Civilizations and Historical World Systems

Seyed,

From my understanding of Wallerstein's usage of the
term civilization, it all depends on the historical
system you are speaking about.  To put it in crude
terms, world empires had their own civilizations in so
far that the Roman, Graak, Sassinid, Ottoman...
empires had one political unit encapsulating one
economy.  

Unlike much of the social science literature which
construct civilizations as units in-of-themselves, for
Wallerstein civilizations are in the modern period
part and parcel of the modern world, units which are
reproduced by the larger system itself, the capitalist
world-system of the modern world.   

The present world-system, while effectively
restructuring these premodern systems to the degree
that we can no longer talk about them as independent
units, nonetheless persist, but under new forms. The
most important changes in this respect is that they no
longer operate under one uniformed political
structure.  Instead, in the modern period there are
multiple state structures unified under a single
division of labor.   Civilizations in the modern
period are larger than states but smaller than the
world, and the substance of which they are composed is
of a non-material, informal substance.    This
informality, moreover, is what allows them to survive
the carnivore-like substance of the political and
economic institutions of the modern world-system.

Historically this is a complex phenomenon.  In the age
of empires civilizations were, in essence, “the navel
of the world,” the Middle Kingdom where, for instance,
for both Christendom and Islam their respective
notions of community were equal to the empires that
encapsulated them.  The Bishop of Rome and the
ecumenical universal Church of the Holy Roman Empire
as well as the Umma of Dhar al-Islam, were “the
centers of the world.”  This, of course, is not unique
only to these two empires, as the Chinese version of
“The Middle Kingdom” makes all too clear.

In the modern world system, on the other hand,
civilizations have continued to play a major role in
producing identities that are civilizational in
character, maintaining some form of a pan-Islamic type
of regional and global integration.  However, in
losing the political structure of their old former
selves they have dissolved to empires of the mind, a
form of transnational identities that are reproduced
within the context of a much larger world system. 
Even though the remains of the past is still with us
in all its vividness in the forms of Islamic and
Ottoman architecture, the huge numbers of mosques,
synagogues, and basilicas, and most significantly in
the forms of pilgrimage centers where Muslims,
Christians, and Jews and others throughout the world
converge, what gives these formations life, however,
is not in any way shaped by anything we can assume to
be exact replicas of civilizations of the past.  

This is due to the fact that the formal political
structures of the past world empires are replaced, in
the modern period, with the informal structures of
civilizational identities. As the world empires of the
past have been fractured into multiple units, in their
place we have one world-economy with an inter-state
system.  

This is how I have read Wallerstein.  

Khaldoun


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