partial listing, it is clear that the environmental impacts of
migration and remittances are multiple and multi-directional. Taken together, they
exacerbate dependency on agrochemicals, hired labor, and rented land, and on
emigration and remittances. A political ecology of transnationalism approach ties
these local socio-economic-environmental dynamics to global flows of people,
funds, and ideas.
Remittance-based development or dependency?

Land use in Honduras follows the three historical stages of dependence outlined
by dos Santos (1970): colonial dependence with monopoly over land, mines, and
manpower, (2) financial-industrial dependence with expansion of the production
of raw materials and agricultural products for export (late nineteenth century),
and (3) postwar technological-industrial dependence based on multinational cor-
porations. Colonization and a centuries-long process of integration into the global
capitalist economy through focusing on export agribusiness at the expense of
production of staples for domestic markets placed Honduras in a process of under-
development and ever greater integration into the 500-year world system. The
Latin America-wide process has been analyzed in detail elsewhere (Cardoso and
Faletto 2008 [1979]; dos Santos 1970; Frank 1969, 2000; Mintz 1985; Wallerstein
1979, 1987; Wolf 1982).
Relations of production continue to evolve in Aguas Blancas. The past decades
have already seen a shift from subsistence agriculture to a mix of subsistence agri-
culture and coffee growing. Integration into the capitalist market economy began
with the sale of basic produce and coffee and has recently accelerated through
such purchases as materials to fabricate homes (tin and concrete as opposed to
adobe and straw) and basic grains such as corn. Whether because of coffee produc-
tion or emigration, households no longer produce sufficient staples for household
consumption. As evidenced by the co-existence of market production (coffee),
subsistence farming (corn, beans), and a nascent service economy (eco-tourism),
multiple modes of production overlap in Aguas Blancas. Remittances, domestic
and transnational, are an additional mode that further incorporates residents into
the market and is creating dependency on emigration.
As of 2006, 10 percent of Hondurans resided in the United States. Together these
emigrants (predominantly men under thirty-six years of age) send U.S.$200–300
per month back to the 11 percent of Honduran households with family members in
the States. At the national level, U.S.$2.3 billion in remittances (up from U.S.$50
million in 1990) surpassed the combined income from foreign direct investment,
exports, and maquiladoras (Banco Central de Honduras 2007).17 In its quest to
make the most of remittances, Honduras has the help of international agencies such
as the Inter-American Development Bank and the Multilateral Investment Fund,
which are actively looking at remittances as a form of, and possibly a replacement
for, foreign aid (Chimhowu et al. 2003; Inter-American Development Bank and
Multilateral Investment Fund 2006; Terry and Wilson 2005). As United States aid
to Honduras rapidly declined (even before the June 2009 coup, in part because of
the country’s diminished importance as a staging zone for operations in Central
America; see Ruhl 2007), remittances from the United States came to account for
twice the country’s combined overseas direct assistance and foreign direct invest-
ment of approximately U.S.$935 million in 2004 (Inter-American Development
Bank and Multilateral Investment Fund 2006).18 Resulting short-term increases
in consumption and longer-term increases in savings and investment are seen as
having a positive impact on local development (Solimano 2004).
Exploring the possibility of tapping remittances directly for development pro-
jects, the Inter-American Development Bank and Multilateral Investment Fund
(2001) found that 43 percent of Central Americans were interested in investing
in a fund that would benefit the development of their home country, especially
if directed to their city or region. About one-fifth of Latin American immigrants
have already contributed money to “collective remittances,” events organized by
Latin American communities throughout the United States to raise money for pro-
jects in their home country. Providing theoretical support to these governmental
and aid agency contemplations of remittances, some scholars look to remittances
as possible subsidies for rural or community development or more generally as
sources of rural investment that will help alleviate rural poverty (e.g. Durand et
al. 1996; Taylor 1999). Little is said on the resulting increased market dependence
or environmental impact.
Aguas Blancas and Santa Rosa already tap directly into remittances for devel-
opment, channeling funds to community-level development. The Aguas Blancas
water council assesses prorated fees to emigrant members to pay for water or
electricity hook-ups to the homes that their remittances have financed. While
developing its water system in 2003–2008, emigrants living on Long Island were
asked by the emigrant son of the then-community council president to donate to
the improvements, channeling funds to the Santa Rosa water council. Organizing
across such distance faltered when the person entrusted with delivering the funds
failed to arrive. Later contributions took the form of direct individual to water
council remittances via Western Union and Money Gram. Indirectly, emigrant
members of both communities subsidize community development through remit-
tances that free up financial resources otherwise dedicated to food, lodging,
education, and healthcare. Remittances also allow older or infirm community
members to “buy out” of their community labor responsibilities by hiring a day
laborer to take their place. In this way, the community council of Santa Rosa
compensates for the loss of labor through emigration. By assessing monetary and
labor fees to each water tap, whether the corresponding home is occupied or not,
the water council brings in resources from successful migrants who have built
houses “back home.” In turn, these elevated fees subsidize the project as a whole.
Although it is hard to deny that remittances contribute to community and
economic development through infrastructure and education, the changes in

watershed management practices and potential changes in the watershed envi-
ronment discussed above suggest that remittances come with a price. Others
are concerned with the economic, social, and, to a lesser degree, environmental
impact of increased market integration, increased dependency on capitalist mar-
kets brought about as a result of increased consumption and emergence of land
and labor markets, paired with withdrawal of government assistance under the
rubric of decentralization (see, for example, Reichert 1981).
I explore the implications of transnational migration and remittances for natu-
ral resource management practice and policy more thoroughly elsewhere (Taylor
2010). Here I would like to ask another related question: How do emigration-
and remittance-induced changes in household and community natural resource
management practices impact the sustainability and (under)development of rural
livelihoods? Although not easily answered because of the great number of con-
founding variables that have been laid out above, I am asking if emigration- and
remittance-generated changes in watershed-impacting practices (as well as the
resulting environmental impacts) exacerbate dependency on domestic and trans-
national labor and commodity markets. To the extent that livelihoods are made
more difficult as a result of these changes, emigration and remittances could be
considered a source of underdevelopment.19 Although I focus on the potential
negative impacts because I think they are more indirect and hidden, I appreciate
that those families and communities that have benefited value the positive impacts
of remittances such as the improved housing, running water, electricity, and
greater educational opportunities described for Javier’s family and community.
Because I see evidence of both development and dependency in Aguas Blancas
and other Honduran communities I have visited, I am appreciative of positions
that allow analysis of both. Drawing on his work with sending-community house-
holds of peasant farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico, Cohen illustrates that development/
underdevelopment is a false dichotomy (Cohen 2001; Cohen et al. 2005; Conway
and Cohen 1998, 2003). Drawing on Basch et al. (1994) and Kearney (1995) he
frames the study within a transnational model that allows for a more nuanced
study of current and long-term multi-directional relations across domestic and
international fields of social and economic interaction:
A transnational approach breaks down the contradictions of dependency and

development and defines the outcomes of migration and remittance use as
rooted in a series of interdependencies that emphasize production and con-
sumption, class and ethnicity, and the individual and the community while
transcending localities and national boundaries.
(Cohen 2001: 955)
Cohen argues that contradictions are not an inherent quality of transnational

migration, but rather arise from the historical development of the process, such
as the history of land distribution-driven underdevelopment leading to migration
discussed above. His conceptualization of transmigration is robust enough to look

at remittances on the multiple levels in which they are earned and spent, to see
both economic and social remittances and to examine the economic, social, and
political transactions and structures within which they are embedded. When con-
cern for the impacts and inequalities produced by human/environment relations is
added, it becomes a political ecology of transnationalism approach.
Concluding thoughts
Transnational migrants occupy interlaced social spaces across borders and main-
tain strong ties to both “home” and “host” countries (Basch et al. 1994; Levitt
2001). Those who have emigrated from places such as Aguas Blancas and Santa
Rosa remain connected to their “home” communities and to household and com-
munity water(shed) management practices indirectly through economic and social
remittances and resulting changes in watershed-impacting practices and in the
distribution of economic and social capital. Their very absence has environmen-
tal, social, and economic repercussions as families adapt to having fewer hands to
perform labor-intensive soil conservation practices or as they rent out emigrants’
land. Emigrants impact watersheds directly through their investments in crops,
cattle, labor, and agrochemicals and by helping to fund community-wide envi-
ronmentally impacting or conserving activities such as installing a water system.
If the conceptualization of community in community-based natural resource
management is to be expanded to include families and communities operating
across transnational social fields, then home villages and park managers will need
to address how best to include transnational emigrants in more formal decision-
making about watershed resource management. An ethnography informed by
a political ecology of transnationalism offers insights into the historical and
day-to-day role of emigration and remittances in fostering development and
underdevelopment through watershed-impacting practices and management.
Notes
1 Watersheds are identifiable areas of land of varying scale that drain into a common
water source. When taken as units of social analysis, watersheds emphasize the
interconnectedness of community and household practices and a shared physical envi-
ronment (Berkes 2004). Focusing on watersheds also reflects the centrality of water
to community development and Honduran national policy (República de Honduras
2006).
2 I use “transnational” in lieu of “international” or “global” as it suggests multiple
border crossings of people and funds, reflects intentions to return, and highlights that
these occur within and between two nation-states: Honduras and the United States.
3 Watershed-impacting practices refers to all human activities with potential impact on
the watershed of interest, not only those that might be considered “conservation” or
“natural resource management” Such activities include behaviors undertaken on indi-
vidual farms or as part of community or park projects that relate to watershed function,
for example tree cutting, soil conservation, application of pesticides, community-built
infrastructure to supply water to individual houses, or petitioning a municipality for
equitable compensation for farm land appropriated for municipal water provision.
4 Current residents of Aguas Blancas and other communities in Cerro Azul Meámbar
National Park were themselves, or were related to, agricultural colonists, most arriv-
ing in the 1950s to 1970s. Establishment of the park in 1987 and active management
beginning in 1992 all but halted immigration to this mountainous frontier.
5 As this chapter goes to press, the global economic slowdown and 2009 political
turmoil in Honduras threaten to significantly change these figures. Among the study
population, deportations and voluntary return migration among Honduran emigrants,
layoffs, and reduced work hours have made sending money home increasingly dif-
ficult. Although this dynamic has greatly colored my more recent work, this chapter
is necessarily written primarily in the “ethnographic present” of 2007 and early 2009,
when remittances had not yet dropped off significantly.
6 Conditions are often not an improvement for those who migrate domestically, as
Honduran cities have been hard pressed to keep up services and infrastructure for the
marginal urban poor (Vinelii 1986: 108). Similarly, emigrants to the United States
often share crowded quarters, have few funds after making the costly and dangerous
border crossing and sending as much as possible home, and, for the majority without
papers, are at continual risk of immediate deportation.
7 Watersheds at the community stream and/or spring level are sometimes called
“microwatersheds.” They form part of the catchment basins for larger bodies of water.
Watershed resources also include farmland, fallow fields, and other flora and fauna.
8 Collaborators of Aldea Global include municipalities, the national agriculture ser-
vice, the national agricultural institute, coffee promoters, ministries of education and
health, and national electric and water organizations.
9 I use terms such as “conservation,” “natural resource management,” and “sustainable”
loosely, recognizing that each has been critiqued extensively. Aldea Global’s activities
include training programs for sustainable resource management (e.g. sound burning,
and sufficient fallows), technical assistance in soil conservation (e.g. terracing),
agroforestry, organic agriculture, crop diversification, agrochemical use and manage-
ment, family and school gardens, fish farms, and small community-run hydroelectric
projects.
10 Stark (1986, 1991) in Mexico and Adams (1998) in Pakistan argue that domestic and
transnational remittances may have different effects. Extensive rural–urban migration
scholarship in Africa is helpful in bringing domestic migration into the transnational
social field (Adepoju 1974; Cliggett 2003; Gugler 2002; Trager 1998).
11 A call to focus on families and family networks goes back at least to Macisco (1972),
and more recently to Boyd (1989), who provides a rich view of families as contentious
sites of conflicting interests among members. For a historical view that encompasses
questions of transnationalism over a longer time period, see Manning (2004).
12 Alternately, these flows of people, funds, and ideas could be conceived of as overlap-
ping ethnoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996; Nygren 2004)
13 Predissertation and master’s thesis research led me to Cerro Azul Meámbar National
Park. During research for my masters in Development Sociology at Cornell University,
I focused on environmental education and water conservation discourse, including
interviewing park rangers during a 2001 visit, transcribing an environmental edu-
cation radio program, and collecting documentation on laws, funding, and projects
impacting the park (Taylor Bahamondes 2003). Much of the thesis was based on
my analysis of original data collected through a survey of 601 park residents and
fifty-four in-depth interviews on resident conservation values and practices by Max J.
Pfeffer and students from 1996 to 1998. Aguas Blancas is in both data sets and Santa
Rosa was included in the surveys. (For more on their work, see Pfeffer et al. 2001,
2005, 2006 and Schelhas and Pfeffer 2008.) I returned to PANACAM in July–August
2007 to document community-based watershed activities, including hydroelectric
projects, multi-community collaborations, intercommunity water conflicts in the
park, and major issues such as aging or inexistent water systems, drying springs, inad-
equate management, and forest fires (Taylor Bahamondes 2007b). I visited villages
throughout the park, speaking with park managers and water council members and
interviewing representatives of each of the park co-managing municipalities and of
national water and forestry agencies (resulting in seven taped interviews). In Aguas
Blancas and another village I spent several days interviewing residents and water
council members (ten) and conducting group interviews (two).
14 The specific village was selected during previous research based on (1) inclusion in
Pfeffer et al.’s 1996–1998 surveys and qualitative interviews that formed the basis of
my 2003 study of the globalization of water conservation discourse, (2) interest in the
project, and (3) the extent of migration, impact of remittances, and resulting inequali-
ties. To illustrate the feasibility of a transnational political ecology-informed study I
focus on the methodology of the more recent dissertation study.
15 This methodology expands on existing multi-sited ethnographies (Burawoy 2000;
Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Kearney 1995; Marcus 1995) and on the use of kin-
ship for studies of transnational migration (Boyd 1989; Cohen 2001; Olwig 2003,
2007; Schmalzbauer 2004, 2005, 2008). Focusing on transnational family networks
allows for a nuanced, non-spatially bound treatment of community and conservation
(Agrawal and Gibson 2001; Schmalzbauer 2004). In pragmatic terms, the methodol-
ogy is designed to maximize limited project resources to capture expansive flows of
people, funds, and ideas across transnational space and the impact that they have on
the beliefs and practices of real people in a real place.
16 In the park, implementation of policies and reforestation programs also play a part
in this conversion. Using satellite imagery, Pfeffer et al. (2005) showed that between
1993 and 1998 the proportion of land in Aguas Blancas dedicated to coffee increased
by 17 percent to account for 34 percent of total land (with 6 percent in agriculture, 2
percent in fallow, and 58 percent in forest).
17 Increases in the consumption of foreign goods and investment have augmented inter-
national reserves, stabilized the exchange rate, and slowed inflation and interest rate
reductions. The government sees the contradictions between increasing income and
an apparent shift from production to consumption in rural areas, but concentrates
energy on finding ways to help emigrants remit cheaply and safely. The Central Bank
sees opportunities for development in remittances, even as it recognizes the precarious
dependent position they put the country in vis-à-vis the United States (Banco Central
de Honduras 2007).
18 This is significantly higher than for most developing countries: on average, remit-
tances are the second most important source of external finance, less than direct
investment and surpassing foreign aid (Solimano 2004). In Honduras remittances
amount to 70 percent of total export revenues and 21 percent of GDP (Inter-American
Development Bank, and Multilateral Investment Fund 2006). These flows of capital
are among the fastest growing in Latin America.
19 At the national level the Honduran economy is inextricably intertwined with U.S.
production and demand for labor. Even channeling the over U.S.$2.3 billion returned
by immigrant workers each year into national or local projects does not erase the
accompanying degree of economic dependency on the United States and the continu-
ation of transnational migration and remittance.
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14
Conclusion
Preparing for future analysis
Patrick Manning
In the aftermath of World War II, three groups of economic analysts competed
for intellectual and political space. The first group consisted of “neoclassical-
neoliberal analysts,” who focused on the leading sectors of wealthy countries and
conducted their analyses in terms of formal economic theory. Second was the
group of “socialist-world analysts,” based in the Soviet Union and its allies, who
analyzed through eclectic central planning to build a system expected to expand
by maintaining both efficiency and equity.1 The third school of thought may be
called “world-economy analysts” – they analyzed in terms of a wider and more
complex framework and offered critiques of the other two approaches from a
position usually marginal to policy-making.2 This concluding chapter offers brief
comments on the first two and then turns to discussion of the third.
Socialist-world analysis maintained its significance in the overall discourse on
the world economy for about thirty years, but then lost its impetus in the 1970s
through a mixture of internal weakness and external pressure. Whether the recent
initiatives in socialist-led countries of China and Venezuela amount to a renewal
of that tradition is a question of interest, but it will be left aside here.
Neoclassical analysis, in contrast, grew spectacularly in influence in the imme-
diate postwar years. Its emphasis on economic growth and modernization gained
great influence in those years of rapid growth, the era of Keynesian hegemony.
Then from the 1970s came an overlapping neoliberal analysis: its shift to focus
on monetary and financial issues gained a welcoming reception in the corporate
world. Business schools and their MBA degrees, proliferating from their Ivy
League origins, provided the technical and especially ideological training for the
business elite worldwide. Rational-choice theories and a belief in the dependable
efficacy of unrestricted markets as the best solution to all problems of allocation
gained hegemony in this economic marketplace of ideas.3 Salaries of economists
grew steadily, but the earnings of stockbrokers grew even more rapidly. The study
Conclusion 259
of economic history was absorbed into departments of economics as it developed

quantitative sophistication, but there it was marginalized as a curiosity.
Despite the upbeat ethos among the neoclassical-neoliberal crowd, periodic
economic downturns revealed weaknesses in their understanding. At such
moments, Keynesian theorists spoke up to contest the growing neoliberal domi-
nance of the economics profession (Stiglitz 2002, 2010). Theory and ideology
became confounded, and leaders in business and economics lost touch with the
larger picture. The horrendous financial crash of late 2008 provided a wake-up
call, but did not necessarily cause much change in the outlook or actions of
those who took a neoliberal approach to the world economy. The purpose here
is not to devote much energy to describing or castigating the errors and failures
of neoclassical-neoliberal economics and business practices.4 Nor is this an
attempt to argue that there exists a sharp dichotomy or an absence of communi-
cation between neoclassical-neoliberal and world-economy approaches. Indeed,
there are important examples of the use of standard economic theory by critical
economic analysts, and of the recognition of research results in global political
economy by standard economists. The field of economic history is important as
one of the main areas of interchange between the two approaches (O’Rourke and
Williamson 1999).
The focus here is on the world-economy analysts. They formed a much smaller
and more diverse group than the neoclassical-neoliberal analysts. Many of these
analysts had political sympathies with the socialist-world analysts but their criti-
cal interests went beyond defending the existing socialist order. Members of this
group were mostly academics, yet these scholars – spread across the continents
and across disciplines – found ways to communicate and build on each other’s
arguments. As seen within their perspective, the world economy is an immense
but worthy topic. It encompasses past and present, the lives of rich and poor, the
experiences of every region of the globe, the influences of the natural world as
well as human agency, and interactions among these. The tentacles of the world
economy are seen to extend to the politics of empires, nations, and localities; to
divisions and conflicts by social class, race, and ethnicity; to gendered divisions
of labor and decision-making power; and to the psychology of decisions at all
levels. Yet even as the world economy encompasses this vast web of factors, it
functions through a hierarchy of variables and interactions. That is, for all the
topics into which study of the world economy extends, it centers on economic
relations: reproduction of the economic order, production of goods and services,
exchange, consumption, and economic institutions. Maintaining an appropriate
balance among the key variables, the dominant interactions, and the complexity of
other significant factors is the task of the analyst of the world economy.
Although the neoclassical-neoliberal approach benefited from substantial
resources, the balance of intellectual factions in economic analysis has shifted
over the past six decades from admiration to critique of this “standard” frame-
work. World-economy analysis has gained strength through its increasing depth
and sophistication and also as it has expanded its spatial and temporal scope. The
260 Patrick Manning
specific historical and analytical assertions emerging from world-economy analy-

sis are gaining appreciation outside as well as within the group. The occasional
involvement of neoclassical-neoliberal scholars in historical and global analysis
and their periodic concern with social and institutional aspects of economic life
now resonates with the more systematic work of world-economy analysis in these
fields (Austin and Sugihara 2011; Acemoglu et al. 2002; Reinhart and Rogoff
2009; Ferguson 2009).
In the view of world-economy analysts, the “world” is the whole world (rather
than some privileged segment of it) – and that includes the historical world as well
as the present moment. The framework encompasses great advances in knowl-
edge about topics and sub-systems within it. For instance, the contributions to this
volume address a wide-ranging though not necessarily exhaustive sample of those
topics and sub-systems. This concluding chapter reviews some of those advances,
identifies topics in need of additional study, and offers comments on likely direc-
tions and relevant priorities of further work.
Most generally, the approach of world-economy analysts assumes the exist-
ence of a global economic system and a historical world economy. Using this
approach, scholars have balanced studies of the world economy of today succes-
sively against analyses of industrialization, the economic systems of early times,
and the early modern era. The work of Frank, Wallerstein, Arrighi, Amin, and
Chase-Dunn and Hall has been outstanding in this regard. The emphasis on the
overall economic system and its operation includes distinctions between core and
periphery, cycles in economic and political variables, and transformations over
time. The dynamics of core and periphery have now undergone thorough and
successful exploration. In addition, analyses have given increasing attention to
a range of scales (e.g. from local to global) in topic, space, and time. For each
scale, overall analysis requires attention to key variables and key interactions,
as well as to the nuances that come from considering the economic system in its
full complexity. As Robert Denemark in particular has emphasized, the analysis
gives fundamental attention to the accumulation of wealth and resources over the
long term – and to its concomitant of growing inequality (sometimes expressed in
terms of entropy) (see Chapter 3).
Analysis of the world economy necessarily distinguishes sub-topics and
explores their dynamics and interactions. There is no dependable hierarchy into
which to set these topical dimensions or sub-systems of the world economy,
because of their complex inter-relations. Here, however, is a brief listing of some
important sub-topics, working from those that are most strictly economic to those
mixed with political, social, cultural, and ecological variables, with notations
on how they have been discussed in recent studies including those within the
covers of this book. Commerce has been the principal focus of studies in the
world economy, for instance in Gunder’s (1998) ReOrient and in the chapters
in this volume addressing that study (Chapters 2 and 3). For recent centuries in
which data are more precise, it has been possible to link commerce to money and
finance. The remarkable continuity of the world’s money system, dominated by
Conclusion 261
silver from the seventeenth century, is under close study. Studies of finance are
expanding, and the recent crisis makes clear that much more study is needed of
worldwide patterns of finance and investment going far back in time (see Chapters
4–6 and 9). Economic cycles – with both short and long periods – have received
recurring attention, though with less definitive results. Of all the transformations,
understanding the changing nature of capital and capitalism remains a central task
– at the present moment but also for many moments in the past (see Chapter 9).
Systems of production and labor receive varying levels of attention in studies
of the world economy. Scholars experimented with the macro-level framework
of modes of production for a time, then set it aside. More immediately produc-
tive have been studies of individual commodities – textiles, metals, foodstuffs
– which reveal the continuities and transformations in inter-regional economic
linkages. Technology has not been a major focus in studies of the world economy.
Somewhat more attention has been given to the labor system, especially the sub-
stantial importance of slavery as well as wage labor, and many other forms of
impressments. Studies of consumption have not been central in the macro-level
focus on the world economy, but there has been substantial and growing attention
to the issue of distribution – within societies and across societies – of income
and wealth. Overall, such analysis emphasizes long-term growth and short-term
fluctuation in economic inequality (see Chapters 10–13).
In the interpretation of governance in the era of empires, world-economy ana-
lysts have moved past Eurocentrism to show the place of Asia, Latin America, and
Africa in economic affairs of each period. In the revised view, European hegemony
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is acknowledged (though set in context);
but European economies are shown to have grown later and more rapidly than
previously argued. Asian economies, in contrast, are now seen to have grown for
many centuries, to have led in production for global trade through the eighteenth
century, and to have weakened precipitously in the nineteenth century. And each
of these transformations is now explained through interactions rather than through
the inherent and enduring qualities of one civilization or another (see Chapters 6,
8, 11, and 12). The history of the economic hegemony of great nations, past and
present, is gradually being replaced by the history of a worldwide, interconnected
economic system within which leadership is disputed by competing social and
political interests (see Chapters 2–4, 6–8, 11, and 12).
Social dimensions of the world economy include social classes, community
structures, social movements, commercial and productive institutions, and the
recent expansion of interstate and global organizations (see Chapters 5–8 and
12). Migration studies have made clear that diaspora communities have parallel
importance but different dynamics from national communities. Anthropological
perspectives remain important in analysis of the world economy, by revealing
the impact of the changing world economy on families, systems of production,
changes in consumption patterns, and decay of ecological systems. The analysis
of ecology, widely recognized for its importance in principle, is increasingly gain-
ing attention in practical studies of the world economy (see Chapters 10 and 13).
262 Patrick Manning
What is to be the destiny of the world economy? The current wave of eco-
nomic fluctuations, in the context of immense population growth and successive
instances of exhaustion of natural resources, raises the likelihood that big changes
in the economic system are at hand. Four alternative scenarios come under con-
sideration in writings on the world economy. First is that future generations may
experience more of the same: that is, the possibility that the preceding experience
of accumulation with large and small cycles punctuated by hegemonic shifts will
continue into the foreseeable future. Frank and Chase-Dunn and Hall have done
most to show that an extension of previous system change is a possibility. The
second scenario is socialism: that social movements may seize the initiative and
reorganize the world economy with a dramatic shift toward equality. Chase-Dunn
and Hall, along with Amin and Wallerstein, articulate the possibility and the bene-
fits of a transition to socialism. The third scenario is that of a dramatic shift toward
inequality, in which a tiny elite expropriates and controls the rest of humanity.
Amin labels this as “barbarism”: in this volume he poses sharply the alternatives
of socialism and barbarism, and makes clear that barbarism – a system of extraor-
dinary and vigorously enforced inequality – is one possible consequence of the
present crisis. The fourth scenario is that of chaos – a wholesale transformation
or even collapse of the system because of financial, ecological, or other disasters.
Studies at the level of Big History, considering the experience of other species,
show that there are precedents for a chaotic sequel to the present crisis. That is, it
may be that the destiny of human society and the rest of the biosphere has already
been decided by natural forces.
No unified theory for the functioning and evolution of the world economy has
emerged, but world-economy analysis has developed an increasingly coherent
research agenda and a broadly shared approach to the study of economic interac-
tions and transformations. No single factor provides the essential motor of change
or the unique threat to human economic welfare. Rather it is the interaction of
numerous factors – each with its characteristic dynamics – that sets the trajectory
of the world economy.
Where is this work headed? One way to respond to this question is to identify
problems in the contemporary economy or in current analysis that are in need of
further study. Certainly the recent wave of financialization requires exploration
through a historically deep and geographically wide-ranging analysis of money
and finance. At the other end of the social scale, labor requires continuing and
imaginative study, getting beyond the recent preoccupation with wage labor to
include the interplay of household labor, various sorts of forced labor, the substan-
tial informal sector, and the growth of professionalized labor. Studies of ecology,
which have advanced dramatically in recent years, need to be linked more closely
to the world economy. And the state, which has undergone endless study, is in
need of still more study, but now more closely tied to an improved understanding
of the world economy.
For both state and civil society, we should assess the importance of policy and
ideology in determining the direction of systemic change. Quijano and Beverley,
Conclusion 263
in Chapters 7 and 8, respectively, have shown the importance of ideas in structur-

ing social systems and policy responses.
A more practical and less programmatic way to trace the trajectory of scholar-
ship on the world economy is to read and reread the work of the next generation
of scholars, notably as seen in Chapters 10–13 of this volume. These authors
contest the neoclassical-neoliberal theories that have previously held sway. They
systematically list the complications and details of the situations they investigate,
yet insist on big-picture questions and interpretations. Abbeloos (Chapter 10) on
the dilemmas of resource-exporting economies shows that the analysis has been
biased toward focus on state interests. Harris (Chapter 11) shows the economic
policy of the Iranian revolutionary government to have been relatively successful,
in effect “following Gunder Frank’s advice one decade at a time.” Song (Chapter
12) shows, through the case of South Korea, that “national development” depends
not simply on national policy but on the momentary conjuncture of the global eco-
nomic system. Taylor (Chapter 13) on Honduran families traces their migrations
and the transformation of their home life and finds implications at once in culture,
ecology, and labor. To summarize concisely, Abbeloos conducts an analysis link-
ing wide spaces; Harris explores Iranian revolutionary policy and the evolution of
Gunder Frank’s ideas over three decades of time; Song argues that Korean growth
depends on a wide range of issues, both national and global; and Taylor considers
the lives of rural Honduran families in several places and from several perspec-
tives. These scholars, and others working within the world-economy framework,
show a methodological dexterity and an interpretive breadth that can build on the
accomplishments of the past sixty years to advance the understanding of the world
economy.
Gunder Frank, in his early work, demonstrated that the economies of Latin
American and European regions interacted more deeply than had previously been
argued. In his final decade, he was able to document economic dynamics at the
planetary level, especially through interactions and shifting roles among Asian
and European economies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter
2). He thus played a substantial role in the development of the world-economy
approach. At the same time, this volume’s celebration of Gunder’s life, work,
and legacy extends logically to the generation of scholars who joined during the
1960s and 1970s in analysis of large-scale economic issues. The giants of critical
economic analysis – Frank, Wallerstein, Amin, Arrighi, and quite a few others –
had by the end of the 1970s established frameworks for an approach that was to
survive and thrive. Indeed, the initial success of their critique of capitalism and
colonialism clearly invites comparison with the earlier and somewhat parallel cri-
tique by writers who scrutinized worldwide economic issues in the early twentieth
century: Hobson (1938), Hilferding (1910), Lenin (1920), Luxemburg (1951),
and Schumpeter (1991). But the critical works of the early twentieth century took
the form of insightful individual investigations carried out during a two-decade
era of imperial collision: these critiques of empire and capitalism focused on the
authors’ own time and mostly on their home countries.
264 Patrick Manning
In contrast, the group that began work in the 1960s and 1970s was able to
carry on at length and generate an expanding corpus of investigation. That is, in
addition to making a mark on the era of the 1960s and 1970s, Gunder and his col-
leagues created a tectonic shift in scholarly work. They made a mark for all time
by elevating economic analysis beyond regional economic systems to explore a
global system and to launch the systematic analysis of its character and evolution.
The evolution of their work during long lives meant that, at maturity, they had
established the world economy as a comprehensive if not unitary field of study.
From this perspective, there is no doubt that Gunder’s work will go ahead. His
achievements and research questions remain on the agenda for world-economy
analysis. Yet how was it that Gunder’s work facilitated this advance? Were there
certain key types of analytical insight that advanced thinking about the world
economy? Did Gunder’s method of presenting his analysis rely on particular tech-
niques? Were there certain especially prominent effects of Gunder’s work? Here
are some suggestions as to the characteristic nature of his approach:
Robert Denemark characterizes Gunder’s analytical approach by listing four
main emphases, starting with Gunder’s focus on historical continuity and his
investigation of “horizontally integrated macrohistory” (see Chapter 3). Gunder
was able to link specific, neglected regions to the understanding of the world
economy. He did so most obviously for Latin America early in his career and for
East Asia in his later years; in between he made an incisive intervention on the
centrality of Central Asia. Second, Denemark emphasizes Gunder’s “inveterate
empiricism” – he liked theories but preferred facts. Third was the focus in his
many commercial studies on “multi-angular multi-linearity” or what Bergesen
calls “Frankian triangles” and what Gunder called “location, location, location.”
Fourth was Gunder’s emphasis on “entropy,” the presumption of a social entropy
parallel to thermodynamic entropy, such that expanding wealth brought poverty
and growing order brought disorder (see Chapter 2). In addition to these points
one may note Gunder’s attention to multiple economic linkages and long-term
cycles. Further, in his two-volume study of 1970s economic crisis, he sought to
sketch out a comprehensive analysis of the world economy (Frank 1980, 1981).
Without a doubt, Gunder’s succession of research tactics and strategies provides
models for continuing scholarship on the world economy.
In his mode of presentation, Gunder was a phrase-maker. Part of his phrase-
making was simply his joy in toying with words; part of it was a determined search
to come up with language that would draw attention to key elements of an argu-
ment. Not all of his phrases worked. Although Gunder’s research and underlying
analysis emphasized complex interactions, in reporting his results Gunder usually
tried to boil his complex analyses down to simple points: the development of
underdevelopment, the Asia-centered world economy of past and future, and his
developing skepticism about the concepts of capitalism and imperialism. In these
cases, he was ready to leave nuance aside to convey a major point. Increasingly,
Gunder presented his ideas through vigorous debate and reversal of previous posi-
tions. Through forceful debate, Gunder’s work facilitated broader discussions.
Conclusion 265
For instance, his views encouraged the rise of thinking about “dependency” in
several areas of cultural studies. Gunder was an explicit ally of popular social
movements – most effectively early on in Latin America but continuing to his
later years.
What is necessary for prolonging this work is expanded collaboration. For
scholars of the present and for future generations, the topic of the world economy
appears as an immense set of inter-related historical, regional, and functional
sub-systems. There exists a solid platform of data, analysis, and debate on which
to base future research. Energetic individual scholars can and surely will define
and complete large projects within this framework, yet collaboration has become
essential. Academic collaboration functions most basically through pairs and
triads of scholars working together to handle issues, either sharing the same range
of specializations or dividing their labor between different specialties. More gen-
erally, collaboration encourages openness to a range of voices – to researchers
and analysts from every corner of the world and from any ideological outlook.
(As a measure of progress along that line, the program of the 2008 conference in
Gunder’s memory had seventy-four participants based in fifteen different nations.)
Further, collaboration extends to creating institutions for discussion of common
issues – such as the Fernand Braudel Center, the Institute for Research on World
Systems (IROWS), the Council for the Development of Economic and Social
Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and the Global Economic History Network
(GEHN).5 Collaboration among disciplines is gradually expanding, though the
social-science disciplines that encompass the study of the world economy have
been slower to develop cross-disciplinary and collaborative work than either the
natural sciences or the humanities and arts.
Gunder’s own approach to collaboration was multifaceted. Most of his pub-
lications had a single author. He never was at the heart of a major, collaborative
university department. Yet in most of his work, collaboration of one sort or
another was central to its design and execution. Perhaps the essential point is that,
whether working on his own or in association with others, Gunder had a probing
and eclectic individual mind that dug into every corner of the world economic
system.
Finally, there is one more important element of world-economy analysis to
emphasize, as it has been practiced by Gunder Frank: the need for unsparing
critique of the current world economic order. The point is not to be oppositional
in principle, but to resist incorporation into the inertial tendency of any big insti-
tution to rationalize its current practices and downplay the error, inequity, and
oppression that result from its existence and actions. On this point the stakes are
surely higher than ever. Samir Amin (see Chapter 5) and Immanuel Wallerstein
(at the 2008 conference) expressed forceful views on current and future develop-
ments. Other contributions in this volume, in greater or lesser degree, express
critique of deficiencies in the world economic order and in policies governing
it. Gunder’s widely circulated essays on the world, 2000–2005, provide more of
the same. Gunder, who believed only in material change, made a difference in
266 Patrick Manning
our understanding of processes in the material world and also in our ideas. His
political critique of the looming crisis in financial and monetary affairs – sent off
in his last months – centered around one of his favorite metaphors for misdirected
leadership, the emperor’s new clothes (Frank 2005).
Notes
1 Among the most skilled and best known of these economists were the Polish econo-
mist Oskar Lange and the Soviet economist Evsei Lieberman. See Lange and Taylor
(1938); Liberman (1962).
2 The term “world-economy analysts” is of my own choosing and does not represent
any self-conscious school, and the differences among scholars I have grouped here
are significant. Nonetheless, I believe there is some validity to the broad groupings I
am sketching here.
3 Milton Friedman also recorded an often re-broadcast 1980 television series, Free to
Choose, broadcast by U.S. Public Television.
4 For critique of neoliberalism in theory and policy by authors especially in the United
States and Argentina, see Harvey (2005), Firmenich (2004), and Gatti (2004).
5 Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and
Civilizations (http://fbc.binghamton.edu), founded 1976; the Institute for Research on
World Systems (IROWS, http://www.irows.ucr.edu), founded 2002; and the Council
for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA, http://
www.codesria.org), founded in 1973. A further group is the World-Historical Systems
Theory Group within the International Political Economy Section of the International
Studies Association. Newly formed institutions of interest include the Network of
Global and World History Organizations (http://www.nogwhisto.org), a federation
of world-historical organizations based in five continental centers, and the Global
Studies Consortium (http://globalstudiesconsortium.org), a consortium of some thirty
universities worldwide that are developing interdisciplinary graduate study in global
studies.
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Index
Abbasi, M.J. et al. 200 Alliance for Progress 7

Abbeloos, Jan-Frederik xi, 17, 20n22, Althusserian Marxism 147
175–92 Amaru, Tupac 133
Abrahamian, Ervand 196, 197, 198 Amaya, Jorge Alberto 235, 236
Abu-Lughod, Janet 11, 12, 36, 41, 52, 53, Amid, M.J. and Hadjikhani, A. 204
54, 67, 69 Amin, S. et al. 12, 198, 199, 200
accumulation: capitalism and, irrational Amin, Samir xi, 7, 9, 15, 16, 19n18, 66,
process of 83; East/West comparison 83–96, 158, 207, 260, 262, 263, 266
and modes of 108–11; through Amsden, Alice 227n3, 227n4, 227n7
dispossession 83–4, 158–60, 219; Anderson, Perry 18n5, 65, 99
transformations in modes of 108–9; see Angola 6
also capitalism Anthony, David W. 101
Acemoglu, D. et al. 260 anthropological perspectives 17, 148, 239,
Adam Smith in Beijing (Arrighi, G.) 261
109–10, 113–14, 163 anti-capitalist forces 86, 222–3
Adams, Richard H. Jr. 249n10 anti-systemic movements 100, 112–13,
Adepoju, A. 249n10 115, 196–7, 203, 208
Adger, W. Neil 240, 242 Antisystemic Movements (Arrighi, G.,
Africa 6, 7, 10, 84, 123, 188; African Hopkins, T. and Wallerstein, I.) 111–12
National Congress (ANC) 200; Berg A-phase expansions 60, 155, 156, 162,
Report on (1981) 9; Copperbelt 163, 166
States 177–8, 188 Appadurai, Arjun 249n12
Afroeurasian world system 100, 105, 107 Appleyard, Reginald T. 240
Agostini, Claudio A. 192n16 Araníbar, Carlos 139n10
Agrawal, A. and Gibson, C.C. 240, 250n15 Ardao, Arturo 139n12, 139n13
agriculture: capitalism and agrarianism 84; Argentina 137, 160
expansion in Iran 203; operations in Arielism 133–4
Honduras, limits on 237 Arrighi, G. et al. 99, 112, 196, 208
Aguas Blancas 232, 233, 234, 237, 238, Arrighi, Giovanni 15, 16, 19n18, 20n20,
241–2, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 37, 87, 97, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114,
249–50n13, 249n4, 250n16 115, 115n6, 154, 158, 159, 163, 168,
Ahmadinejad, President Mahmoud 159 196, 260, 263
Allen, G.C. 188 Aryal, Jeetendra Prakash 240
270 Index
Asia 3, 4, 6, 10, 84, 207; “Asian Tigers” 8; austerity protests in Iran 201
development model in Korea 213–14; Austin, G. and Sugihara, K. 260
and Europe, relative wealth of 45; place Australia 176, 184
in history 57–63; see also Central Asia; authoritarianism 123, 143, 166–7, 218,
East Asia 222–3
Aston, T. and Philpin, C. 65 autocracy 34, 88, 203
astrophysics 126–7 autonomy 147, 151n5, 160, 169n8, 214,
Atlantic capitalism 83 227–8n10; economic autonomy 158;
Atlantic copper market: capital embedded autonomy, notion of 215,
accumulation, dependency and process 216, 217, 227n7; of individuals 122,
of 179, 189; commodification 181; 123, 124, 127, 129–30, 131; of Korean
connections and connection developmental state 222
mechanisms 175, 177–8, 189, Ayacucho, battle of (1824) 132
190; Copperbelt States 177–8,
188; dependency theory, capitalist Babones, Salvatore 20n19
system and spatial inequalities 179; Baechler, J. et al. 64
economic development, spatial duality Bagu, Sergio 136
in 178–9; economic transformations Bairoch, Paul 7, 44, 58
in 182–3; entrepreneurial elements, Balkans 121, 122
influence of 180–1; Global Value Ball, Simon 192n17
Chains Initiative 181–2, 191n12; Baltic, city-states on 100, 107
History Database of the Global Bandung Conference (1955) 4–5
Environment (HYDE) 185, 192n18; Bani-Sadr, Abdolhassan 197
imperialism, big business and 183; Banzar, General Hugo 139n20
institutional quality 176–7; London Baran, Paul A. 5, 6
Metal Exchange 184; multinational Barber, Benjamin R. 57
networks 184–7; national specialization, Barfield, Thomas J. 101, 102
international market and patterns Basch, L. et al. 247, 248
of 178; nationalizations, wave Bayat, Asef 196
of 188; natural resource intensity, Beasley-Murray, Jon. 149
national development and 175–6; Beckett, Samuel 151
Netherlands Environmental Assessment Before European Hegemony (Abu-Lughod,
Agency 185; New York Commodity J.) 11, 41, 52
Exchange (Comex) 187; ownership, Behdad, Sohrab 200, 201
power circuits and 180–2; political Bentley, Jerry H. 19n10, 53
transformations in 182–3; primary Benton, Lauren 192n22
production, comparisons of 183–4; Berg Report on Africa (1981) 9
production, multinational networks Bergesen, Albert J. xi, 16, 25–39, 31,
and 184–7; regional development, 39n2, 264
production chains and 187–8; relations Berkes, F. 248n1
among people and within societies 179, Bernal, Martin 66
189; resource abundance 176; resource Beverley, John xi–xii, 15, 17, 18n4, 20n19,
dependency 176–7, 178; resource 142–51, 262
intensity 176; sectoral exports, Biersack, A. and Greenberg, J.B. 239
development and character of 177; biotechnology 126–7
Shanghai Metal Exchange (SHME) Blaikie, P. and Brookfield, H. 233
187; spatial dimensions of copper Blaut, James 64
exploitation 182; spatial transformations Bolivia 139n20, 151n5, 160
over 20th century 182–8; state- Bondy, Augusto Salazar 139n17
centric approaches to development Bornschier, V. and Chase-Dunn, C. 107
studies 180–1; technological Boswell, T. and Chase-Dunn, C. 112, 114
transformations in 182–3, 191n9, Bourdieu, Pierre 234, 241
192n13; transnational production Boyd, Monica 249n11, 250n15
chains 181; US involvement in B-phase contractions 153–4, 155, 159–60,
development of 183 161, 162, 163, 164, 165–6, 167
Index 271
Braudel, Fernand 5, 9, 58, 61, 66, 67, 68, oligopolistic capitalism 84–5, 86–7,
69, 75n5 88, 89, 90–1, 94; pauperization and 83;
Brazil 11, 133, 136, 180, 203, 207; profit rates, crisis of 86–7; restorative
geopolitical influence of 165 processes, implementation of 90–1;
Brenner, Robert 27, 28, 36, 158, 169n6, science and technology, potential
178, 179, 219 of 93; senile capitalism 89; socialist
Bretton Woods system: collapse of 6; perspective on 88–92; societal dynamics
expansion and 155–6 of 36; Southern awakening and 91–2,
Brosius, J.P. et al. 240 94–5; Stiglitz Commission 91; systemic
Brown, Gordon 91 crises of 85–6, 87, 89, 90–1; vulgar
Brunnschweiler, C. and Bulte, E. 176, 177 economics and 90, 93; wasteful
Bryant, Raymond L. 239 consumption and 84, 93
Bulgaria 121 Capitalism and Underdevelopment (Frank,
bulk goods networks (BGNs) 98–9 A.G.) 7
Burawoy, Michael 250n15 Cardoso, F.H and Faletto, E. 147, 239, 245
Burt, Roger 192n14 Carey, Alex 157
Bush, George W. 13, 92, 158, 159 Caribbean, Spanish colonialism in 133
Carter, Jimmy 169n17
Callaghan, James 161 Castells, Manuel 208
Canada 12, 52, 183–4, 191n9 Castro, Fidel 139n17
Canclini, Néstor García 149 Castro-Gómez, Santiago 138n2
Candela, Alison 3, 13, 15, 55 Central Asia: centrality in world
capital: capital-imperialism, notion of 108; system 102, 104–5; Chinese expansion
impact of transnational flows on 241–2 in 111; evolution since Stone Age
capital accumulation: dependency and of 100–4
process of 179, 189; world crisis The Centrality of Central Asia (Frank,
of 198–9 A.G.) 12
capitalism: accumulation and, Cerro Azul Meámbar National Park
irrational process of 83; agrarianism (PANACAM), Honduras 232, 238, 240,
and 84; Atlantic capitalism 83; capitalist 241, 243, 244, 249–50n13
development in Korea 221–2; collective Cervantes, Miguel de 125
imperialism 87; consumption, ideology chaebol structure in Korea 224, 225
of 93; creative Marxism, renewal as Chakrabarty, Dipesh 143
antidote to 95–6; in crisis, strategies Chang, H.-J. and Yoo, C.-G. 227n6
for exit from 88; de-politicisation Chang, H.-J. et al. 227n6
and 92–3; dispossession, accumulation Chang, Ha-Joon 215, 216, 217, 218,
by 83–4; ecological dimension in 227n6, 227n8, 227n10
radical critique of 89–90; emancipation chaos in world economy, possibility of 262
of the people in answer to 92–6; Chapman, Anne 235
financial meltdown (2008) 85, 93–4; Charles V 125
financialization and 86–7; fundamental Chase-Dunn, C. and Hall, T. 41, 260, 262
logics of, need to overcome 90; Chase-Dunn, C. and Jorgenson, A.K.
globalization, imperialism and 83, 87, 115n3
88; hegemony of US, crisis for 84–5, Chase-Dunn, C. and Lerro, B. 108
90, 91; ideological alienation and 93; Chase-Dunn, C. and Mann, M. 115n2
imperialist capitalism, crisis of 84–5; Chase-Dunn, C. and Manning, S. 115n4
industrial capitalism 85; institutional Chase-Dunn, C. et al. 107, 112, 113
features and negative outcomes Chase-Dunn, Christopher xii, 15, 16, 19n9,
from 113–14; internationalism of 19n14, 36, 53, 97–116, 191n8
the people in answer to 88, 92–6; Chaudhuri, K.N. 51, 67, 69, 75n4, 77n10,
liberalism and 89–90, 92, 94–5; modern 77n11
capitalism, built-in crisis for 154; Chaudhuri, K.N. and Morineau, M. 75n4
monopolies and 87; nationalization, Cheung, Robin 76n8, 77n9, 77n11
socialization of oligopolies and 95; Chevalier, Michael 139n13
natural resources, plundering of 84; Chew, Sing 99
272 Index
Child, Sir Joshua 74 and 123–4; Economic Commission

Chile 1, 3, 7, 133, 135, 137, 180, 188; for Latin America (CEPAL) 137,
socialist government in 6 139n18; Euro-centered colonial/
Chimhowu, A. et al. 246 modernity 126–7, 138; Euro-centered
China 5, 11, 97, 156, 159, 188, 201, colonial/modernity, paradoxes
207; anti-capitalist revolution in 86; of 127–31; Euro-centered colonial/
central government, system of 109–10; modernity, production of 127;
centrality to global system 104–5; core/ Eurocentric myopia and 121–3;
periphery interaction in 102; Cultural Eurocentrism, questions for 123, 131;
Revolution in 6; cycles of dynasties Eurocentrism and Latin America, post
in 104; geopolitical influence of 165; World War II 136–8; exploitation, social
isolation of Chinese civilization 101; relation of 129; frustrated decoloniality,
power of, hegemonic change and 159, Indo-America and 134–6; historical
160, 165; statocracy in 88; United States implications of Eurocentrization of
resources in 162; upward mobility coloniality of power 124–6; Iberian
in 106; world-system theory, insertion power 124–5, 127–8; Ibero-American
into 37 debate 133, 134; identity, search
Chirot, Daniel 121 for 133–4; Indo-America and frustrated
Christian, David 102 decoloniality 134–6; industrial
cities, relative size and importance revolution 125–6, 130; knowledge,
of 104–7 production of 128–9, 130–1; Latin
citizenship 127, 131, 132, 137, 149; America, coloniality of power
emptiness of 122; fundamental and 123–4; Latin America, development
institution of political order 129–30 and dependence in, debates about 121;
civil society 142, 148–9, 150, 211–12, 216, Latin America, Eurocentrism and, post
262–3 World War II 136–8; Latin America,
Civilizations and World Systems social action and reflection in, new
(Sanderson, S., Ed.) 54 movements of 120–1; Latin America,
Clarence-Smith, W.G. and Topik, S.C. subversion of Eurocentrism in 132–4;
191n10 liberal democracy 122–3; liberty 129–
Clark, Gregory 112 30; Mexican Revolution 135; military
Clark, Robert 46 dictatorships 135; nation-state, public
class power relations 221, 222, 223 authority of 123; nobility, ideology
Cliggett, Lisa 249n10 of 124–5; oppression 125; power
Clinton, William J. 92, 201 patterns, axes of 124; racialized
Cohen, Jeffrey H. 236, 239, 247, 250n15 identities, self-depreciation of 131;
Cohen, J.H. et al. 240, 247 scientific knowledge, development
Cold War 4, 6, 142, 150, 155–6, 159, 162, of 126–7; social domination, patterns
215, 221–2; end of 10; post-Cold War of 124–5; social equality 129–30;
environment 57 social existence and ambiguity
collaboration 41, 52, 53, 54, 249–50n13; of 130; socialism 123; subjectivity,
Frank’s approach to 265 confrontation of controls on 129;
collective imperialism 84, 87 subversion of Eurocentrism in Latin
Collier, P. and Hoeffler, A. 176, 191n1 America 132–4; technical knowledge,
Collins, Randall 54, 99 development of 126–7; violence 125;
colonial/modernity, paradoxes of: wealth, transfer of 125
Arielism 133–4; astrophysics 126–7; Columbus, Christopher 65, 76n9
autonomy of individuals 129–30; commerce 16, 70, 124, 125, 244, 260;
biotechnology 126–7; citizenship, commercialism 113; tributary empires,
emptiness of 122; citizenship as commercialization of 108–9
fundamental institution of political commodification 145, 150; agents of 100;
order 129–30; coloniality of power, copper market 181; world system 113
deepening of 130–1; coloniality of Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism
power, Eurocentrization of 124–6; (Gereffi, G. and Korzeniewicz, M.,
coloniality of power, Latin America Eds.) 181–2
Index 273
communicative rationality 143 cultural correlative 147–8

community 128, 261; community-based cultural creolization 148
natural resource management (CBNRM) cultural determination 146–7
236, 240; concept in context of natural cultural diversity 150
resource management 232, 233–4, cultural modernity 142, 143, 146, 148
236–8, 239–41, 241–2, 244, 246, 247, Cultural Revolution in China 6
248–9n3, 249–50n13, 249n7, 249n9, cultural studies 17, 147, 148, 149, 265
250n15; international community 92; Cumings, Bruce 208
networks of, transnational extension of Curtin, Philip 110
233 cycling, process of 99
comparative advantage 161, 178, 206–7
Comparative Civilizations Review 54 da Gama, Vasco 65, 76n9
Congo 177, 183, 184, 185, 188, 191n9, Dabashi, Hamid 197
192n17 Dae-Jung, Kim 225, 228n15
connections, connection mechanisms Davis, Graham 177, 189
and 175, 177–8, 189, 190 de-historicization 220
consumer revolution 163 de Klerk, F.W. 200
consumption 136, 163, 164, 204, 221, de-politicization 92–3
240, 242, 246, 247, 250n17, 259; de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui
diversity in 167; fuel consumption 160; Salkamaywa, Juan 133, 139n10
household consumption 245; ideology De Ste. Croix, G.E.M. 65
of 93; mass consumption 179; studies decoloniality, Indo-America and frustration
of 261; subsidization of 201; wasteful of 134–6
consumption 84 decolonialization 6, 132, 134–6, 138
Conway, D. and Cohen, J.H. 239, 247 democracy 10, 11, 86, 89, 92, 114,
Cooper, Frederick 189, 190 115, 134–5, 136; bourgeois
Copperbelt States 177–8, 188 democracy 90, 92; crisis of 157–8;
core - periphery 46, 48–9, 83–4, 163, 203, democratic movements 94, 96;
233, 239; connections between 178–9, democratic practice 93; democratization
181, 191n7; dynamics of 260; Frank’s of developmental state 218, 223–4,
triangular perspective on 27, 28, 30–1, 225; electoral democracy 88, 93; liberal
36–7; hierarchies 99; world systems democracy 89, 90, 122, 123; social
evolution, East and West in 97, 99, 102, democracy 85, 89, 95, 114, 123, 142,
106–7, 111 156
corruption 8, 227n9 Denemark, R. et al. 19n9
Council for the Development of Economic Denemark, Robert xii, 15, 16, 19n9, 41–9,
and Social Research in Africa 55, 260, 264
(CODESRIA) 265, 266n5 Deng Xiaoping 159, 201
Counter-Reformation 124, 125 dependency 2, 15, 36, 120, 147–8,
Cramer, Christopher 191n1 245–8, 265; and capital accumulation,
La Crise, Sortir de la Crise du Capitalisme process of 179, 189; resource
ou Sortir du Capitalisme en Crise dependency 176–7, 178
(Amin, S.) 96 dependency theory 17, 36, 97, 179, 197–8;
Crisis in the Third World (Frank, A.G.) 10 Althusserian Marxism and 147; basic
Crisis in the World Economy (Frank, A.G.) premise of 143; capitalist system and
10 spatial inequalities 179; center stage in
Critique and Anti-critique (Frank, A.G.) 10 Latin American history and policy 142,
critiques of Eurocentrism 11, 47, 52, 66, 147; civil society 149; communicative
68, 120, 136, 138 rationality 143; cultural citizenship 149;
Crowson, Philip 182, 188 cultural correlative 147–8; cultural
Crozier, M. et al. 157 creolization 148; cultural
Cuba 5, 6, 121, 133, 134, 137, 142; determination 146–7; deterritorialization
Revolution in 7 of identity 149; development,
cultural citizenship 149–50 capitalism, modernity and 145,
274 Index
150–1; diversity without equality 150; Durkheim, Émile 31

economic development, inhibition Dutch Republic 107
of 143; feudalism to capitalism,
transition from 144, 145; globalization, East and West in world system 97–115
transculturation and 149–50; East Asia 156, 219, 221; empires and
Guatemala, armed struggle in 145–6; territories in 102–3; evolution since
interchangeability 145; market society, Stone Age 100–4; rising to centrality
development and 149; modernity, again 110; upward mobility in 106;
desirability of 143; modernity and world revolutions 111–12; world
and 142–51; multitude, Hardt and revolutions and 111–12
Negri’s concept of 144–5; nation- Eastern Europe 122, 123
state and ‘development,’ equation Eban, Abba 155
between 143; peasant rebellion, British ecology 8–9; ecological dimension in
India and 144; post-hegemony 149; radical critique of capitalism 89–90;
postmodernist social theory 149; world-economy analysis and 261, 262
proletarianization 145; Sandinista Economic Commission for Latin America
land reform policy 146–7; social (CEPAL) 137, 139n18
control 147; socialism and capitalism, economic cycles 60–1, 168, 261
argument between 142–3, 150–1; economic development 5, 33, 43–4,
state socialism, apparent failure 63, 162, 166, 169n8, 175, 177, 247;
of 148–9; Third World in economic inhibition of 143; in Iran 201; in
order 143; tradition, modernity Korea 213, 216, 218; spatial duality
and 149; transculturation 148, 149–50; in 178–9
underdevelopment of the periphery 143; economic institutions of China 109–10
ungovernability 143–4, 148 Economic Planning Board in Korea 218
Dependent Accumulation and economic transformation, copper market
Underdevelopment (Frank, A.G.) 9 and 182–3
deregulation 8, 9, 11 The Economist 200
development: reconstruction of Economy and Society (Parsons, T. and
developmental state in Korea 221–5 Smelser, N.J.) 5
developmental state theories see Korea Ecuador 150, 160
Diaz, Arrivillaga 233 Edelman, Marc 239
disembedded markets 113 Egypt 6, 203; first cities in 105
dispossession, accumulation through 83–4, Ekholm, K. and Friedman, J. 108
158–60, 219 Ekholm, Kaisa 54
distribution: capital distribution 233; Elvin, Mark 111
distributional equity of economic Empire (Hardt, M. and Negri, A.) 144–5
processes 206, 241, 248; focus entrepreneurs 180–1, 192n17, 216,
on 261; geopolitical distribution of 227–8n10, 241
coloniality 121; global distribution entropy 46, 48–9, 153–4, 167, 169n15,
of commodity chains 182; income 260, 264
distribution 13, 202–3; land environmental causes of
distribution 146, 235, 247–8; power emigration 239–40
distribution 239; of social capital 241, environmental change 8–9, 9–10, 84
248; wealth distribution 234; work, environmental crises 11, 49, 87, 166
distribution of 129 environmental degradation 233, 235
diversity without equality 150 environmental economics 240, 245
Djait, Hichem 61, 66, 67 environmental education 232, 237, 245,
Dobb, Maurice 5, 65; Dobb-Sweezy 249–50n13
controversy 5, 9 environmental exhaustion 161
dominance of Eurocentrism 57, 63 environmental impacts of remittances 234,
dos Santos, Theotonio 138n1, 245 242, 245, 246
Dubai 207 environmental recovery 243
Durand, J. et al. 244, 246 environmental sustainability 237
Index 275
environmental triggers 48 financialization 160–5; exploration of

Escobar, Arturo 138n2 financialization, need for 262; financial
Euro-centered colonial/modernity 126–7, crisis (1997-8) in Korea 218, 223;
138; paradoxes of 127–31; production financial liberalization in Korea 217–18,
of 127 223; financial meltdown (2008) 85,
Eurocentralization 128 93–4
Eurocentrism 19n15, 109–10, 148, 261; Fine, Ben 227n2
break from 17, 66; coloniality of Firmenich, Mario Eduardo 266n4
power and historical implications, Fitzpatrick, John 111
Eurocentricizing of 124–6; ‘common Florida International University 13
knowledge’ of 44–5; critiques of 11, 47, Fogel, R.W. and Engerman, S.L. 7
52, 66, 68, 120, 136, 138; distortions Foran, John 197
of 57, 66; dominance of 57, 63; of Ford, Gerald 157
European ‘exceptionalism’ 69; global Frank, A.G. and Dalton, G. 235
historical processes beyond 2–3; in Frank, A.G. and Gills, B.K. 12, 19n13,
historical analysis 43, 63, 65, 68, 108; 19n14, 36, 105, 115n5, 181, 191n3,
humanocentric alternative to, search 191n7
for 57; Latin America and, post World Frank, Andre Gunder 18n8, 19n9, 19n14,
War II 136–8; of Marxist economic 19n16, 19n18, 25, 26, 31, 37, 39n1,
history 65–6, 108; and misinterpretation 41, 42, 169n4, 170n20; birth and
of Afro-Asian participation 63–9; early life 4; capitalism, accumulation
myopia of 121–3; ‘orientalism’ and 66; and 14; collaboration, approach to 265;
post-World War II, Latin American commemoration of 2; contributions
perspective 136–8; questions for 123, of, evaluation of 14; cycles in world
131; resistance to, language for 135–6; economy, work on 14; dependency,
in social theory 42; subversion in Latin beginnings in analysis of 2; dependency,
America of 132–4 thinking about 265; economic
European Union (EU): collective accumulation, explorations of 14;
imperialism of 87, 88, 90–1; formation economic dynamics, documentation
of 10–11 at world level 263–4; economic
Evans, P. et al. 227n6 growth and contraction, patterned
Evans, Peter 215, 216, 217, 227n6, 227n7, cycle of 153; entropy, emphasis
227n8 on 46, 48–9, 153–4, 167, 169n15,
exchange rates 6, 59, 199, 200, 201, 260, 264; Frankian triangles 25–39;
250n17 global historical processes, pioneer
exploitation 8, 123–4, 130, 225; capitalist of study of 2; historical continuity,
exploitation 227–8n10; institutions focus on 264; historical system, notion
of 122; of labour 85, 223; social relation of 14, 41–2, 54–5, 97; intellectual
of 128–9 activism 1; inveterate empiricism
of 44, 264; later years, retirement
Fagley, Robert 20n19 and 12–13; Latin America, importance
fair trade, notion of 113 for 120; Latin America, theorist
Fausto, Boris 121 and propagandist for revolution
female education in Iran 200 in 7–8; legacy of analysis of world
Ferguson, Niall 260 economy 3; life experiences 2–3, 18n2;
Fernand Braudel Center 9, 18n5, 265, macrohistory, horizontal integration
266n5 of 43, 44, 264; multi-angular multi-
Fernando VII 132 linearity (Frankian triangles), focus
Fetter, Bruce 192n20 on 25–39, 264; multidisciplinary
feudalism: to capitalism, transition approach 2, 12, 14; passion, wit
from 144, 145; feudal relations of and 2; phrase-making skills 264–5;
production 198 Pittsburgh Conference (2008) 14–16;
finance: capitalism and prolongation of work of 264–5; as
financialization 86–7; collapse of rebel 1; relevance, continuing of
276 Index
thought of 2; “Requiem for a Reader” Global Value Chains Initiative 181–2,

10; revolutionary enthusiasm 7–8; sharp 191n12
edge to arguments of 10; simplification globalization: from below, advocacy
of descriptions of complex for 114; imperialism and 83, 87, 88;
interactions 264–5; synthesis of world transculturation and 149–50; world
economic argument, role in 14; times economy and 10–11
of 1; underdevelopment, beginnings in globology 28–9, 30, 31; transition from
analysis of 2; underdevelopment, on sociological to globological theory 36
social movements and 7; undergraduate Goldring, Luin 244
studies 5; world citizen 3; world Goldstein, Joshua S. 61
economic order, call for unsparing Goldstone, Jack A. 60
critique of 265–6; and world Gorbachev, Mikhail 200
economy 3–14; world system under Goulart, President João 7
Asian hegemony 50–80 governance, interpretation of 261
Frank, Fiona 52 Gowan, Peter 219
Frank, Miguel 52 Gracia, J.J.E. and Jaksic, I. 139n11
Frank, Paul 55 Gramsci, Antonio 93, 144
Frente Sandinista (FSLN) 146–7 Great Depression 1, 85
Freud, Sigmund 95 The Great Divergence (Pomeranz, K.) 11,
Friedman, Jonathan 19n9, 54 44–5, 48
Friedman, Milton 5, 7, 9, 18n8, 179, 266n3 Greece 34, 63, 121
Friedman, Thomas 153, 205 Grew, Raymond 190
Frondizi, Risieri 139n17 Griffin, Keith 191n5
Fuentes, Marta 3, 7, 12 Grosfoguel, Ramón 138n2
Furtado, Celso 121, 138n1 Gross national income per capita (GNIpc)
comparisons 201–3
G20 London Summit (2009) 90 Grundrisse (Marx, K.) 7
Garbo, Greta 18n2 Guam 133, 134
Gatti, Mario 266n4 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe 132–3,
geographical determinism 31, 38, 176 139n10
geopolitics 30–1, 38–9, 165 Guatemala 146–7; armed struggle in 145–6
geostrategies 38–9 Gugler, Josef 249n10
Gereffi, G. and Korzeniewicz, M. 181 Guha, Ranajit 135, 144
Gereffi, G. et al. 191n11 Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 250n15
Gernet, Jacques 68 Gutenberg, Johann 63
Ghosh, B.N. 178
Gills, Barry K. xii–xiii, 1–20, 12, 15, 16, Habermas, Jürgen 143
19n9, 20n19, 41, 50–80 Haitian Revolution (1804) 132
Gills, B.K. and Frank, A.G. 12, 16, 19n11, Hall, John A. 64, 102
19n13, 19n17, 166, 167 Hall, Thomas D. xiii, 15, 16, 19n9, 19n14,
Gills, Dong-Sook 52 36, 53, 97–116
Gilly, Adolfo 139n14 Halperin, Sandra 200
Glick Schiller, N. et al. 239 Hamashita, Takeshi 111
Global Economic History Network Hanson, Victor Davis 34
(GEHN) 12, 265 Hapsburg Empire 107, 125
global economic system, assumption of Harberger, Arnold 18n8
existence of 260 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 144, 145
global geography, world trade triangles Harris, Kevan xiii, 17, 20n22, 196–208,
and 38 263
global historical processes beyond Harrop, Martin 55
Eurocentrism 2–3 Hart-Landsberg, M. and Burkett, P. 228n14
global justice movement 112–13 Harte, N.B. 63
global left, rerise of 112–13 Harvey, David 159, 161, 219, 266n4
global social influence, contradictions in Hawley, Amos 102
contentions for 8 Heeren, A.H.L. 76n9
Index 277
Hegel, G.W.F. 149 Hitler, Adolph 38

hegemonic change 153–69; A-phase Hobsbawm, Eric 183
expansions 155, 156, 162, 163, 166; Hobson, John A. 263
B-phase contractions 153–4, 155, Hodgson, Marshall G.S. 61, 64, 67, 69
159–60, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165–6, Honduras: agricultural operations, limits
167; Bretton Woods expansion 155–6; on 237; Aguas Blancas 232, 233, 234,
change, underlying forces creating need 237, 238, 241–2, 243, 244, 245, 246,
for 154; China, power of 159, 160, 247, 248, 249–50n13, 249n4, 250n16;
165; consumer revolution 163; crisis capital, impact of transnational flows
(1970s) and US order restoration 156–7; on 241–2; Cerro Azul Meámbar
democracy, “crisis” of 157–8; National Park (PANACAM) 232,
dispossession, accumulation through 238, 240, 241, 243, 244, 249–50n13;
(1980s) 158–60; financialization, colonialization, history of 233;
collapse of 160–5; India, power community, concept in context of
of 159; innovation, areas of 162–3; natural resource management 232,
interwar depression 155–6; Iran, 233–4, 236–8, 239–41, 241–2, 244,
status of 159; Japan, crisis for 164; 246, 247, 248–9n3, 249–50n13,
Keynesian Bretton Woods Order 249n7, 249n9, 250n15; community-
(KBWO) 155, 156; Kondratieff based natural resource management
pattern of disturbances (K-waves) 153, (CBNRM) 236, 240; dependency
154, 165–6, 167–9; Latin America, or remittance-based development?
experiment with autonomy 160; 245–8; economic capital, finance
Minsky moment 157, 160–5, 169n10; of 234; emigration and remittances
modern capitalism, built-in crisis among hillside farmers 235–6;
for 154; neoliberalism and 156–7, 159, environmental degradation 233;
160, 161, 162, 163, 164–5, 166, 169; hillside farmers, emigration and
order and profitability, maintenance remittances among 235–6; hydroelectric
of 154; Pax Americana 155; profits projects 236; Inter-American
and hegemony, US and restructuring Development Bank 236, 245–6, 250n18;
global system 156–7; Russia, decline labour lost, complications of 233–4;
and recovery of 159–60; spatial fixes land distribution, inequity in 235;
(1980s) 158–60; unipolar world, US microwatershed management 236–7,
hegemony in 158–9, 165; US economic 243; migration, rural to urban 235–6;
power, erosion of 163–4; USSR, migration and remittances, effects
collapse of 158–9 of 242–5; Multilateral Investment
hegemonic succession wars 38 Fund 236, 245–6, 250n18; policy
hegemony: global structure and 37–8; of and practice, impact of transnational
US, crisis for 84–5, 90, 91 flows on 241–2; political ecology of
Helleiner, Eric 169n8 transnationalism 239–41; remittance-
Henry the Navigator 109 based development, dependency
Hilferding, Rudolf 263 or? 245–8; remittances 233, 234;
Hilgerdt, Folke 44 remittances, emigration among hillside
Hilton, Rodney 9, 65 farmers and 235–6; rural poverty 235;
Hindess, B. and Hirst, P. 9 rural to urban migration 235–6;
Hiro, Dilip 199, 200 Santa Rosa 232, 233, 234, 237, 238,
historical analysis, Eurocentrism in 43, 63, 242–3, 244, 246, 248, 249–50n13;
65, 68, 108 social capital, finance of 234; social
historical implications of Eurocentrization remittances 234; study site, dynamics
of coloniality of power 124–6 of 236–9; transnational flows, impacts
historical perspective on world economy, on capital and practices 241–2;
move towards 36–7 transnationalism, political ecology
historical world economy, assumption of of 234–5, 239–41; underdevelopment,
existence of 260 history of 233; United States, migration
History Database of the Global to 236; watershed-impacting practices
Environment (HYDE) 185, 192n18 (WIP) 234, 236, 241, 242, 244,
278 Index
247, 248–9n3; watershed-impacting innovation 54, 97, 99, 102, 161, 162–3;
practices (WIP), effects of migration technological innovation 155, 156, 163,
and remittances on 242–5; watershed 164, 166
management 234, 238, 240, 241, Institute for Globalization and Social
244, 247; watershed management, Movements (IGSO) 168
transnational migration and 232–48 Institute for Research on World Systems
Honeychurch, W. and Amartuvshin, C. 101 (IROWS) 265, 266n5
Hoodfar, H. and Assadpour, S. 200 institutional linkages of state and market in
Hoover Institution 9 Korea 215–18, 225–6
Hopkins, T. and Wallerstein, I. 181 institutional quality 176–7
Hopkins, Terence 111, 196 institutionalist political economy 215–16,
Hornborg, Alf 46 227–8n10
horses, domestication of 101 intellectual contestation, resurgence of 10
horticultural settlements, development Inter-American Development Bank 236,
of 100–1 245–6, 250n18
Howell, Nancy 12, 52 interchangeability 145
Hu Jintao, President 91 interchiefdom systems 99
Hugo, Graeme 240 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 4,
humanocentric alternative to Eurocentrism, 161–2, 218
search for 57 International Studies Association 11, 19n9,
Humphrey, John 181 43, 54, 255n5
Hung, Ho-Fung 110 internationalism of the people 88, 92–6
hunter-gatherer pastoralism 101 interwar depression 155–6; see also Great
Huntington, Samuel 57, 157 Depression
Hussein, Saddam 10, 159 Iran 8; agriculture, expansion of 203;
hydroelectric projects in Honduras 236 anti-systemic movements and 196–7;
austerity protests 201; autocracy in 203;
Iberia: Iberian power 124–5, 127–8; Ibero- birthrate, lowering of 200; capital
American debate 133, 134 accumulation, world crisis of 198–9;
identity: deterritorialization of 149; comparative advantage within world
racialized identities, self-depreciation economy 206–7; dependent capitalist
of 131; search for 133–4 development 197–8; dependent
ideological alienation 93 underdevelopment 198; exchange rate
Imlah, Albert 44 normalization 200; exports and imports
imperialism: big business and 183; by region 207; female education 200;
imperialist capitalism, crisis of 84–5; feudal relations of production 198;
West and China compared 111 five-year plan (1989-1994) 200;
import substitution 203–4, 206–7, 222 geopolitical influence of 165; GNIpc
India 11, 203, 207; geopolitical influence comparisons 201–3; human capital
of 165; power of 159 resources, improvements in efficiency
Indo-America 134–6 of 205; import substitution, expansion
industrial capitalism 85 of 203–4, 206–7; independent
industrial development 137, 221–2 development possibility 198; Iran-
industrial revolution 125–6, 130 Iraq War (1980-88) 199; Iran-Libya
inequality 2, 48, 189, 239, 260; Sanctions Act (1996) 201; Iranian
economic inequality 4, 11, 261; Revolution, causes and nature of 197;
income inequality 242; interfamilial Iranian Revolution, effects of 196–7,
inequality 244–5; possibility of 198, 208; Iranian Revolution, problem
‘barbarism’ of 262 of 196; labour-intensive strategies 199;
informal institutions in Korea 216 manufacturing in, sectoral shares 206;
information networks (INs) 98, 102 political ostracization 201; populist
Inner Asian Frontiers of China (Lattimore, nationalism based on religious
O.) 104 foundations in 198–9; poverty
Index 279
rates 204; privatization of state- Kirch, Patrick V. 99

owned enterprises 200; public Kissinger, Henry 197, 201
works projects 200; realpolitik 201; knowledge, production of 128–9, 130–1
self-sufficiency 199; social policies, Koltashov, Vassily 168, 169
effect on poverty reduction 205; Kondratieff pattern of disturbances
socio-political instability, fear of 204; (K-waves) 153, 154, 165–6, 167–9
socio-political trajectory 196, 198, 208; Kondratieff, Nikolai 153, 154, 167, 168,
state power, world economic forces 169
and 200; status of 159; technology Korea 201, 202–3, 207; Asia development
transfer 206; trade flows, reorientation model in 213–14; authoritarian
of 207; urbanization 200; wartime political regime, rise of 222–3;
mobilization 199; welfare-warfare capitalist development in 221–2;
alliance in 199–200, 203–4; World Bank chaebol structure 224, 225; class
initiatives 200–1 power relations 222; de-historicization
Iraq 10 of social conditions 220;
Israel 6 democratization of developmental
Italy 122; city-states in 100, 107 state 218, 223–4, 225; developmental
state and limits of state-centered
Jalée, Pierre 6 Marxism 218–20, 226; developmental
Jameson, Fredric 151n3 state theories 213–15; dispossession,
Jansen, Hans G.P. 235 accumulation through 219; Economic
Jansen, H.G.P. et al. 234, 235, 243 Planning Board 218; financial
Jansen, H.G.P., Pender, J. et al. 235, 244 crisis (1997-8) 218, 223; financial
Japan 11, 188, 219; collective imperialism liberalization 217–18, 223; import
of 87, 88, 90–1; crises for 164; upward substitute industrialization 222;
mobility in 106 industrial development in Japanese
Jenkins, J. Craig 239 colonial period and afterwards 221–2;
Jeong, Seong-Jin 224, 228n11, 228n12, informal institutions 216; institutional
228n13 linkages of state and market 215–18,
Johnson, Chalmers 227n3, 227n4 225–6; institutionalist political
Jones, E.L. 64 economy 215–16, 227–8n10; market,
Jones, Jeffrey 244 developmental state theories and 213–
José Torres, General Juan 139n20 15, 225–6; market, institutional linkages
Journal of World History 12, 53–4 of state and 215–18, 225–6; market-
centred approach to development
Kagarlitsky, Boris 153–70, 169n11 in 214; national development, notion
Kaldor, Mary 114 of 211, 212, 213, 217, 218, 219;
Kaplinsky, R. and Morris, M. 191n10 neoliberal approach to development
Kaplinsky, Raphael 191n11, 191n12 in 214; neoliberal imperialism 219–20;
Karl, Terry 177 neoliberal transition in 211–26;
Kautsky, Karl 145 reconstruction of developmental state
Kay, Cristóbal 178 in 221–5; social formations 212–13;
Kearney, Michael 239, 250n15 state, embedded autonomy of 217;
Keddie, Nikki R. 197, 200, 201 state, institutional linkages of market
Kees Klein Goldewijk 185 and 215–18, 225–6; state-centered
Kelly, T.D. 184 Marxism, limits of 218–20, 226;
Kennedy, Paul 164 state-market relations 214–15, 216–17,
Keynes, John Maynard 83, 86, 89, 90, 91 225; transformation of developmental
Keynesian Bretton Woods Order (KBWO) state in 221–5; welfare, subordination
155, 156 of 224–5; World Bank 213, 218, 226n2;
Keynesian economics 4, 5, 6 world system theory 211, 212, 213, 226,
Khamene’i, Ayatollah 200 226n1
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 196, 200, Korea Herald 224
201
280 Index
Korzeniewicz, R.P. and Martin, W. 181 Lumpenbourgeoisie, Lumpendevelopment

Kradin, N.N. et al. 102 (Frank, A.G.) 7
Kradin, Nikolai N. 102 Luxemburg, Rosa 263
Kuwait 10
K-waves 61, 153, 165–6, 167, 168–9 Macisco, John J. Jr. 249n11
Kyle, David 239 McNeill, J.R. and McNeill, W.H. 102
McNeill, William H. 53, 64, 101
Laclau, Ernesto 147, 150, 179 macrohistory, horizontal integration of 43,
Lander, Edgardo 138n2 44, 264
Lange, O. and Taylor, F.M. 266n1 Maddison, Angus 11, 19n11, 44, 45
Lange, Oskar 266n1 Mair, Victor H. 101
Lao-Montes, Agustín 138n2 Maldonado, Nelson 138n2
Latin America 2, 7–8, 10, 14, 84, 95, Mallon, Florencia 151n1
121; coloniality of power and 123–4; Maloney, Suzanne 199
dependency theory, history and Mandel, Ernest 167
policy in 142, 147; development Il Manifesto 88
and dependence in, debates Mann, Michael 99
about 121; Economic Commission Mann, Thomas and Herman 18n2
for 5; Eurocentrism and, post World Manning, Patrick xiii, 1–20, 20n19, 189,
War II 136–8; experiment with 249n11, 258–66
autonomy 160; Frank as theorist and Manoilescu, Mihail 121
propagandist for revolution in 7–8; Mao Zedong 111
importance for Frank 120; social action Marcos, Ferdinand 9
and reflection in, new movements Marcus, George E. 242, 250n15
of 120–1; subversion of Eurocentrism Mariátegui, José Carlos 136, 139n15, 145,
in 132–4 146
Latin America: Underdevelopment or market: capitalist market 212, 233, 245,
Revolution? (Frank, A.G.) 7 247; developmental state theories
Lattimore, Owen 104 and 213–15, 225–6; institutional
Lee, Byeong-Cheon 215, 216, 217, 218, linkages of state and 215–18,
224, 227n6, 227n7, 227n8, 227n10, 225–6; market-centred approach to
228n16 development in Korea 214; state-market
LaFeber, Walter 169n8 dichotomy 217, 218, 227–8n10
Leitner, Jonathan 192n14 market cycles 154, 167
Lenin, Vladimir I. 85, 86, 263 market exchange 113, 179
Levine, M. et al. 101 ‘market magic’ 113
Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. 239, 240 market socialism 114
Levitt, Peggy 234, 239, 240, 241 market society: capitalism and 89;
Lewis, W.A. 44 development and 149; emergence in
liberal democracy 122–3 China of 110–11, 113–14
liberalism and capitalism 89–90, 92, 94–5 Márquez, G. et al. 148
liberty 129–30 Marshall Plan 4
Lieberman, Evsei (Liberman, Ye. G) 266n1 Martí, José 133, 135
Linduff, Katheryn 101 Marwick, Arthur 200
Liu, X. and Shafer, L.N. 101 Marx, K. and Engels, F. 191n2
Lo, Dic 227n2 Marx, Karl 1, 7, 9, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 37,
Loker, William M. 234, 235, 243 38, 41, 65, 83, 85, 89, 90, 93, 95, 109,
London Metal Exchange 184 143, 144, 145, 146, 167
The Long Twentieth Century (Arrighi, G.) Marxism 30, 96, 212, 213, 218;
110 Althusserian Marxism 147; creative
Lopez, R. and Valdes, A. 239–40 Marxism 95; creative Marxism, renewal
Love, Joseph LeRoy 121 as antidote to 95–6; Eurocentrism
Lugones, Maria 138n2 of Marxist economic history 65–6,
Index 281
108; international Marxism 145; neo- Moo-Hyun, Roh 225

Smithian Marxism 28, 36; theoretical Mottaki, Manouchehr 207
Marxism 66 Mufson, Steven 160
Massey, Douglas S. 242 Mughal Empire 52, 58, 59–60, 62, 63, 67,
Matos, G.R. 184 74
Mauro, Frederic 79 multi-angular multi-linearity (Frankian
Maximilian I of Mexico 133 triangles) 25–39, 264
Menchú, Rigoberta 146, 151n2 multidisciplinarity 2, 12, 14, 17
Mendez, Julin 235 multilateral global governance 114–15
Merkel, Angela 91 Multilateral Investment Fund 236, 245–6,
Mesopotamia 105 250n18
Metzler, Mark 61 multinational networks 184–7
Mexico 7, 133, 156, 203; Revolution multitude, Hardt and Negri’s concept
in 133, 135 of 144–5
Meyer, J. et al. 31 Mussolini, Benito 121
microwatershed management in myopia of Eurocentrism 121–3
Honduras 236–7, 243 Myrdal, Gunnar 9
Middle East 11, 35, 206
Mignolo, Walter 138n2 Napoleon Bonaparte 34, 38
migration: migration studies 261; and Napoleon III 133
remittances, effects of 242–5; rural to Napoleonic France 34, 107
urban in Honduras 235–6 nation-state: and ‘development,’ equation
Mikesell, Raymond F. 185 between 143; public authority of 123
Milani, Abbas 197, 201, 203 national development, notion of 211, 212,
military dictatorships 135 213, 217, 218, 219
Mill, John Stuart 83 national independence, achievements of 6
Ming Dynasty 52, 58, 59–60, 62, 109, 110, national specialization, international
111 market and patterns of 178
Minsky, Hyman 169n10 nationalization, socialization of oligopolies
Minsky moment 157, 160–5, 169n10 and 95, 188
Mintz, Sidney W. 245 natural resources: intensity of, national
Mitchell, B.R. 19n11 development and 175–6; plundering of
Moaddel, Mansoor 197 84
Modelski, G. and Thompson, W.R. 61, 65, Nazi/fascist power 121, 122–3
75n3 Nelson, Admiral 34
Modelski, George 19n9, 54 neo-Smithian Marxism 28, 36
Modern World-System (Wallerstein, I.) 7, neoclassical-neoliberal analysis 258–9,
109 259–60, 263
modernity 123–4, 125, 126, 127, 129–30, neoliberal development in Korea 214
133; dependency and 142–5, 147–50; neoliberal imperialism 219–20
desirability of 143; Western modernity, neoliberalism 8, 10, 113, 156, 159–60, 161,
anti-liberal challenge to 196–7 162, 163–4, 166, 266n4; developmental
modes of production 9, 19n7, 28, 42, 43, state theories and 214–15, 219–20, 226;
64, 108, 245, 261 hegemonic change and 156–7, 159,
Moghadam, Val 198 160, 161, 162, 163, 164–5, 166, 169;
Monbiot, George 115 neoliberal transition 211–26; world
money system 260–1 economy and 9, 11
Mongol Empire 102 Nepal 95
monopolies and capitalism 87 Netherlands Environmental Assessment
Monopoly Capital (Baran, P. and Sweezy, Agency 185
P.) 6 Neustra América 135
Monthly Review 5, 12, 16 New York Commodity Exchange (Comex)
Montreal, Canada 7 187
282 Index
New York Times 207 political ecology of

nobility, ideology of 124–5 transnationalism 239–41
nonaligned movement 5 political-military networks (PMNs) 98–9,
North, D.C. and Thomas, R.P. 65 102, 111
North Atlantic Treaty Organization political ostracization in Iran 201
(NATO) 87, 90, 91, 92 political transformations in copper
Norway 176 market 182–3
Nygren, Anja 240, 242, 249n12 Pomeranz, Kenneth 11, 15, 16, 20n20, 44,
48, 109
Obama, Barack 91, 92 populist nationalism 198–9
O’Brien, Patrick 12 postmodernist social theory 149
O’Donnell, Guillermo 143 postwar academic debate 5
oligopolistic capitalism 84–5, 86–7, 88, postwar growth in world economy 4–5
89, 90–1, 94 postwar recovery, contradictions in 4
Olwig, Karen Fog 239, 250n15 poverty 1, 104, 113, 224; rates in Iran 204;
opium triangle (China–India–Britain) 25–6 rural poverty in Honduras 235, 246;
oppression 1, 2, 112, 125, 225, 265 social policies, effect on poverty
‘orientalism’ 66 reduction in Iran 205; wealth and
O’Rourke, K. and Williamson, J.G. 259 poverty of nations, production of 25–6,
Ortíz, Fernando 148 27, 28–9, 37, 264
Orwell, George 88 Powell, Bill 176
Ottoman Empire 52, 58, 59–60, 62, 63, power patterns, axes of 124
67, 203 power transition wars 38
ownership, power circuits and 180–2 Prado, Caio Jr. 136
Prain, Ronald 183, 184, 188
Packenham, Robert A. 191n5 Pre-capitalist Modes of Production
Palat, R.A. and Wallerstein, I. 66 (Hindess, B. and Hirst, P.) 9
Palmer, R.R. et al. 192n15 Prebisch, Raúl 5
Parsons, T. and Smelser, N.J. 5 prestige goods networks (PGNs) 98–9,
Parsons, Talcott 5 102, 115n2
pauperization and capitalism 83 primary production, comparisons of 183–4
Pavlov, Leonid 168 Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, A.) 144
Pax Americana 155 privatization: of state-owned enterprises in
peasant rebellion, British India and 144 Iran 200; world economy and 9
Pease, Franklin 139n10 production: feudal relations of 198;
Peet, R. and Watts, M. 239 knowledge, production of 128–9,
Peloponnesian War 33–4 130–1; and labour, systems of 261, 262;
Pender, J. and Scherr, S.J. 235 modes of 9, 18–19n7, 28, 42, 43, 64,
Pender, John 243 108, 245, 261; multinational networks
Perdue, Peter 111 and 184–7; primary production,
Pesaran, Mohammad Hashem 197 comparisons of 183–4; regional
Petras, James 169n11 development, production chains
petroleum industry, influence of 8–9, 165, and 187–8; transnational production
199, 206 chains 181; wealth and poverty of
Pfeffer, Max J. 249n13 nations, production of 25–6, 27, 28–9,
Pfeffer, M.J. et al. 237, 242, 243, 249n13, 37, 264
250n14, 250n16 profits: and hegemony, US and
Philippines 8, 133, 134 restructuring global system 156–7; rates
Pittsburgh Conference (2008) 14–16 of, crisis of 86–7
Pliny 76n9 proletarianization 145
Polanyi, Karl 69, 113 public works projects in Iran 200
policy: and ideology, systemic change Puerto Rico 133, 134
and 262–3; and practice, impact of Puett, Michael 101
transnational flows on 241–2
Index 283
Qatar 207 Saeidi, Ali 203

Quijano, A. and Wallerstein, I. 138n3 Safavid Empire 58, 59–60, 63, 67, 203
Quijano, Aníbal xiii, 15, 17, 120–39, 262 Sahlins, Marshall 250n15
Said, Edward 66
racialized identities, self-depreciation of Saito, Osamu 11
131 Saldaña, Maria Josefina 146
Rafsanjani, Hashemi 200, 201 Salehi-Isfahani, Djavad 201, 202, 204, 205
Rama, Ángel 148 Samuelson, Paul 5
Ratzel, Friedrich 29 Sanderson, Stephen K. 53, 54, 100, 108
Ravnborg, H.M. 234, 235, 244 Sandinista land reform policy 146–7
Rawski, Thomas 20n19 Santa Rosa, Honduras 232, 233, 234, 237,
Reagan, Ronald 9, 155 238, 242–3, 244, 246, 248, 249–50n13
realpolitik 201 Sarkozy, Nicolas 91, 92
Reflections (Frank, A.G.) 10 Schelhas, J.W. and Pfeffer, M.J. 249n13
regional core formation, process of 107 Schmalzbauer, Leah 239, 240, 250n15
regional development, production chains Schmitz, Christopher 182
and 187–8 Schumpeter, Joseph 263
regional importance in world science: knowledge of, development
system 104–7 of 126–7; and technology, potential
Reichert, Joshua 247 of 93; see also technology
Reinhart, C.M. and Rogoff, J.S. 260 Segal, Marcello 136
Reitan, Ruth 113 self-sufficiency in Iran 199
remittances 233, 234, 235–6 semiperipheral capitalist city-
Renfrew, Colin 101 states 99–100, 108
rent gathering 109 senile capitalism 89
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian September 11 attacks on US 11
Age (Frank, A.G.) 12–13, 14, 41–2, 43, Shafer, Michael 177, 178
44, 46–7, 52–3, 54–5, 104–7, 120 Shah of Iran 9, 197, 198, 203
ReOrient the Nineteenth Century (Frank, Shang China, state formation 101
A.G., unfinished manuscript) 16, 41–9, Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
55 92
research agenda, world-economy Shanghai Metal Exchange (SHME) 187
analysis 262–3 de Sherbinin, Alex 240
resource abundance 176, 177, 180 Sheridan, Thomas E. 239
resource dependency 176–7, 178, 179, Sherratt, Andrew 101
180, 189 Silk Road 101, 102
resource intensity 175, 176 Simon, William 157, 161
Rise and Demise (Chase-Dunn, C. and Sladkova, Jana 236
Hall, T.D.) 108–9 Smith, Adam 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38,
Robbins, Paul 239 65, 97
Rodrik, D. et al. 176 Smith, Monica 101
Roemer, John 114 social capital, finance of 234, 238, 241,
Romania 121 244, 248
Romero, Francisco 139n17 social contestation, resurgence of 10
Ronnaback, Klas 169n1 social control 147
Ross, Michael 176 social domination, patterns of 124–5
Rostow, Walt W. 5, 191n2 social equality 122, 123, 127, 129–30, 131
Ruhl, J. Mark 246 social forms: in Korea 212–13; patterns of
Russia 188; decline and recovery development of 100
of 159–60; geopolitical influence social movements: of 1968 6; and
of 165; Revolution in 85, 86 socialism, possibility of shift towards
262
Sachs, J. and Warner, A. 176, 191n1 social remittances 234
Sachs, Jeffrey 176 social services 4, 6, 205
284 Index
social theory, Eurocentrism in 42 subversion in Latin America of

socialism: and capitalism, argument Eurocentrism 132–4
between 88–92, 142–3, 150–1; colonial/ Sugihara, Kaoru 11, 15, 16, 20n20, 109
modernity and 123; fascism and 94 Supachai Panitchpakdi 91
socialist-world analysis 258, 259 Suro, Roberto 240
societal dynamics of capitalism 36 Sweezy, Paul M. 65; Dobb-Sweezy
socio-cultural evolution 97, 98, 99, 102, controversy 5, 9
108 Sweezy, P.M. et al. 5, 6
socio-economic affairs, academic debate Syria 6
on 6–7, 9 systemic crises of capitalism 85–6, 87, 89,
socio-political instability in Iran, fear of 90–1
204
socio-political trajectory in Iran 196, 198, Taiwan 201, 202–3
208 Takahashi, Kohachiro 65
Sociology of Underdevelopment (Frank, taxation, tribute gathering 109
A.G.) 7 Taylor, Andrew 192n20
Solimano, Andrés 236, 246, 250n18 Taylor, Bahamondes 236, 240, 249n13,
Sommers, Jeffrey xiv, 12, 153–70 250n13
Song, Hae-Yung xiv, 17, 20n22, 211–28, Taylor, C. et al. 244
263 Taylor, Carylanna xiv, 17, 18n5, 20n22,
Sonn, Ho-Chul 228n15 232–50, 246, 247, 263
South Africa 183, 191n9, 200; geopolitical technology: biotechnology 126–7;
influence of 165 focus in world-economy analysis
Southern awakening 91–2, 94–5 on 261; science and technology,
Soviet Union see USSR potential of 93; technical knowledge,
Spain 122 development of 126–7; technological
spatial boundaries 97–9 innovation 155, 156, 163, 164, 166;
spatial dimensions of copper exploitation technological transformations in copper
182 market 182–3, 191n9, 192n13; transfer
spatial fixes (1980s) 158–60 in Iran 206
spatial transformations over 20th Teggart, Frederick J. 43, 66, 101
century 182–8 Terry, D.F. and Wilson, S.R. 246
Spengler, Oswald 138n4 Thatcher, Margaret 9
Stark, Oded 249n10 “Third World”: cultural defense
state: embedded autonomy in of 196; dependence and development
Korea 217; institutional linkages of in 198; in economic order 143;
market and 215–18, 225–6; power integration, imposition on 162; and
in Iran, world economic forces ladder of wealth 204; revolutionary
and 200; state-centered Marxism, limits movements 158; Soviet presence in 159
of 218–20, 226; state-centric approaches Thompson, William R. 19n9, 54
to development studies 180–1; state- Thucydides 35
market relations in Korea 214–15, Tibebu, Teshale 65
216–17, 225; state socialism, apparent Time on the Cross (Fogel, R.W. and
failure of 148–9 Engerman, S.L.) 7
statocracy in China 88 Tomich, Dale 138n2, 139n7
Stiglitz, Joseph E. 89, 259 Topik, S.C. et al. 191n10
Stiglitz Commission 91 Topik, Steven 181
Stonich, Susan C. 233, 235, 239, 240 Toynbee, Arnold J. 138n4
Strange, Susan 51 trade: network and balances by regions
Street, James H. 191n5 (1400-1800) 69–74; in world-system 37
Sturgeon, Timothy 181 tradition, modernity and 149
sub-topics, world-economy analysis 260–1 Trager, Lillian 249n10
subjectivity, confrontation of controls on transculturation 148, 149–50
129 transition wars 31–6
Index 285
transnational production chains 181 Vasconcelos, José 135

transnationalism, political ecology Velasco Alvarado, General Juan 139n20
of 234–5, 239–41 Vellut, Jean-Luc 192n17
Turchin, P. and Hall, T.D. 102 Venezuela 160, 258
Turkey 121, 201, 203 Vidal, Hernán 151n3
twenty dos equis 112 Vietnam 121; War in 6
Vilas, Carlos 147
Ukraine 3 Villa, Pancho 135
underdevelopment 15, 25, 147, 179, Vinelii, Paul 249n6
191n4, 226, 234–5, 240, 247–8, 264; violence 92, 131, 137; of competition
colonialism and 233; dependency and, between colonial powers 87, 124;
questions of 120, 143–4; dependent oppression and 125
underdevelopment 198; Frank on social von Hayek, Friedrich 9
movements and 7–8; Frank’s early vulgar economics 90, 93
work on 2; global exchange and 27–9;
history in Honduras of 233, 245; of the Wade, Robert 227n3, 227n4
periphery 143; systemic nature in Latin Wallerstein, I. and Amin, S. 12
America of 14, 137 Wallerstein, I. and Hopkins, T. 191n11,
Underhill, A.P.and Habu, N. 101 198
ungovernability 143–4, 148 Wallerstein, I. and Starr, P. 18n3
unipolar world, US hegemony in 158–9, Wallerstein, I. et al. 61, 66
165 Wallerstein, Immanuel 7, 9, 15, 18n3,
United Kingdom (UK) 4, 9, 161; debt 18n5, 19n12, 19n18, 31, 36, 51, 52, 53,
crisis in 161; gold standard, adoption 54, 69, 87, 109, 111, 116n8, 156, 158,
of 44; hegemony 107; wealth of 46 168, 178, 179, 191n7, 191n11, 196, 206,
United Nations (UN) 4, 5, 6; Group 211, 212, 226n1, 245, 260, 262, 263,
of 77 within 6; marginalisation of 92; 266
UNCTAD (Conference on Trade and Walsh, Catherine 138n2
Development) 91 Walton, J. and Seddon, D. 201
United States 4, 5, 9, 12, 97, 122, 176; Washington Post 207
Atlantic copper market, involvement wasteful consumption 84, 93
in development of 183; bailouts watershed-impacting practices (WIP)
from 156–7; challenge and opportunity 234, 236, 241, 242, 244, 247, 248–9n3;
of crisis for 165; collective imperialism effects of migration and remittances
of 87, 88, 90–1; crisis (1970s) and on 242–5; see also Honduras
order restoration 156–7; defeat in Cuba wealth 28, 109, 115n2, 124, 155, 163,
and Vietnam 121; democracy in crisis 258, 260; accumulation, fundamental
in 157–8; economic power, erosion attention to 260; Asia and Europe,
of 163–4; equity markets in 159; relative wealth of 45; concentration
financialization by 161; hegemony of 48; distribution of income and,
of, crisis for 84–5, 90, 91; Iran-Libya studies of 261; levels in Iran 203;
Sanctions Act (1996) 201; Iraq, military material wealth 238; national wealth,
power in 10; migration from Honduras export of 197; of nations, studying
to 236; Reaganomics in 162; resources of 180–1; and poverty of nations,
in China 162; September 11 attacks production of 25–6, 37, 264; power
on 11; unipolar world, hegemony and 158, 234; stripping of 162; Third
in 158–9, 165; ‘Washington project’ of World and ladder of 204; transfer of,
military control 92 coloniality and 125; waste, upheaval
upward mobility in China 106 and generation of 46
urban population, change over 4000 Weber, Max 5, 7, 25, 31, 38, 41, 109, 129
years 105–6 Weimar Republic 122
urbanization in Iran 200 welfare 164, 205; human economic
Uruguay 133, 135, 160 welfare, threat to 262; resource
USSR 4, 5, 108, 158, 159, 201; collapse dependence and 176; social welfare 6,
of 158–9 199, 201, 228n15; subordination in
286 Index
Korea of 224–5; welfare effects 177, advances in 262–3; anthropological

180, 189; welfare state 4, 89, 143, perspectives 261; balance,
203; welfare-warfare alliance in importance of appropriateness
Iran 199–200, 203–4 of 259; chaos, possibility of 262;
West, timing of rise of 104–7 commerce 260; core and periphery,
White, Lynn 64 dynamics of 260; distribution, focus
Whitney, Mike 165 on 261; ecology 261, 262; economic
Wilkinson, David 19n9, 53, 98 cycles 261; factors encompassed
Williamson, Jeffrey G. 11 by 259, 260; financialization, need for
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Weber, M.) exploration of 262; global economic
5, 7 system, assumption of existence
Wolf, Eric 7, 64, 239, 245 of 260; governance, interpretation
Wong, R. Bin 109 of 261; historical world economy,
Woolf, Virginia 150 assumption of existence of 260;
World Accumulation (Frank, A.G.) 9 inequality, possibility of ‘barbarism’
World Bank 4, 162; initiatives in of 262; migration studies 261; money
Iran 200–1; in Korea 213, 218, 226n2 system 260–1; policy and ideology,
World Economic Forum 8, 11 systemic change and 262–3; previous
world economy: 1945-1960 4–5; Alliance system change, possibility of extension
for Progress 7; “Asian Tigers” 8; of 262; production and labour, systems
1960-1975 6–8; Bretton Woods of 261, 262; research agenda 262–3;
system, collapse of 6; 1975-1990 scenarios of the future 262; social
8–10; Cold War, end of 10; conflict, dimensions 261; social movements
Cold War and anti-colonialist 6; 1989 and socialism, possibility of shift
and since 10–14; deregulation 8, towards 262; strength of 259–60; sub-
9, 11; directions in critical analysis topics 260–1; technology, focus on 261;
of 17–18; environmental and ecological wealth accumulation, fundamental
changes 8–9; European Union, attention to 260
formation of 10–11; Frank and 3–14; World-Historical Systems Theory
global geography, world trade triangles Group 11, 19n9, 54, 266n5
and 38; global social influence, World Social Forum 11
contradictions in contentions for 8; world system: accumulation, East/West
globalization 10–11; growth, triangles comparison and modes of 108–11;
of trade and 37; health and literacy, accumulation, transformations in
fruits of postwar investments in 8; modes of 108–9; anti-systemic
hegemony, global structure and 37–8; movements 112–13; A-phase
historical perspective on, move expansions 60, 155, 156, 162, 163, 166;
towards 36–7; intellectual contestation, Asia’s place in history, 57–63; B-phase
resurgence of 10; long-term continuity contractions 153–4, 155, 159–60,
of system, academic concentration 161, 162, 163, 164, 165–6, 167; bulk
on 11; national independence, goods networks (BGNs) 98–9; capital-
achievements of 6; neoliberals 9, 11; imperialism, notion of 108; capitalism,
perspective from 2010 on 13; petroleum institutional features and negative
industry, influence of 8–9; postwar outcomes from 113–14; Central Asia,
academic debate 5; postwar growth 4–5; Chinese expansion in 111; Central
postwar recovery, contradictions in 4; Asian evolution since Stone Age 100–4;
privatization 9; September 11 attacks on central government, system in China
US 11; social contestation, resurgence of 109–10; centrality of Central
of 10; social services in postwar Asia 102, 104–5; China, centrality
economy 4, 6; socio-economic affairs, to global system 104–5; China, core/
academic debate on 6–7, 9; trade in periphery interaction in 102; China,
world-system 37 cycles of dynasties in 104; cities,
world-economy analysis 258, 259, relative size and importance of 104–7;
260–1, 262, 263, 264, 265–6; commercialism 113; commercialization
Index 287
of tributary empires 108–9; relative importance of regions 104–7;

commodification 113; comparative rent gathering 109; ReOrient:
world systems perspective 97; core/ Global Economy in the Asian Age
periphery hierarchies 99; cycling, (Frank, A.G.) 104–7; semiperipheral
process of 99; disembedded capitalist city-states 99–100, 108;
markets 113; East and West in evolution semiperipheral development 99–100;
of 97–115; East Asia, empires and semiperipheral marcher chiefdoms 99;
territories in 102–3; East Asia, rising Shang China, state formation 101;
to centrality again 110; East Asia and Silk Road 101, 102; social forms,
world revolutions 111–12; East Asian patterns of development of 100; spatial
evolution since Stone Age 100–4; boundaries 97–9; taxation, tribute
economic institutions of China 109–10; gathering 109; trade network and
Eurocentrism and misinterpretation balances by regions (1400-1800) 69–74;
of Afro-Asian participation 63–9; twenty dos equis, world revolution
evolution of, idea of 100; fair of 112; urban population, change
trade, notion of 113; global justice over 4000 years 105–6; West, timing
movement 112–13; global left, rerise of rise of 104–7; world revolutions and
of 112–13; globalization from below, East Asia 111–12
advocacy for 114; horses, domestication The World System: Five Hundred Years or
of 101; horticultural settlements, Five Thousand? (Frank, A.G. and Gills,
development of 100–1; hunter-gatherer B.) 12, 50, 54, 167
pastoralism 101; imperialism, West world-system theory 19n15, 27, 28, 30,
and China compared 111; information 38, 46–7, 147; Asian hegemony 50–80;
networks (INs) 98, 102; interchiefdom China and 37; Korea and 211, 212, 213,
systems 99; isolation of Chinese 226, 226n1
civilization 101; K-waves 61, 153, World Wars: I and II 34–5, 85, 87; III?
165–6, 167, 168–9; ‘market magic’ 35–6
113; market socialism 114; market Woytinsky, Wiladamir and Emma 44
society, emergence in China of 110–11,
113–14; Mongol Empire 102; multi- Yates, Lamartine 44
centric interstate system in Europe 109; Yeltsin, Boris 200
multilateral global governance 114–15; Yugoslavia 121
multilateral trade (18th century)
79–80; phonetic writing, development Zaire 177
of 101; political-military networks Zambia 177, 188
(PMNs) 98–9, 102, 111; prestige goods Zapata, Emiliano 135
networks (PGNs) 98–9, 102, 115n2; Zea, Leopoldo 139n17
regional core formation, process of 107; Zhou En-Lai 169n5
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(Rethinking Globalizations 30) Barry K. Gills - Patrick Manning-Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development - Visions, Remembrances and Explorations-Routledge (2011) PDF

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(Rethinking Globalizations 30) Barry K. Gills - Patrick Manning-Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development - Visions, Remembrances and Explorations-Routledge (2011) PDF

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Andre Gunder Frank and Global

Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and Director

Barry K. Gills is Professor of Global Politics at Newcastle University and editor

Edited by Barry K. Gills, Newcastle University, UK

2. Globalization and Global History

4. Globalization and Contestation

6. Globalization, the City and Civil Society in Pacific Asia

7. Challenging Euro-America’s Politics of Identity

8. The Global Politics of Globalization

10. Globalization as Evolutionary Process

11. The Political Economy of Global Security

12. Cultures of Globalization

13. Globalization and the Global Politics of Justice

14. Global Economy Contested

15. Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence

16. Recognition and Redistribution

17. The Social Economy

18. The Global Governance of Food

19. Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights

20. Globalization and Popular Sovereignty

22. Globalisation, Knowledge and Labour

23. Dying Empire

24. Alternative Globalizations

25. Global Restructuring, Labour and the Challenges for Transnational

26. Global South to the Rescue

27. Global Ideologies and Urban Landscapes

28. Power and Transnational Activism

29. Globalization in Crisis

30. Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development

Edited by Patrick Manning and

1 The world economy in theory and practice: the contributions

3 ReOrient the Nineteenth Century: Andre Gunder Frank’s

4 The modern world system under Asian hegemony: the silver

5 Exiting the crisis of capitalism or capitalism in crisis? 83

6 East and West in world-systems evolution 97

7 The paradoxes of colonial/modernity 120

8 Dependency theory and the aporias of modernity: lessons

9 Tides of hegemonic change: the atypical trajectory of the

10 Connections, connections, connections! The Atlantic copper

11 ReOrienting Iran: following Gunder Frank’s advice one decade

12 The Korean developmental state and its neoliberal transition

13 Watershed management in the wake of transnational migration:

14 Conclusion: preparing for future analysis 258

Jan-Frederik Abbeloos is a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Modern

Albert J. Bergesen is Professor of Sociology and Department Head of the

John Beverley is Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature

On the Politics of Truth (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Subalternidad

Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director

Robert A. Denemark is on the faculty of the Department of Political Science and

Barry K. Gills is currently Professor of Global Politics at Newcastle University,

History (Routledge, 2006; with William R Thompson); The Globalization of

Thomas D. Hall is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology and

Kevan Harris is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Johns

Boris Kagarlitsky is a well-known international commentator on Russian poli-

Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History and Director

Aníbal Quijano is Director of the Center of Social Research in Lima, Peru,

Jeffrey Sommers is Associate Professor of Africology at the University of

Hae-Yung Song is a PhD candidate in the Department of Development Studies,

Carylanna Taylor is completing a doctorate in Applied Anthropology at the

globalized. She has worked on conservation and development projects in Ecuador

course of a pleasant dinner in Georgetown in the course of a 2006 conference

Patrick Manning and Barry K. Gills

Andre Gunder Frank and the world economy

5 Exiting the crisis of capitalism or capitalism in crisis? 83

6 East and West in world-systems evolution 97

7 The paradoxes of colonial/modernity 120

14 Conclusion: preparing for future analysis 258