World-Systems Theory in Practice: Leadership, Production, and

Exchange (review)
Bogucki, Peter I.

Journal of World History, Volume 12, Number 2, Fall 2001, pp. 479-482
(Article)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2001.0051

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jwh/summary/v012/12.2bogucki.html

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Book Reviews

479

unity of this world has been obscured by many factors, including the
difficulties of doing research on both sides of the Iron Curtain during
the Cold War, the emergence of distinct scholarly languages (Russian
and English) in Central Asia and India, and the paucity of scholars
with command of both Russian and Persian sources. Foltz recreates this
world superbly. His book is well constructed (apart from some unnecessary repetitions) and is remarkably concise. He packs a lot into a
mercifully short book.
Foltz is also well aware of the wider resonance of these themes, for
he reminds us that the close links he describes between Central Asia,
Persia, and India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflect a
much more ancient phenomenon. This was a world in which links of
culture, trade, and travel go back to the very origins of a Eurasian world
system from perhaps as early as 2000 b.c.e. To project the modern borders between Central Asia, Persia, and the Indian sub-continent back
into the past is to miss some important and enduring continuities.
Both volumes have a powerful message for world historians: it is vital
to reconceptualize the geographical units that guide our thinking.
Otherwise, we will never escape the gravitational pull of a nationalist
paradigm that hides from us the sort of trans-Eurasian parallels and
connections explored so well in these two volumes.
david christian
Macquarie University
World-Systems Theory in Practice: Leadership, Production, and
Exchange. Edited by p. nick kardulias. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xxii + 326. $75.00 (cloth);
$27.95 (paper).
World-Systems Theory in Practice: Leadership, Production, and
Exchange, edited by P. Nick Kardulias, is a challenging book to review.
The central theme of this volume of papers is the application of WorldSystems Theory (WST) to historical cases, especially in archaeology.
WST was first articulated in the early 1970s by Immanuel Wallerstein
to characterize the global nature of interactions over the last four centuries between the expanding and dominant mercantile capitalist
societies (the core) and the distant peoples that both enabled and
were exploited by this development (the periphery). WST has had
the helpful effect of calling the attention of social and economic historians to the fact that there were useful insights to be obtained by

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expanding their frame of reference from years and decades to centuries

and from a local to a global scale. WST is less of a theory as it might
be defined in the sciences and instead seems more like a model of
interlinked contingencies and assumptions of causality about the
emergence of modern global capitalism. The writings of some of its
adherents also seem to have a political edge in that they focus on the
transformation (usually for the worse) of traditional structures, such as
the household, in the periphery under the hegemony of the core.
Archaeologists discovered WST in the 1980s and sought to apply
it to try to understand ancient complex societies and the people who
lived on their peripheries. Fitting ancient societies into the WST paradigm proved difficult. For one thing, no prehistoric or early historic
state had a global reach, so it was then necessary to use the oxymoron
regional world-system. Archaeological applications of WST have
generally been discussions of core-periphery relations in as broad a
geographical and temporal frame of reference as possible, often with
just a token nod toward formal WST, perhaps to suggest that archaeology has common interests with other historical fields.
The papers in World-Systems Theory in Practice reflect this ambiguity and ambivalence about the relevance and utility of WST in archaeology and ancient history. Two of the papers, those by Hall and Frank,
represent the true believer view that WST is a powerful explanatory
tool. Several others, by Shutes, Peregrine, Alexander, Kardulias, Kuznar, LaLone, Urban and Schortman, and Modelski and Thompson,
believe that WST is a useful and promising interpretive framework for
understanding core-periphery relations. Feinman suggests that it is
useful if one does not lose sight of other scales of analysis. Stein and
Jeske appear to conclude that WST has serious deficiencies in interpreting the archaeological cases that they study. Wells and Morris discuss core-periphery relations in prehistoric Europe in a relatively nontheoretical vein and mention WST only in passing.
Most of the papers in this volume do not apply WST to their
archaeological examples uncritically. Even the authors who are sympathetic to WST selectively choose elements of it for their own models
and discard others. A widespread theme in this volume is to challenge
the fundamental WST proposition that the core dominates the periphery and that there is little, if any, influence in the reverse direction.
Perhaps this is the most useful contribution of archaeology to WST
to point out that while the core may dominate the periphery politically
and economically, the periphery can also affect the core socially and
culturally and can retain some level of autonomy to change and adapt.
Perhaps the most successful merging of WST and archaeological

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data in this volume is found in Alexanders paper that discusses the

impact that the expansion of the European economic system had on
communities and households in rural Yucatn during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Contrary to WST orthodoxy, Alexander
concludes that world-system expansion did not fully disenfranchise
rural households, especially the independent ranchos, from the means
of production. Instead, they adapted to the new economic conditions,
intensifying production by raising chickens and pigs, while retaining
much the same basic structure as before.
The most negative paper about the potential of WST is that of
Stein, who believes it to be fundamentally flawed because it overemphasizes interaction, minimizes the internal dynamics of the periphery,
and fails to specify the ways that distance affects power relationships
among the different polities in the exchange network. As an alternative, he outlines a model that emphasizes the importance of interregional interaction without assuming that it determines the political
economy of the various polities involved. Like Feinman, Stein calls
for attention to multiple scales of analysis.
Steins dismissal of WST does not sit very well with Frank, who
apparently played the role of discussant in this collection. In a particularly crotchety tone, and in a text cluttered with asides and parenthetical remarks, Frank seems particularly exercised that the archaeologists did not embrace WST wholeheartedly and uncritically, but
rather that they pared away the elements that did not work and that
they are not more grateful for the insights that he believes WST has
to offer.
Despite the contentious tone of Franks discussion, I had a somewhat similar reaction in that I was baffled by the fact that most of the
authors who mentioned WST then proceeded to discard elements of
it that simply did not fit their archaeological situations. If that is the
case, then WST ceases to be a useful interpretive paradigm for ancient
societies and becomes just another approach to the much larger question of core-periphery relations in the past. Perhaps this is as it should
be. My own view is that archaeologists should steer clear of interpretive paradigms that border on being ideologies (and Franks commentary shows that for WST true believers, this is the case), and should
stick with analytical approaches that arise more from their data. There
is considerable merit in taking a broad geographical and temporal perspective, but to tie this to a theory that has to be modified and
amended continually in order to be consistent with data does not seem
to make a lot of sense. World-Systems Theory in Practice is probably not
going to win many converts to the WST approach, despite attempts

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journal of world history, fall 2001

in the Preface and on the back cover to characterize this collection of

papers as a debate or a dialogue. It does suggest, however, that
there is much to be gained from looking at the archaeological record
of later prehistory in a larger geographical and temporal perspective
than that normally taken.
peter bogucki
Princeton University
The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World
Economy, 1400 to the Present. By kenneth pomeranz and
steven topik. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. Pp. xvii +
256. $ 34.95 (cloth).
Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topiks book is a collection of articles previously published in the business magazine World Trade. Will
Swain originated the venture and some of his pieces are included. The
nature of the original publication excluded the traditional scholarly
apparatus, and the authors decided to keep it that way, with the exception of a bibliography to provide further information on the topics and
an index. But to discharge the book from the ranks of rigorous scholarship would be a serious mistake. Historians and social scientists
would greatly benefit from the books information, insights, and innovative theoretical approach. The authors prove persuasively how world
trade was an essential process of the last five hundred years of history.
These were the centuries in which all populated continents began to
interact in a continuous and incremental way. Plants, animals, germs,
people, commodities, and ideas were exchanged among continents
transforming the life and landscapes of world population.
We are telling the story of the ebbs and flows of the creation of the
world economy, done by people with cultures, not by homo economicus or by capital itself. The creation of trade conventions, variations
in knowledge and goals, the inter-linking of politics and economics,
social organization, and culture all are given attention. (p. xv)

Pomeranz and Topik state the central ideas of the book in the Introduction. Europeans were not the single entrepreneurs in the world
economy. Non-Europeans played key roles in its history. Europeans
often used violence to gain economic control. There are many examples in the book, such as the Atlantic slave trade and the Opium Wars.
Powerful markets were established during this last five hundred years:
They were not natural or inevitable, always latent and waiting to be