richard moore's essay

Thu, 13 Nov 1997 15:05:53 -0500
christopher chase-dunn (chriscd@jhu.edu)

richard moore's essay is fine. a few small points:
1. in Wallerstein's original usage there is a distinction between
"world" and "global". global means Earth-wide. world means the world in
which people live. in this sense world-systems were not always global.
they got bigger over time. Tom Hall and I have developed a comparative
world-systems perspective that looks at small, medium and large
world-systems to see how and why they evolve (_Rise and Demise_ Westview
1997).

2. It is probably useful to distinguish between globalization as
economic, political and cultural integration and globalization as a
political project of the world bourgeousie. the latter is quite recent.
the former have been upward trends for millenia in the sense that
interaction networks have been getting larger, but this trend has also
been somewhat cyclical. Paul Bairoch calculates that the ratio of
international investment to national investment was as high in the 1890s
as in the 1990s. and trade globalization (the ratio of international
trade to the sum of national gnps) was nearly as high before world war I
as it is now. in between these peaks were periods of much lower levels
of investment and trade globalization.

chris