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Dependency approaches emerged out of Latin America in the 1960s in reaction to modernization theories of development. Dependentistas attributed the difficulties of development in the global South to the legacies of the long history of colonialism, as well as contemporary international power relations. This approach suggested that international inequalities were socially structured and that hierarchy is a central feature of the global system of societies.
The world-systems perspective is a strategy for explaining social change that focuses on whole intersocietal systems rather than single societies. The main insight is that important interaction networks (trade, information flows, alliances, and fighting) have woven polities and cultures together since the beginning of human social evolution. Explanations of social change need to take intersocietal systems (world-systems) as the units that evolve. However, intersocietal interaction networks were rather small when transportation was mainly a matter of hiking with a pack. Globalization, in the sense of the expansion and intensification of larger interaction networks, has been increasing for millennia, albeit unevenly and in waves.
The idea of the whole system ought to mean that all the human interaction networks, small and large, from the household to global trade, constitute the world-system. It is not just a matter of ”international relations” or global-scale institutions such as the World Bank. Rather, at the present time, the world-system is all the people of the earth and all their cultural, economic, and political institutions and the interactions and connections among them. The world-systems perspective looks at human institutions over long periods of time and employs the spatial scales that are required for comprehending these whole interaction systems.
The modern world-system can be understood structurally as a stratification system composed of economically, culturally, and militarily dominant core societies (themselves in competition with one another), and dependent peripheral and semi-peripheral regions. Some dependent regions have been successful in improving their positions in the larger core/periphery hierarchy, while most have simply maintained their peripheral and semiperipheral positions. This structural perspective on world history allows us to analyze the cyclical features of social change and the long-term patterns of development in historical and comparative perspective. We can see the development of the modern world-system as driven primarily by capitalist accumulation and geopolitics in which businesses and states compete with one another for power and wealth. Competition among states and capitals is conditioned by the dynamics of struggle among classes and by the resistance of peripheral and semiperipheral peoples to domination and exploitation from the core. In the modern world-system, the semiperiphery is composed of large and powerful countries in the third world (e.g., Mexico, India, Brazil, China) as well as smaller countries that have intermediate levels of economic development (e.g., the newly industrializing countries of East Asia).
It is not possible to understand the history of social change without taking into account both the strategies and technologies of the winners, and the strategies and forms of struggle of those who have resisted domination and exploitation.
Most world-systems scholars contend that leaving out the core/periphery dimension or treating the periphery as inert are grave mistakes, not only for reasons of completeness, but also because the ability of core capitalists and their states to exploit peripheral resources and labor has been a major factor in deciding the winners of the competition among core contenders. And the resistance to exploitation and domination mounted by peripheral peoples has played a powerful role in shaping the historical development of world orders. Thus world history cannot be properly understood without attention to the core/periphery hierarchy.
Bibliography:
- Cardoso, F. H. & Faletto, E. (1979) Dependency and Development in Latin America. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
- Chase-Dunn, C. & Hall, T. D. (1997) Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems. Westview, Boulder, CO.
- Shannon, T. R. (1996) An Introduction to the World-Systems Perspective. Westview, Boulder, CO.
- Wallerstein, I. (2000) The Essential Wallerstein. New Press, New York.
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