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Economic Growth in Wallerstein's Social Systems. A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Frederic C. Lane
Affiliation:
Westminster, Massachusetts

Abstract

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Type
Methods of Comparison
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1976

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References

1 Wallerstein, Immanuel, Africa, the Politics of Independence (New York: Vintage, 1961), p. 6;Google Scholar and Social Change, the Colonial Situation, 2 vols. (New York: Wiley, 1966), vol. I, pp. 12.Google Scholar

2 Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World System. Capitalistic Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974).Google Scholar

3 Toynbee, Arnold J., A Study of History, Abridgement by D. C. Somervell of volumes I through VI (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 15.Google Scholar

4 Presidential Address to the American Historical Association, Dec. 1974.Google Scholar

5 The Modern World System, pp. 1011.Google Scholar

6 The threefold classification is restated in Wallerstein’s, The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalistic System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, XVI: 4 (09. 1974), 387415, where he refers also, however, to “proto world-systems.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 The Modern World System, pp. 15–6, 5860.Google Scholar

8 “Rise and Future Demise,” p. 390.Google Scholar

9 The Modern World System, p. 91.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 10; “Rise and Future Demise,” pp. 348, 411;Google ScholarAfrica, the Politics of Independence, p.7.Google Scholar

11 The Modern World System, p. 350, and the implication of the book”s final sentences, p. 357.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., pp. 9–10. The scholar or scientist should, he says, seek “to discern within the framework of his commitments, the present reality of the phenomena he studies, to derive from this study general principles, from which ultimately particular applications may be made.”

13 “Rise and Future Demise,” pp. 387–8.Google Scholar

14 In a paper presented at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in December 1974 entitled “From Feudalism to Capitalism: Transition or Transitions?” Wallerstein cited extensively from Marx’ The Poverty of Philosophy to justify his usage.

15 These distinctions are made clear only at the end of The Modern World System, pp. 351–4.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 354.

17 Ibid., p. 16 n. 4, pp. 51, 338–9.

18 “Rise and Future Demise,” pp. 413–5.Google Scholar

19 In this sense Mao is right! Ibid., pp. 394 et seq. In his University in Turmoil: The Politics of Change (New York: Atheneum, 1969), Wallerstein interprets the current deténte as “renunciation by the Soviet Union of its challenge to the basic world system….”Google Scholar

20 Compare his Africa, the Politics of Independence, pp. 148–50.Google Scholar

21 Usher, Abbott Payson, A History of Mechanical Inventions, Rev. Ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), chaps. II–IV;Google ScholarSimpson, George Gaylord, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and Its significance for Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 143, 160–8, 180, 185, 218–9, 227–9.Google Scholar

22 For example, Davis, Ralph, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973),Google Scholar which is excellent for particulars, attempts causal analysis of differences between one country and another but not of the change in Europe as a whole. He emphasizes the plural in his title by saying (p. xiii): “There was an Atlantic economy; but it was subsidiary to, a modification and enhancement of, the economies of the individual countries of the Atlantic seaboard that took part in it.” Also Mathias, Peter, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London: Methuen, 1969),Google Scholar in considering in his first chapter the causes of Britain’s “take-off into sustained growth,” surveys the problem by presenting comparisons among European nations, although he notes (p. 16) that Europe’s lead over Asia was already clear in 1500–1700.

23 Because the capitalism productive of modern economic growth was a uniquely European development, he seeks a cause also uniquely European. Such a standard of causal relevance was applied also by Max Weber and its logic expounded in his “Zur Auseinandersetzung mit Eduard Meyer,” translated among the “Critical Studies in Logic and Cultural Sciences,” in Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences, Shils, E. and Finch, H. A., eds. (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1949).Google Scholar

24 The Modern World System, pp. 46, 50–1, 56–7 and passim.Google Scholar

25 Furtado, Celso, Development and Underdevelopment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 36, 7883.Google Scholar

26 Eucken, Walter, Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie (Jena: Fischer, 1940).Google ScholarIdem, Grundsätze der Wirtschaftpolitik (Bern: Francke, 1952), Einzelfrage 5.Google Scholar

27 The Modern World System, pp. 133–4.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., p. 347.

29 Ibid., pp. 67–8, 290.

30 The importance of overseas expansion for Europe's economic growth has been variously estimated. Max Weber and his followers have found within Europe's religious and political structures the changes that explain Europe's distinctive economic development which were, in my view, the use of surplus production for investments that increased productivity. Mueller-Armack, Alfred, Genealogie der Wirtschaftsstile (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1941), pp. 64 ff or (1944), pp. 71 ff.Google Scholar The recent survey by North, Douglass and Thomas, Robert Paul, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973),CrossRefGoogle Scholar emphasizes the strictly intra-European development of property rights which made individual profits coincident with or at least congruent with increases in productivity. But it emphasizes also the lowering of transaction costs that resulted from largescale operations, of which overseas activities were certainly a part. Davis, Ralph, Rise of the Atlantic Economies, p. xi,Google Scholar says: “I have tried to show that the main influences in European economic development arose within the countries of Europe themselves.” Peter Mathias does not include “foreign trade” among his prerequisites (First Industrial Nation, pp. 1011Google Scholar) but counts it one of the “sectors of vital responsiveness” (pp. 14–6)Google Scholar. He mentions as many as seven different factors, a combination of which, he says, were necessary (p.7).

31 For example, The Modern World System, p. 76 n. 31, pp. 118, 273–81.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 187, and compare p. 165.

33 Ibid., pp. 171–87.

34 Ibid., pp. 201–14