One World or Three: A Critique of the World System of Immanuel Wallerstein

Abstract

Our thinking about the process of development has been fundamentally changed in recent years by the emergence of world-system theory, notably in the writings of Andri, Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. It is with the thought of the first two, and primarily Wallerstein, that I shall be concerned here. All of us stand deeply in their debt, not only for the clarity with which they have presented their theoretical frameworks, but also for the serious documentation they have adduced from the historical record. One has only to contrast, for example, the impressionistic account of the 'creation of the world' that I sketched in the first chapter of my book, The Third World, in 1964, to see what a step forward their work represents in terms of theoretical rigour and empirical research.