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Re: Frank as a world-systemist? by Bruce McFarling 22 March 2002 01:25 UTC |
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At 14:50 17/03/02 -0500, Elson Boles wrote: >The oddity in the Frank-Wallerstein debate is that Frank and Gills >have no reason to use the unhyphenated "world system" term, except >to distinguish their world-system as being bigger in TimeSpace than >Wallerstein's. Is there a sense in which Franks "world system" is a shorthand for "that world-system which grew to cover the world" ... that is, "the world world-system"? If a major part of the argument is whether the Central World-System included Europe as periphery and it grew to dominate the Central WS for a hundred fifty years, give or take, or whether the Central World-System was in contact with but did NOT include Europe, so that it is a story of one WS being supplanted by another ... then I can see a certain amount of sense in not just using the term Central WS, since the what that terms refers to is a main point in the dispute. On systemicity, it would seem to me that if the development of import competing textiles in Europe was in fact sufficient to reverse the India's bullion surplus to the west, and place it in an untenable financial position with bullion deficits to both the east and west, then the conquest of Indian by the BEIC with an Indian army in effect financed by New World silver following on that financial reverse would seem to indicate a bit of mutual causality. Of course, one could envision someone arguing an intermediate position that the European WS was a distinct WS pre 1500, on lack of mutual causation grounds, that it developed to the point of merging into the Central WS over 1500-1800, and toward the end of that period the process of shift in dominance in the Central WS took place. It would seem that the place to look for mutual causality pre-1500 would be India. Of course, the point from General Systems Theory should be made that the ability to identify systems at higher and higher levels all the way up to the "universe" is normal in systems analysis, and certainly not the basis for a critique on its own. Most General Systems analysis occurs at the level of a system with both supersystems and subsystems of interest. Obviously given a strong definition of system for world-system, and one that is NOT hierarchical, one would expect world-systems to be part of higher order systems, and to contain lower-order systems. One would expect some sort of major impact if what was formerly a system of world-systems developed into a world-system in its own right, with the "middle position" envisioned above perhaps being a concrete example of exactly that sort of emergent features of the "World System" ... that is, "One World System of World-Systems, then World World-System". Virtually, Bruce McFarling, New Lambton, NSW ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au
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