Session 16: Capitalism and Wallerstein!

Immanuel Wallerstein is a historical social scientist and sociologist, he analyzed world system and gave a theory known as world system theory. In this theory, Wallerstein talked about history of world and social change, it divides the world into core, semi periphery and periphery countries on the basis of labor. Core countries have certain benefits from their domination of periphery countries. They have accessed to a large quantity of raw materials, a market for exports, from the direct capital investment,they can earn enormous profit and they have cheap but skilled labor.


The theory analyses the world while focusing on states and assumes that there is only one path of evolutionary development for countries. Wallerstein traces the rise of the capitalist world-economy from the sixteenth century. In Wallerstein's view, the rise of capitalism was an outcome of the protracted crisis of feudalism. Western countries utilized its advantages and gained control over most of the world economy, presiding over the development and spread of industrialization and capitalist economy, indirectly resulting in unequal development across the world. In the end, the writer talks about the capitalist system which is global in nature but it facing too many challenges and it is also self-destructing. This theory faced criticism for being too focused on economy and too state centric. Theda Skocpol believes that the interstate system is far from being a simple superstructure of the capitalist world economy: "The international states system as a transnational structure of military competition was not originally created by capitalism. Throughout modern world history, it represents an analytically autonomous level [..of] world capitalism, but [is] not reducible to it." (Skocpol 1979)