On July 4
Teivo Teivainen <teivaine@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote the following:
"At this point, I would like to pay attention to one possible difference
between traditional (Wallersteinian) w-s analysis and
Arrighi's interpretation. As far as I've understood it, the one
economy/many polities dichotomy has been one of the main characteristics of
the Wallersteinian view on the modern world-system. This dichotomy
constitutes the basic difference between a world-economy and a
world-empire, and the modern world-system has been characterized as a
world-economy."
"Arrighi, however, says (p. 58) that "the capitalist world-economy as
reconstituted under British hegemony in the nineteenth century was as
much a 'world empire' as it was a 'world-economy'...". The famous hyphen
has been left out of the former term, so it is hard to tell to what
extent Arrighi wants to challenge the Wallersteinian categorical view on
the modern world-system not being a world-empire. In any case, it is a
theoretically relevant provocation on which I would like to hear comments."
"More generally, I think there could be more discussion on the usage of
terms "economy" and "polity" within the w-s tradition. On the one hand,
we are probably all familiar with Wallerstein's invitation to "unthink"
the division to economic/political/socio-cultural categories in social
analysis. On the other hand, the many political units/ one economic unit
dichotomy has, as far as I have noticed, not been really challenged. Not
even by Wallerstein, perhaps because the challenge would imply an
'unthinking' of some of the basic premises of the traditional w-s analysis."
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I think Giovanni Arrighi was saying that the significance of a single
very large colonial empire was great in the 19th century and that the
British hegemony was a political structure that was in some ways comparable
to a world state. But remember he is comparing the British hegemony to
earlier and later systemic regimes of accumulation in the modern
world-system. I doubt that he would go so far as to argue that the British
hegemony was a true world state in the full sense. Thus I dont think
his point is meant to challenge the Wallersteinian distinction between
a world-empire and a world-economy. The nineteenth century world-system was
still a world-economy but had an unusually centralized and politically
structured polity.
The world-economy/world-empire distinction was invented to emphasize
a structural difference between the modern world-system and earlier
state-based world-systems. Tom Hall and I have renamed "world-empire" as
"core-wide empire" because there have been no world-systems in which a
single state dominated the whole arena of interaction.
This is discussed in our forthcoming _Rise and Demise: Comparing
World-Systems_ (Westview Press).
chris
Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD. 21218 USA
tel 410 516 7633 fax 410 516 7590 email chriscd@jhu.edu