Immanuel Wallerstein, the “modern world-system,” and radical human geography

Abstract

Arguably, one of the major innovations in social science beginning in the 1970 s was Immanuel Wallerstein’s discovery of what he called the “modern world-system.” This was the idea of a progressively global capitalist world-economy spreading out from Western Europe and structured geographically to exploit peripheral areas for the benefit of a capitalist class in the core. This model proved attractive to some radical geographers because of its global reach, historicity, critique of state centrism, and reliance on a spatial conception of distinctive labor processes associated with different geographic zones. As well as providing a review of the overall framework and criticisms directed at it, I also discuss Wallerstein’s efforts at what he called “unthinking” the orthodox social sciences, his critique of Eurocentrism, doubts about the “radical” quality of his historical model, and the range of writing that emerged under the sign of “world-system analysis.” I close with a discussion of the influence of the perspective in human geography, specifically in relation to development geography, efforts at revitalizing regional geography, and political geography. A brief conclusion suggests that the overall perspective not only has not kept pace with “current reality” but that its conception of “hegemony” does not account for the contemporary American impasse in the world economy as well as Wallerstein hoped it would.