On Thu, 13 Jul 1995, chris chase-dunn wrote:
> 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.
I totally agree that it would be absurd to claim that the British
hegemony was a a true world state. That`s why I speculated that the
choice of terminology (calling the capitalist world-economy as
reconstituted under British hegemony a "world empire") might be some kind
of exagerration to open up a debate (this can be
interpreted as a question to Arrighi).
I think the interesting issue is the assumption
that the "political superstructure" of the world-economy is exclusively
constituted by territorial nation-states. As far as I have understood,
this is what the Wallersteinian framework strongly assumes. According to my
reading, in Arrighi's research agenda the status of this assumption is
somewhat different. Because there is no explicit discussion on this issue
in the book, I cannot, however, be sure. But let me speculate a few lines
worth.
Arrighi's emphasis on "the world governmental functions" of the UK is not
necessarily in contradiction with the above-mentioned assumption. It is rather
his emphasis on the transnational and "nonterritorial" spaces-of-flows
which makes his approach somewhat different from the Wallersteinian one.
To the extent that these spaces-of-flows are considered political, the
assumption that the "political superstructure" of the world-economy is
EXCLUSIVELY constituted by the states becomes very problematic. Since I
feel that there is some ambiguity in the book as regards the use of
"politics" and "political", I am not sure whether Arrighi would agree.1
In any case, I do think that it is problematic to assume that the only
political units of the world-system are nation-states. One example: Even
though there are many differences between the bureaucracies and
planning-systems of the states and those of the transnational
corporations, both should be regarded as political units. The
difference is rather that the former are more territorialist than the
latter. I think Arrighi`s book is more able to analyze this difference
than many of the previous contributions to the w-s literature.
> 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).
Looking forward to reading it. I hope there was no misunderstanding: I am
by no means saying that the distinction between world-economies and
world-empires should necessarily be rejected. I just wanted to pay
attention to one problematical assumption in the definition of the
world-economy.
Cheers,
teivo
Teivo Teivainen
Iberoamerican Research Center
PO Box 4, 00014 University of Helsinki
fax: 358-0-1917940
e-mail: teivo.teivainen@helsinki.fi