2 The West, capitalism, and the modern

world-system

Immanuel Wallerstein

If one wonders what is the ``sense'' of their endless chase, why

[businessmen] are never satis®ed with what they have, and thus
inevitably seem to act in senseless ways in terms of any purely worldly
approach to life, they would occasionally respond, if they knew how to
answer at all: ``to provide for my children and grandchildren.'' But,
that argument not being peculiar to them but working just as well for
the traditionalist, they would be more likely to respond in a simpler,
most exact fashion, that business with its constant work had become
``indispensable to their life.'' That is in fact the only accurate
explanation and brings out what is so irrational in this lifestyle from the
point of view of personal happiness, that a man exists for his business,
and not the other way around (Weber 1947: 54).

The Rise of the West?

The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system are inextricably
linked together ± historically, systemically, intellectually. But exactly
how, and why? This is a question on which there has been little
consensus up to now, and there is indeed less and less.
The imbrication of the three concepts (three realities?) reached its
apogee in the nineteenth century. But how even do we delimit this
nineteenth century? ± 1815±1914? or 1789±1917? or 1763±1945? or
even 1648±1968? Within any of these time frames, but particularly as
we narrow them, there seemed little doubt for most people in most parts
of the globe that the ``West'' (or ``Europe'') had ``risen,'' and that it was
exercising, particularly after 1815, effective political and economic
domain over the rest of the world, at least until this dominance began to
recede in the twentieth century.
The nineteenth century was also the period during which the histor-
ical sciences became institutionalized as formal ``disciplines,'' as arenas
(and modes) of knowledge. And, of course, this particular institutionali-
zation occurred originally within ``Western'' universities, to be imposed
subsequently upon the entire world-system. Furthermore, it is scarcely

10

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 11

an exaggeration to assert that the central intellectual problem with

which the various emerging disciplines concerned themselves was the
explanation of this presumed (but seemingly self-evident) ``rise of the
West'' (otherwise known as ``the expansion of Europe'' or ``the transition
from feudalism to capitalism'' or ``the origins of modernity'').
Given the dominance of Enlightenment thought in the nineteenth-
century world, the explanations that were offered all tended to presume
a theory of progress, of the inevitably progressive progression of societal
forms, that had reached by some teleological process the particular
con®guration of the world-system as it was then structured. There
existed no doubt a quarrel about the future, a quarrel about whether the
modern world-system represented the culminating qualitative level of
this progress (essentially the ``Whig interpretation of history'') or only a
penultimate stage in the progression of humanity (essentially the core
assertion of Marxist historiography).
The quarrel about the future, however, was fought out primarily in
the political arena, and by political means. It was the quarrel about the
past that preoccupied the universities. This quarrel revolved around two
central questions. First, what was the agent or propelling force or prime
mover of this historical trajectory? Was it the development of technology,
or the striving for human liberty, or the class struggle, or the secular
tendency to an increase of scale, and/or the bureaucratization of the
world? And, secondly, whatever the answer given to this ®rst question,
why was it that the ``West'' (or some sub-part thereof ) was ``®rst'' or
furthest ``advanced'' in this historical trajectory?
It is interesting to note what questions were not asked, or seldom
asked, either in the nineteenth century or since. It was not asked why
this new phenomenon (whatever it was called) had not occurred much
earlier in human history, say a thousand years earlier. It was not asked
whether there had existed any plausible historical alternative to this
particular ``transition'' or development. That is to say, was the develop-
ment of ``capitalism'' or ``modernity'' unavoidable, at least at this
moment in time? And, since this latter question was not asked, it follows
that it was not asked why the alternative paths were not followed. The
entire discussion in fact centered around the premiss that whatever had
occurred had to have occurred. And, since it had to have occurred, it
seems that it was by this very fact to be considered more or less
progressive. I should like to turn the question around, to reverse the
problematic. Instead of asking why capitalism or modernity or industrial
development or intensive growth occurred in the West ®rst, I want to
ask the question why did it happen at all anywhere? After all, almost all
the standard explanations invoke variables that had been in existence at

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 12 Immanuel Wallerstein

many times and in many different climes at earlier moments of world

history. Yet previously there had been no such transformation. Appar-
ently only circa 1500 (but this dating is subject to much argument) did
there occur the particular concatenation of these variables such that ± in
(Western) Europe ± there was this transformation of the world that most
people agree today was special in some way and signi®cantly different
from anything that had occurred before or elsewhere.
If one uses the physical analogy of an explosion caused by some
critical mass or particular assemblage of variables, the question of
whether this ``explosion'' was intrinsically necessary or historically
``accidental'' becomes a real intellectual question, one that has to be
resolved before constructing an entire theoretical scaffolding for the
historical social sciences out of an inevitable ``transition.''
Let us start by reviewing the statements upon which there is a relative
consensus in this entire discussion. Most scholars throughout the world,
and of many different persuasions, seem to agree on the following
minimal descriptions of part of the empirical situation.
1 (Western) Europe, in what is called the Middle Ages, was organized
in a system (productive, legal, political) that may be designated as
``feudalism.'' But there is little consensus on what were its crucial or
de®ning characteristics, and on whether this system was unique to
Europe or also known elsewhere in the world.
2 European feudalism came to an end, or broke down, and was
transformed into or replaced by another system that some call
capitalism, some call modernity, and some give still other names. But
there is little consensus about the crucial or de®ning characteristics of
the successor system, nor about whether this ``transition'' occurred
only once in history, or repetitively (in the separate ``states'').
3 This system, which originated in Europe (or in various European
states), somehow spread gradually over the whole world. In geo-
graphic terms, this can be visualized as an ``expansion'' of European
ideas, power, and authority. But there is little consensus about
whether Europe imposed this system upon the rest of the world, or
whether the system simply ``diffused'' as a result of its supposedly
patent superiorities, nor is there consensus about the degree to which
non-Europeans opposed this spread or the degree of advantage this
spread offered to the non-Europeans, if it offered any at all.
4 This new system resulted in an enormous increase in world produc-
tive capacity and in world population, but there is little consensus
about the ratio of the two (and how to measure it), nor about the
degree to which the increase in productive capacity is evenly distrib-
uted over the (increased) world population.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 13

In short, a very minimal framework of agreed observations are there,

though each is surrounded by important related questions about which
even the empirical description is under severe debate.
Finally, there is an enormous confusion about what is to be explained
under the heading ``rise of the West'' (or any of its alternative wordings).
There are at least three separate sub-questions about which there is
considerable argument. One is the explanation of what caused the so-
called ``crisis of feudalism,'' that is, what brought about the decline/
disappearance of a particular existing historical system. The second
question, whose relation to the ®rst is unclear in most accounts, is why,
at the very time that ``feudalism'' was declining or disappearing in
Western Europe, did it seem to be increasing (or even occurring in some
areas for the ®rst time) in Eastern Europe in the form of the so-called
``second serfdom.'' A third question is whether meaningful distinctions
can be made in the patterns among Western European zones, and in
particular whether (and why) England became ``capitalist'' before
France (or the Netherlands, or ``Germany'' or ``Italy''). Finally, there is
a literature that seeks to explain why other civilizational zones of the
world (China, India, the Islamic world) did not proceed to become
``capitalist'' or ``modern'' at this moment in time, but Europe did.
Nevertheless, despite this confusion, I note once again one unifying
premise ± that some zone had to move ``forward'' in this way, and at this
approximate moment in time.
And since, in virtually everyone's view, the zone that did move
forward was in fact Western Europe (or for some, more narrowly,
England), it seems clear that there occurred a ``rise of the West.''
Indeed, this has been frequently denoted as ``the European miracle.''
The miracle, it seems, is the realization of the central value of the
capitalist system itself: productivism.1 E. L. Jones states it quite
clearly: ``The vital question . . . is how did a world of static expansion
give way to one of intensive growth? . . . History is to be thought of as
repeated, tentative efforts of intensive growth to bubble up through the
stately rising dough of extensive growth.''2 This stark formulation of
the nature of the miracle ®ts well the prevailing mood of the intellec-
tual problem as it had emerged in the nineteenth century. It is to be
sure somewhat solipsistic. The West rose. How do we know the West
rose? It achieved intensive growth. Why did the West rise? It achieved
intensive growth. Why is it that achieving intensive growth is con-
sidered to be a ``rise''? Because it is a universal value, one however
1
See Jones 1987. Gellner underlines the point by saying: ``The phrase should not be read
. . . the European miracle. It must be read . . . the European ``miracle'' (1988: 1).
2
Jones 1988: 31.

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 14 Immanuel Wallerstein

that originated in the West ± in large part, in fact, after the West had
begun to grow intensively. What makes it then a universal value? It was
culturally imposed upon (diffused into) the whole of the world, and has
its adherents today in all parts of the world, most particularly among the
governments of the world.
Once again, we might invert the question. Did the West really rise? or
did the West in fact fall? Was it a miracle, or was it a grave malady? Was
it an achievement, or a serious failing? Was it the realization of ration-
ality, or of irrationality? Was it an exceptional breakthrough, or an
exceptional breakdown? Do we need to explain the limitations of other
civilizations and/or historical systems such that they did not produce a
transition to modern capitalism, or do we need to explain the limitations
of Western civilization or the medieval historical system located in
Western Europe such that it did permit the transition to modern
capitalism? And was it programmed, or was it a ¯uke?
I propose to discuss these matters as two successive questions: What
is distinctive about the capitalist ``modern'' historical system that distin-
guishes it from alternative (and preceding) historical systems? How was
the capitalist world-economy in fact historically constructed?

What is distinctive about capitalism?

There have been three approaches to de®ning the differentia speci®ca of
capitalism (or ``modernity'') as a historical system. One is to delineate
the social activities or social phenomena considered to be primary or
fundamental. A second is to specify the processes by which these
presumed activities or phenomena occur. A third is to describe the
structures that account for the processes. In each case it is necessary to
argue that these activities or processes or structures can be seen as
suf®ciently different qualitatively (or quantitatively or in both ways)
from those of other historical systems such that they warrant a special
designation. This turns out to be a more dif®cult task intellectually than
most analysts have admitted.
There is of course no reason why we should prefer de®ning an
historical system in terms of its activities or in terms of its processes and/
or its structures, or vice versa; the three vantage points are clearly
linked. But it is not certain that they are linked in such a tight way that
de®ning an historical system from one of the three vantage points
immediately and certainly determines its de®nition from the other
vantage points. In any case, various authors have asserted a strong
preference for utilizing one or the other of the vantage points.
Let us start by looking at the presumed distinctive activities of the

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 15

capitalist/``modern'' historical system. There seems to be little difference

in this regard among analysts of conservative, liberal, or Marxist ideolo-
gical persuasion. Virtually everyone tends to see capitalism as the system
in which humans seek to transform (or ``conquer'') nature in an
eternally expansive way and to amass ever larger residues of this expan-
sion. Whether it is David Landes speaking of ``Prometheus unbound,''
or Carlyle deploring the ``cash nexus,'' or Marx analyzing the search for
an endless accumulation of capital, or Keynes's references to the
``animal spirits'' of (Schumpeter's) entrepreneurs, or, as we have already
seen, the description of the achievement of intensive growth as a
``miracle,'' the phenomenon that is being observed takes the form of a
hyperbolic curve that knows no social limit. To be sure, whether physical
limits exist beyond the control of the historical system itself, that is,
whether ``nature'' inherently places limits on humanity is a question that
has been increasingly asked in the twentieth century. But that modern
capitalism is an historical system without conscious internal social
constraints to its systemic activities is widely asserted, and it is this
ceaseless accumulation of capital that may be said to be its most central
activity and to constitute its differentia speci®ca. No previous historical
system seems to have had any comparable mot d'ordre of social limit-
lessness. Thus, capitalism involves not merely the sale of products for
pro®t or the growth of capital stock (commodities, or machines, or
money). It speci®cally refers to a system based on accumulating such
stock endlessly, a system wherein, as the Weber epigraph says, ``a man
exists for his business, and not the other way around.''
A de®nition at the level of the continuing search for growth, expan-
sion, accumulation without end, whose justi®cation is itself (``we climb
Mount Everest because it is there''), has the signal double advantage of
not only being consonant with virtually all the explanations of the
structures and processes of the capitalist/``modern'' world, but also of
being a good ®t with historical reality. The capitalist world has in fact
grown, steadily and for many variables geometrically, for several
hundred years, its cyclical downturns all being part of long-term secular
linear trends ± at least thus far.
Furthermore, it is quite apparent that this description of capitalist
activity ®ts well with the central tendencies of Western ``universalist''
thought since the late Middle Ages ± the Renaissance and the Reforma-
tion, Baconian±Newtonian science, the Enlightenment, ``modernity'' as
a cultural expression. We shall see, when we proceed to discuss both the
processes and the structures of capitalism, that there are many problems
in distinguishing the capitalist/``modern'' historical system in these
regards from prior non-capitalist ones. But it is quite easy to perceive

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 16 Immanuel Wallerstein

the distinction at the level of its Weltanschauung, at the level of this

central de®ning activity of ceaseless growth, the ceaseless accumulation
of capital. In this regard, no other historical system could have been said
to have pursued such a mode of social life for more than at most brief
moments.
The agreement on the assessment of capitalist reality that exists for
the description of its central activity breaks down as soon as one turns to
analyzing the processes by which this activity is pursued. Indeed, the
analyses we have of the processes of our capitalist/``modern'' historical
system are doubly confusing. First, we are given virtually opposite
descriptions by differing analysts. And secondly, it is not clear that
either of the opposing descriptions describes a reality clearly different
from that of other historical systems. We may see this in the dissecting of
three processes which are referred to in almost all analyses: the freedom
of subjects, the distribution of surplus, and the construction of know-
ledge.
The freedom of subjects to pursue their interests has long been one of
the central themes in the analysis of the capitalist/``modern'' historical
system. What, however, one can mean by the ``freedom'' of subjects to
pursue their interests is far from self-evident. In the evolution of
Western universalist philosophy, the emphasis has been placed on the
(progressive) elimination of external constraints ± external to the subject
(or individual) ± on the part of both political institutions and collective
social institutions (for example, religious structures). This is in part a
question of jurisprudence, in part a question of mentalities. The
evidence that is usually adduced to demonstrate a decline in constraints
is, on the one hand, the possibility of mobility ± geographical, occupa-
tional, social ± and, on the other hand, the absence or minimization of
political or social repression.
However, the absence of constraints has been interpreted by other
analysts in a directly opposite fashion. The elimination of constraints
has been considered to be the elimination of guarantees for reproduc-
tion. A ``constrained'' system offers rights for current reproduction on
the basis of past activities ± past activities of the present individual or his
forebears. When the ``constraints'' are removed, however, current repro-
duction becomes dependent on current activity. And current activity
depends on current alternatives. If one is ``forced to be free,'' that is, if
the alternative of rights deriving from heritage are eliminated, the scope
of alternatives may in fact be reduced, not increased. This might be true
whether one is comparing a medieval serf to a contemporary proletarian
or a medieval seignior to a contemporary middle-class professional.
We ®nd ourselves in what is an unclear debate about the range of

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 17

effective freedoms that result from ability (rights) to act in the present
and ability (rights) to preserve the fruits of past acts. Furthermore,
whichever set of factors one emphasizes (the increased range of choice
in the ``present'' or the diminished guarantees deriving from past
activity), it is uncertain how great the difference is between the capi-
talist/``modern'' historical system and other (past) systems. For
example, the de facto mobility of serfs was greater than the comparison
usually assumes, and the de facto mobility of proletarians less. On the
other hand, the de facto guarantees of reproduction of serfs was less than
the comparison usually assumes, and the de facto guarantees of repro-
duction of proletarians greater.
We encounter similar problems when we look at the process by which
surplus is distributed. The unequal distribution of the total social
product has presumably been true of all known historical systems.
There are however several aspects of the unequal distribution that may
vary. One is how large is the produced ``surplus'' (meaning the value
produced by an historical system over and above the amount necessary
for simple reproduction). The second is how unequally it is distributed
(as measured for example by a Gini curve). But the third and most often
cited in the discussion is the process by which the unequal distribution
occurs.
Given the ceaseless accumulation of capital, already established as the
primary activity of the capitalist/``modern'' historical system, it follows
that the absolute surplus is large and far larger than that of previous
historical systems. But is it more unequally distributed? Here the
theoretical (and empirical) positions of contending ideological schools
have been directly at odds one with the other. One school contends that
our current system is relatively more egalitarian in distribution than
previous systems and getting ever more so. The opposing school con-
tends the exact inverse: that the distribution is more unequal (or more
polarized) and getting ever more so. One of the sources of this difference
is that the two camps take different spatial units to measure. Those who
see increasing equality tend to focus on so-called ``advanced'' industrial
countries, alone categorized as fully capitalist/``modern'' (on the basis of
certain structures, to be discussed below). Those who see increasing
polarization tend to focus on the capitalist/``modern'' historical system
as a whole. It remains dif®cult, therefore, to take as a de®ning feature of
an historical system one (degree of equality of distributed surplus) about
which the empirical evidence is so contentious.
We arrive therefore at the measurement most frequently proposed,
the mode or process of distribution. This comes down to a distinction
between ``rent'' and ``pro®t.'' Both terms are subject to much terminolo-

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 18 Immanuel Wallerstein

gical confusion. The ideal type of ``rent'' is derived from the model of
the seignior who controls (``owns'') land whose use he allocates to direct
cultivators in some sort of contract, in return for some kind of payment
generically called ``rent.'' What makes this payment ``rent'' is a combina-
tion of two factors: a politically secured ``right'' to exact such payments
and the fact that the seignior need put no labor into the arrangement in
order to receive the payment. The ideal-type of ``pro®t'' is derived from
the model of the urban industrial factory in which the capitalist entre-
preneur/owner hires wage laborers to utilize his machinery, retaining the
``pro®t'' from the sales of the ®nal product, the ``pro®t'' being the
difference between gross income and total costs. What makes this net
income ``pro®t'' is that there has been an ``investment'' of capital by the
entrepreneur/owner and some direct management of the economic
operation.
One difference between the two modes of distribution of surplus is
the form of moral justi®cation offered. In the ideal-typical situation of
``rent,'' the primary moral justi®cation is ``tradition.'' Unequal distribu-
tion is somehow God-given (and perhaps in a secondary way a reward
for past military activity). In the ideal-typical situation of ``pro®t,'' the
justi®cation offered is quite the opposite. The unequal distribution is
precisely not considered God-given but primarily the result of human
activity, mostly in the present but partially in the past. To be sure, we are
speaking of the moral justi®cations offered in each system by the
bene®ciaries of the unequal distribution and those who defend them.
Critics, with opposite views, have always existed to contest these moral
justi®cations. But, critics aside, it is important to note the difference of
emphasis of the two moral justi®cations: spiritual versus material,
presumably eternal versus continually to be renewed by current activity,
serving the public weal through the maintenance of collective order
versus serving the public weal by achieving an optimal collective
``growth.''
But here too, on closer inspection, the two ideal types seem to lose
much of their distinctiveness. ``Rent'' seems to play a central role in the
capitalist/``modern'' historical system, and we are becoming more and
more aware of how many operations in prior historical systems took the
form of ``pro®t.'' Furthermore, for very many economic operations, it is
dif®cult to decide whether the appropriation of surplus is ``rent'' or
``pro®t.''
The difference between capitalism as a mode of production and the
multiple varieties of a redistributive or tributary mode of production is
surely not, as often asserted, the difference between a mode in which all
transfer of surplus is mediated through the market and one in which the

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 19

transfer is accomplished through ``extra-economic coercion.'' For there

is considerable extra-economic coercion in our capitalist/``modern''
historical system, and markets of some kind have almost always existed
in other historical systems.
The most we can argue is a distinction that is more subtle. In the
constant tensions between allocation via market mechanisms and alloca-
tion via administrative (or political) mechanisms, and in the contra-
dictory behavior that results from the con¯icting pressures, either mode
of allocation may prevail in given situations in either kind of historical
system in the short run. But in the middle run, the market will play a
larger role in the capitalist/``modern'' historical system than the political
arena. To be sure, the ``market'' is itself shaped, in the middle run, by
the political arena. Nevertheless, once shaped, it has a conjunctural
autonomy whose impact is hard to constrain administratively, and which
thus forces political rede®nitions, from time to time, of the shape of the
``market.'' It is not really the case that in capitalism the market is ``free''
from political controls, as is asserted by neo-classical economists. It is
rather that the market becomes itself an important political mechanism,
something not true (or far less true) in redistributive/tributary historical
systems.
We can put this in the language of the invisible hand. In redistributive/
tributary systems, the methods in which transfers of surplus are accom-
plished tend to be quite visible: rent, taxation, plunder, ritual payments.
In the capitalist/``modern'' historical system, some signi®cant portion of
the transfer occurs less visibly, via the ``market,'' in the form of ``pro®t.''
The advantage to the recipient of the larger share is that the losers may
be in part unaware of having lost, or less immediately aware, and also
less aware of exactly to whom they have lost. They may thus be less able
to analyze the operations by which the transfer has occurred, and there-
fore less able to contest its injustice to them. In any case, a capitalist
system operates by trying to convert visible transfers into ``invisible''
ones. However, since the ``invisible hand'' is a hand that is politically
structured (and constantly restructured), it is dif®cult to keep it ``in-
visible.'' Thus the political success of the device is far from perfect; it has
nonetheless been reasonably ef®cacious, in part precisely because it is so
complicated.
The third process which is repeatedly offered as a or the differentia
speci®ca of the capitalist/``modern'' historical system is the construction
of knowledge. This is put forward in a number of guises. In general, the
emphasis is on the predominance of science, or of a certain form of
science and therefore of scienti®c method, a mode of thought sometimes
referred to as Newtonian or Baconian±Newtonian, and which presumes

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 20 Immanuel Wallerstein

or emphasizes the linearity and universality of physical phenomena. It is

less that this mode of science constitutes in some way the essence of the
capitalist/``modern'' historical system than that it alone, it is argued,
could have made possible the remarkable transformation of technology
that has historically occurred. In turn it was this transformation of
technology that made possible the large-scale substitution of non-
human for human energy in productive activities which in turn accounts
for the phenomenon of intensive growth.
There are a number of levels at which this thesis can be, and has been,
challenged. In the late twentieth century, there has been increasing
challenge, from within the community of science itself, of the adequacy
or utility of this model of science. The challenge, to the degree that it is
correct, raises questions implicitly about the rationality of the technolo-
gical choices that were historically made on the basis of the Newtonian
model. This however amounts to a critique of the practice of the
capitalist/``modern'' historical system, and not necessarily a questioning
of its nominal existence.
A quite different challenge has been to question the singularity of the
technological achievements of this historical system. One effort has been
to establish a continuous pattern of scienti®c/technological advance,
located in many different world regions (China, India, the Near East,
the Mediterranean zone), into which recent Western European scienti®c
efforts have ®t themselves, primarily since the sixteenth century. By
underlining continuities, this argument reduces the distinctiveness of
what occurred in Western Europe. Furthermore, it has been argued
that, in this arena as in many others, Western Europe had previously
been a ``backward'' or ``marginal'' zone, implying therefore that any
explanation of signi®cant change could not be accounted for exclusively
or even primarily in terms of some West European af®nity for or
tradition of scienti®c knowledge.
This rapid survey of processes that may be thought to distinguish the
capitalist/``modern'' historical system from other systems suggests that
the distinctions are dif®cult to etch clearly, and that it is dubious to erect
a theoretical scaffolding of explanation on the basis of these presumedly
distinctive processes. Can we do better if we look at the structures of the
capitalist/``modern'' historical system?
There are three structures that have been established in the capitalist/
``modern'' historical system which repeatedly have been (separately and
collectively) asserted to be its distinguishing features: private property;
commodi®cation (of goods, of land, and of labor); and the sovereign
``modern'' state. Each poses problems in the effort to uncover the
differentia speci®ca.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 21

Private or quiritary property rights refers to the assignation of owner-

ship to individuals (real or ®ctive) of physical phenomena (extended to
include so-called intellectual property), who receive legal guarantees
that they can retain their property inde®nitely, transfer or sell it, and
bequeath it. They may also use it (or leave it unused), rent it, or use it
up. Furthermore, no one may con®scate it, use it, or dispose of it in
their stead or against their will. Finally, all physical phenomena are in
principle owned by someone.
There are certain elementary objections to this picture of the institu-
tion. Not all phenomena are in fact owned by someone. For example, it
is generally agreed that air is not owned, and water seldom is. It is not
true that property is exempt from all outside decisions. For example,
states retain the right of eminent domain. They may legislate limitations
on certain usages to which property may be put. In times of ``emer-
gency,'' they may go even further. Sales of property are subject to
various legal limitations. Thus, on the one hand, property rights are far
from absolute in the capitalist/``modern'' historical system. On the other
hand, this system is not the only one to have had such property rights.
As frequently noted, ancient Rome, for example, had a similar structure
of quiritary rights.
If, however, we leave these objections aside as minor, and agree that
property rights are a pervasive phenomenon of the capitalist/``modern''
historical system and it alone, there remains the question of how relevant
this is. Property is ®rst of all the securing of phenomena that potentially
lead, directly or via the market, to some kind of consumption. Against
whom, and why, does consumption need to be secured? Obviously,
there are generically only two possibilities: against the collectivity of
others, and against individual others.
Security of property against the collectivity is of course not absolute.
We have already noted the concept of eminent domain, or the rights of
the state in an ``emergency.'' But how effective is it, even normally? Can
not modern states (and their substructures) tax, more or less at will? If
they are restrained in taxation, is it not primarily by political pressures
rather than by constitutional ®at? No doubt, there is a point at which
``normal'' taxation may be thought to be exceeded, and the state is
considered to be (illegitimately) con®scatory. But this is hard to de®ne,
and harder to enforce legally against the state bureaucracy, and in any
case the very de®nition of the threshold level that constitutes con®sca-
tion is subject to constant rede®nition and stretching. The real question
is the de facto difference between the security of so-called private
property against the collectivity and the security of other forms of
control of physical phenomena in non-capitalist historical systems

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 22 Immanuel Wallerstein

against the collectivity. In the latter systems, the constraint on the

collectivity (or the political ruler) may not be thought of as the illegi-
timacy of con®scation but rather as the illegitimacy of violating the
``moral economy.'' But in practice, how great is the distinction?
There is of course the second guarantee of security, that against
other individuals. This is the guarantee against theft, plunder, fraud.
But surely there are no essential differences here, either in law or in
practice, between the capitalist/``modern'' historical system and other
(previous) ones. Perhaps more pertinent is the securing of property
rights against those other individuals who are close relatives. Presum-
ably, in the capitalist/``modern'' historical system, property rights
inhere in designated individuals and not in a ``family'' or a ``commun-
ity,'' which is more frequently the case in other systems. But even here,
the distinction blurs. There has been a very wide gamut of rules in the
capitalist/``modern'' system that has ensured ``family'' rights in prop-
erty (inheritance rules, spousal or parental responsibility rules, etc.).
Conversely, in systems that emphasize the ``community'' nature of
property, often the ``leaders'' of these communities dispose de facto of
rights that are very close to those associated with individual private
property.
Security of goods is not the only object of property rights. Commodi-
®cation is a second. Security presumably matters primarily because it
acts as an incentive for entrepreneurial risk behavior by ensuring the
permanence of the rewards. Entrepreneurial risk behavior is market-
oriented behavior, and this requires commodi®cation. Commodi®cation
is structured, by law and by custom. It has ®rst of all to be permitted,
then socially encouraged.
Of course, the marketing of goods is a phenomenon in no way
exclusive to the capitalist/``modern'' historical system. To be sure, ®fty
years ago, there were many scholars who considered it to be rare or
exceptional or restricted to special arenas in non-capitalist systems. But
all the empirical work of the past ®fty years on these other systems has
tended to reveal that they had much more extensive commodi®cation
than previously suspected, even if globally not quite as extensive as in
our present system. The existence of real markets (and merchants) in
these other systems is certainly suf®cient nonetheless to eliminate a view
that the mere commodi®cation of goods is suf®cient to distinguish the
capitalist/``modern'' historical system from other previous systems.
An argument based on commodi®cation therefore has to rest largely
on the commodi®cation of two special phenomena: land and labor (or
labor power). It is in some ways dif®cult to know why analysts have
always singled out these two phenomena as cases apart. It cannot be

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 23

that they have been historically the most resistant to commodi®cation.

As already noted, air (and even water) have been more resistant to
commodi®cation than land. Such special status as land has is clearly
related to the fact that agriculture has been the central economic activity
of the past 10,000 years, upon which the reproduction of humanity has
been fundamentally dependent. It is only in the twentieth century that
we have begun to move in any signi®cant way to a situation in which less
than the majority of the world's population will be employed in agricul-
tural work. Even so, most of the world's food supply still comes
essentially from the land. It is not surprising therefore that various
historical systems have developed mechanisms to constrain (even ban)
the commodi®cation of land. Has this been undone in the capitalist/
``modern'' historical system? To some extent, of course. Most land is
today alienable. But it is of course a matter of degree: not all land is
alienable, even today. And it was not true in prior times that no land at
all was alienable. Indeed, there were some zones, like China, where land
was largely alienable. It has been primarily a matter of increasing world-
wide in the last few centuries the percentage of land that is alienable.
In addition, we must pose the question of how important it is that
land is alienable, and in terms of what? Market transactions are surely
not the only way of transferring control of land, and transfers of control
have been a frequent and recurring phenomenon of all known historical
systems. If consolidation of control is optimal for production (and
productivity), there has surely been as much consolidation in the course
of non-capitalist systems as in the capitalist/``modern'' historical system.
If so-called ``family-size'' units are optimal, once again they have been as
frequent in the ones as in the other. In short, it is not clear that the
relatively increased alienability of land has resulted in any enormous
difference in the essential morphology of landholdings.
What then of the commodi®cation of labor, or of labor power? The
key importance of the proletarian wage worker has been stressed in
many analyses of capitalism. Here too, we must look ®rst at empirical
reality and then at its consequences. Wage work has of course been a
central feature of the capitalist/``modern'' historical system. But it has
never been the only mode of the use of labor power. Indeed, it may be
questioned whether it has been even the majority mode within historical
capitalism. Conversely, it has seldom (if ever) been entirely absent as
one mode of the use of labor power in non-capitalist systems. As with
the alienability of land, the alienability of labor power is a matter of
degree. There has been no doubt more of it in the capitalist/``modern''
historical system, but it is not immediately self-evident that the differ-
ence of degree has been qualitatively signi®cant.

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 24 Immanuel Wallerstein

This leaves undiscussed what justi®cation there is for distinguishing

between the commodi®cation of labor and that of labor power, that is,
the difference between the sale and purchase of a human's labor power
for a lifetime (slavery) as opposed to its use for a speci®ed period (a year,
an hour). It is surely not clear that in the history of the world there has
been less slavery within the capitalist/``modern'' historical system than
in previous ones. One might perhaps make the opposite case.
Finally, however, the question remains, as with the alienability of
land, what difference does alienability of labor (and/or labor power)
make? If it is argued that, only if labor and/or labor power is alienable,
will it be possible to allocate optimally its use, this leaves out of
consideration the possibility that ``administrative'' transfers might
achieve the same objective, indeed achieve it better under certain
circumstances. If it is argued that commodi®ed labor power is essential
to provide a substantial commodity goods market, this leaves out of
consideration that collective purchase of goods for reproduction (as by
an army intendancy or by a factory/plantation owner) can have substan-
tially the same effect of providing market purchasing power, and indeed
has had this effect historically.
We are left therefore with the uncertainty as to whether the degree of
commodi®cation achieved under the capitalist/``modern'' historical
system, while quantitatively greater than other systems, has been thus far
qualitatively fundamental. And even if it has been so, whether it is in
fact true that commodi®cation by itself transforms productivity.
We thus turn to the third structural feature considered speci®c to the
capitalist system ± the sovereign ``modern'' state. What is it about the
``modern'' state that is different from the political structures of previous
historical systems? In the political theory of the capitalist/``modern''
historical system itself, the theme that is emphasized is sovereignty. The
word itself makes clear its essence. Sovereignty is derived from ``sover-
eign'' ± a single ruler of a geographically de®ned area who has compre-
hensive and exclusive authority within this area. Sovereignty is the
uni®cation of political authority, the opposite of the ``parcelization'' that
had marked the political structure of European feudalism.3
If sovereignty is often considered essential to the capitalist/``modern''
historical system, it is because it is considered the necessary complement
to the institution of private property. Private property requires political
guarantees, and these guarantees can only be taken seriously if offered
by a state that is sovereign and thereby has the necessary authority to
make those guarantees.

3
Anderson 1974a: 19ff.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 25

There are however two problems here. One is, once again, the ®t
between the theoretical structure and the real structures. Have sovereign
states actually been sovereign? Have they had both comprehensive and
exclusive authority within their boundaries? Clearly, in the historical
reality of the modern world, no state has ever been totally sovereign. In
addition, the states have varied widely in terms of the effective authority
they have been able to exercise. Many have been quite weak; a very few
relatively strong. Secondly, if sovereignty is measured by centralized and
uni®ed authority as opposed to parcelized authority, other historical
systems have known this condition (or made this claim): for example,
the major world empires, although in fact the real power of world
empires was for the most part less than that of sovereign states in the
modern interstate system.
This leads, then, to the question whether there is some way of
distinguishing the ``modern'' state from the world empires. The whole
corpus of Max Weber's political writings may be said to be an attempt to
do just this. The two key elements that Weber discerns, closely linked in
fact one to the other, are the mode of legitimation of power and the
structure of the bureaucracy. Weber (and the Weberians) have empha-
sized the degree to which the modern state is based on ``rational-legal''
premises as opposed to being ``patrimonial.'' A rational bureaucracy is
said to be technically superior and is directly linked by Weber to the
needs of a capitalist market economy ``that the of®cial business of public
administration be discharged precisely, unambiguously, continuously,
and with as much speed as possible.''4 As with the other essential
structures, the question is double. What is the empirical reality of the
practice, as opposed to the theoretical description? Even if in practice a
difference exists, what are the real consequences of this difference?
The operational importance of ``rational-legal'' legitimation is located
in the rationality of the bureaucracy. But how rational have rational
bureaucracies been? The limitations on the degree to which bureau-
cracies of ``modern'' states have in fact been composed of impersonal
and disinterested rational technocrats is indicated by the now very
extensive literature on ``corruption,'' which is continuing and pervasive
(in one form or another). Indeed may we not consider it an integral
element of the operations of the historical system? Just as wage labor
turns out to be only one mode of remuneration among several (not
residually but constitutively), so disinterestedness turns out to be only
one mode of bureaucratic behavior among several (not residually but
constitutively). In addition, as the administrative structures of

4
Weber 1978: 974.

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 26 Immanuel Wallerstein

``modern'' states have grown in size, far from becoming more ``rational,''
as Weber asserted, they have in fact removed a larger stratum of
positions from the direct operations of a system of rational bureaucratic
recruitment.
It may also be asked whether bureaucratic public administration is an
essential element in the maximization of the ability of entrepreneurs to
pursue their pro®t-oriented interests. Obviously, it has advantages in
terms of predictability and objectivity (in terms of the con¯icting
interests of the competing entrepreneurs). But the interest of particular
entrepreneurs, especially the largest among them, might be better
served by less predictable, less objective (hence more collusive) public
administrations.
There is a third structural feature that distinguishes the ``modern''
state, one that is least frequently discussed. It is the fact that these
``sovereign'' states are in fact precisely not politically isolated structures
but rather members of an interstate system; indeed, they are de®ned by
their membership in this interstate system. This was not of course true
for the multiple antecedent world empires. But what is the signi®cance
of this ®nal structural particularity of the capitalist/``modern'' historical
system? Is it not ®rst that the interstate system constrains the sovereign
states in precisely all of the features which presumably distinguish the
``modern'' states from other forms of states? The interstate system limits
the sovereignty of the states, thereby recreating a form of parcelized
sovereignty. The interstate system creates the possibility of recourse
beyond the boundaries of the state, thereby undermining the perma-
nence of decisions on the security of property rights. The interstate
system provides the framework within which trans-state patrimonial
systems may ¯ourish (e.g., the existence of ``compradore bourgeoisies,''
subversive networks, paid agents of foreign powers, etc.). Finally, the
interstate system subverts the signi®cance of proletarianization within a
given state as it reinforces a world-economy-wide division of labor in
which the role of non-wage labor remains signi®cantly high.
The one thing that the interstate system does not constrain is the
basic activity of the capitalist/``modern'' historical system ± intensive
growth, expansion, the ceaseless accumulation of capital. Quite the
contrary! The interstate system has been itself one major expression of
this activity. As the world-economy has ``grown,'' so has the interstate
system, from its limited boundaries (as codi®ed, say, in the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648) to its global inclusiveness (as recorded in the
universal vocation of the United Nations).
We thus return to the question, what is distinctive about capitalism?
This rapid review of the standard responses to this question has served

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 27

to present the case that the presumably speci®c structures and processes
of the capitalist/``modern'' historical system all are less distinctive in
practice than in theory. And it has raised questions about whether the
various processes and structures, to the extent they are in fact different
from those of other systems, can be said to account for the economic
and scienti®c-technological development that we see. The one thing
that seems unquestionable, and unquestioned, is the hyperbolic growth
curves ± in production, population, and the accumulation of capital ±
that have been a continuing reality from the sixteenth century. But
hyperbolic growth curves are not per se to be applauded. Cancers too
grow hyperbolically.
We must now turn from the outcome ± the existence of a capitalist/
``modern'' historical system ± to the description of the origins. This is
often referred to as the question of ``the transition from feudalism to
capitalism,'' or how it is that our current system actually came into
existence.

The historical construction of a capitalist world

We have tried to specify what we mean by ``capitalism'' and/or ``moder-
nity.'' Similarly, it is necessary to specify what we mean by ``feudalism,''
at least in Western Europe, if we are to ask how it is that there was a
``transition'' from one to the other in this speci®c geographic zone.
Furthermore, as Bois reminds us, ``a theory of feudalism must take
account of its origins as much as of its disappearance.''5
At one time, it had been argued that ``feudalism'' was some kind of
``natural economy'' with a near total absence of markets, money, and
manufactures. This has become hard to defend in the light of current
scholarship. On the contrary, it seems clear that European feudalism
involved a signi®cant growth of markets, money, and manufactures. We
must begin with the fact that the instituting of the feudal system in its
classical form in the eleventh century was at the time a new solution to
the continuing problem of how to exploit agricultural labor by an upper
stratum whose primary skill was warfare. Slavery had been an important
(perhaps the key) mechanism to accomplish this, not only in the Roman
Empire, but in the early Middle Ages as well (®fth to ninth centuries +).6
However, the maintenance of slavery, in signi®cant numbers, requires

5
Bois 1976: 261.
6
Domenico Vera (1989: 32) points out that Marc Bloch's famous article, entitled
``Comment et pourquoi ®nit l'esclavage antique?'' (1963), might better have been
entitled ``How and Why Did Ancient Slavery End in the Middle Ages?'' given that this
was ``the heart of his re¯ections.''

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 28 Immanuel Wallerstein

two simultaneous conditions: ®rst, the constant procurement of new

slaves by warfare on the edges of (or outside) the zone in which the
slaves are used (and consequently the ability of the state, or warriors
within the zones, to conduct or bene®t from the necessary ``razzias'');
and, secondly, the maintenance of a high degree of internal order within
the zone in which the slaves are used (and consequently the dif®culty for
slaves to rebel or desert). DockeÁs summarizes the historical ups and
downs of the use of slavery in Western Europe as follows:
There were relatively few rural slaves, and especially prebendal slaves, during
the ethnic and social unrest of the third century (Bacaudae, invasions), and later
during the ``®nal'' crisis of the second half of the fourth and the ®fth century. By
contrast, the number of slaves increased with the establishment of barbarian
kingdoms, which combined repression internally with military forays externally.
There may have been a considerable number of both escapes and domicilings in
the seventh century (at least in its second half ), followed by a resurgence of the
slave system with the Pepins beginning in the early eighth century and of course
with the empire of Charlemagne. After the collapse of the imperial venture and
its associated state organs, and the ensuing social and tribal unrest coupled with
the Viking, Saracen, and Hungarian invasions in the second part of the ninth
and early tenth century, slavery declined once again.7
Slavery was not incompatible with the presence of ``free'' laborers, as
tenants or even proprietors of land adjacent to that being cultivated by
slaves. Indeed, the co-presence of the ``free'' laborers may even have
been highly positive for the political reinforcement of the slave system.
The creation of this ``ethnic'' distinction among the work force may have
facilitated the maintenance of order. However, such ``free'' laborers
were by no means necessarily joined together in primordial communities
whose differentiation would later give rise to feudal land property,
although that is how Takahashi had pictured the sequence.8 This model
7
DockeÁs 1982: 93.
8
The Hufe (virgate) is a total peasant share (Werteinheit, Lamprecht calls it) composed of
Hof (a plot of ground with a house on it), a certain primary parcel of arable land (Flur)
and a part in the common land (Allmende); or, roughly, ``land enough to support the
peasant and his family'' (Waitz). It is the natural object by which the peasant maintains
himself (or, labor power reproduces itself ). Its economic realization, in the sense of the
Hufe's general form, is the community or the communal collective regulations: the
Flurzwang or contrainte communautaire (G. Lefebvre), servitudes collectives (Marc Bloch)
which go with the Dreifelderwirtschaft and the open-®eld system, or Gemeingelage or vaine
paÃture collective. The collective regulations constitute an apparatus of compulsion by
which the labor process is mediated. However, the inevitable expansion of productivity
arising out of the private property inherent in the Hufe led, and could not but lead, to
men's ``rule over men and land'' (Wittich). The relationships of domination and
dependence into which this sort of Hufe community branched off constituted the feudal
lord's private property, i.e., the manor, or feudal land property. In this way we have the
sequence of categorical development, Hufe ± Gemeinde ± Grundherrschaft. Conversely, as
this sort of domination by the feudal lord took over the village community and the Hufe,
and the rules of seigneurial land property penetrated them, Hufe and village community

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 29

not only ignores the existence of the medieval villas and their slaves, but
also misses the fact that the rural communities (and their quasi-egali-
tarian ideologies), far from being primordial, were themselves relatively
late products of the inclusion of the tenants in the feudal dependency
network. As Guerreau argues: ``To see in fourteenth-century commu-
nities heroic survivals of primitive communities reaching back to the
Bronze Age . . . goes counter to the most elementary sense of history.''9
The manorial system, with its combination of slave labor on the
demesne and ``free'' laborers, collapsed by the end of the tenth
century.10 It is this collapse ± Bois calls it a ``revolution'' ± that was ``the
immediate cause of massive initiatives of the rural population in
numerous regions, which led to the famous expansion of the eleventh±
twelfth centuries.''11 These initiatives were institutionalized as the
``classic'' feudal system (serfs bound to their masters, but also bound to
each other in communal structures). For most previously ``free'' la-
borers, this new system in fact involved a considerable increase in their
exploitation, combined with a relative opportunity for some to improve
their situation. Johsua explains this increased pressure on two grounds.
On the one hand, there was the increasing cost of slave supply. As the
near zones for razzia were exhausted, one had to go further a®eld.12 On
the other hand, the reemergence of an urban network (beginning
already in the eighth century) created a demand for increased produc-
tion.13 Thus it was that by 1000+, more or less, ``the banal seigniory was
established virtually everywhere,'' in part (in large part?) because of the
end of the system of ``fruitful pillage.''14 And, with the creation of this
new exploitative system, there may be said to have begun the ``period of
dynamism and ascendancy for Christian Europe in general.''15
Still, despite the economic and geographic expansion of the following
two to three centuries, the new system of exploitation was still on quite
shaky structural legs. One crucial element was that the principal means
of production, arable land, ``had itself to be produced'' by a process of
land clearance.16 Brenner notes this by arguing that colonization was
the ``archetypal form of feudal development and feudal improvement.''17
He states this, however, too narrowly, since the colonization of entirely

as ``natural'' objects and their mutual relations were changed into a historical
(speci®cally, the feudal) form and relationships (Takahashi 1976: 73).
9
Guerreau 1980: 86.
10 11 12
Bois 1989. Guerreau 1980: 196. Johsua 1988: 63.
13
Ibid.: 127. The importance of urban networks in, indeed their centrality for, the feudal
system in Europe has been increasingly recognized in recent literature. See Merrington
1976.
14 15 16
Ibid.: 23. Gimpel 1983: 9. Johsua 1988: 20.
17
Brenner 1985b: 237.

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 30 Immanuel Wallerstein

``new'' areas was only one means of creating arable land. The second
was converting land in the vicinity of existing holdings (pasture lands,
forests, swamp lands, etc.) into arable lands by ``improvement.''
The colonization of entirely new lands was not necessarily more
pro®table than improvement of old lands since colonization often
entailed the cost of ``conquest.'' Though the developers, because they
were free from the constraints of custom, were sometimes able to
impose new and advantageous relations of production on the direct
producers, at other times they found that the low labor±land ratio
required signi®cant concessions to the direct producers. To be sure,
improving ``old'' land required changing old social patterns and this met
with resistance. It also frequently involved the cultivation of less fertile
land (since otherwise the land would probably have been cultivated
previously). But it had the advantage of utilizing land somehow already
in the purview (if not the total control) of the developers, and therefore
involving no new obligations to overlords.
In either case, development of land required the political acquies-
cence, if not the political assistance, of overlords and thus encouraged
``the build-up of larger, more effective military organization and/or the
construction of stronger surplus-extracting machinery.''18 It is thus
appropriate to insist, as does Anderson, that:
The singularity of feudalism was never exhausted merely by the existence of
seigneurial and serf classes as such. It was their speci®c organization in a
vertically articulated system of parcellized sovereignty and scalar property that
distinguished the feudal mode of production in Europe.19
The ef®cacy of feudalism was precisely located in the tight link between
the economic and political powers of the seignior, ``the total assimilation
of power over the land and power over men.''20 Or, as Hilton puts it, it
was ``lordship which is speci®c to feudalism.''21
On the other hand, the seemingly tight link of economic and political
power was precisely undermined by the parcelization of sovereignty and
the limited control of the productive process:
These lords, with their armed retainers and their far-reaching private or public
jurisdictions, had by no means complete control even over the servile peasantry.
In particular, their military and political power was not matched by their power
to manage the agrarian economy. This was because of the great distance
between them and the productive process. Nor was this simply the contrast
between the vast scale of feudal landownership and the small scale of the family
enterprise, for these distances applied to the petty lords of single villages as well
as to magnates possessing hundreds. It was also because, on the whole, the
effective intervention of the lord or his of®cials in the economy of the peasant
18 19
Ibid.: 238. Anderson 1974a: 408.
20 21
Guerreau 1980: 180. Hilton 1985: 124.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 31

holding was very limited. It is true that the lord could affect, usually in a
negative sense, the resources of the peasant holding by his demands for rents
and services. He could also (though never as much as he hoped) control the
movement of the dependent population. But he was not able to determine the
application of labour and other resources within the economy of the holding;
nor, on the whole, was there much attempt in terms of leases, even when
customary tenure began to break down at the end of the middle ages, to specify
good husbandry practices.
We therefore have a landowning class whose very existence depended on the
transfer to it of the surplus labour and the fruits of surplus labour of a class
which was potentially independent of it, over which it exercised political,
military and juridical power, but in relation to which it ful®lled no entrepre-
neurial function.22
It is for these reasons that Bois insists on de®ning feudalism as the
``hegemony of individual petty production'' combined with, of course,
the appropriation of part of the surplus by the seignior, an appropriation
that was made possible by political constraint.23
This system worked wonderfully well for the seigniors for a time, but
then ceased to do so. It was circa 1250+ that the system entered into its
``crisis'' which is conventionally seen to have lasted until circa 1450+.
Hence, we seem to be dealing with an historical system that existed for
only 500 years at most, a period that apparently may be said to be
composed one-half of a rise or ¯ourishing of the system and one-half of
a crisis or fall. This seems a curiously abbreviated and formal schema.
Some authors solve this anomaly by stretching the de®nition of ``feud-
alism'' beyond the seignior±serf model to include within it the period of
circa 400±500+ up to circa 1000+. But this in turn poses another
intellectual dilemma, well stated by DockeÁs: ``What is needed is either to
revise the concept of the feudal mode as composed of two successive
forms within a single mode of production, or to regard the Middle Ages
as a prolonged transitional period between the slave mode and the
capitalist mode of production.''24
22
Ibid.: 125±27.
23
Bois 1976: 355.
24
DockeÁs 1982: 262, fn. 103. See a similar formulation by Harbans Mukhia (1981: 274):
``Feudalism, like other social formations before or after it, was a transitional system. As
such it stood mid-way in the transition of the west European economy, from a primarily
slave-based system of agricultural production to one dominated by the complementary
classes of the capitalist farmer and the landless agricultural wage-earner, but in which
the free peasantry also formed a signi®cant element.''
Guerreau considers the life of the feudal system to be even briefer: ``The feudal
system was launched in the eleventh century, developed in the twelfth and died before
even reaching full growth in the thirteenth at the hands of the royalty. On this point,
Guizot had understood the evolution quite perfectly. The ®ef, as it is described
somewhat maliciously in the textbooks, was a form entirely transitory, uncertain, and
¯uid'' (1980, 197±98).

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 32 Immanuel Wallerstein

The feudal system in Western Europe seems quite clearly to have

operated by a pattern of cycles of expansion and contraction of two
lengths: circa 50 years and circa 200±300 years. The two kinds of cycles
seem to show parallel characteristics and the shorter ones were en-
sconced in the longer ones. The evidence for the shorter ones is most
clearly presented in the careful reconstruction by Bois for Normandy.25
The longer ones (or rather the longer one) has received the consensual
accord of most economic historians dealing with the late Middle Ages.
It is a curious phenomenon, remaining to have an adequate theore-
tical explanation, that these 50-year cycles seem to resemble cycles
found in the capitalist world-economy (the so-called Kondratieff cycles
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), which many also think to
exist in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.26 As for the cycles of 200
to 300 years in length, they are widely agreed to have existed in the
sixteenth to eighteenth centuries,27 and an argument can be made that
they continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. Thus,
in still one more way, we ®nd an uncomfortable blurring of the distinc-
tiveness of the patterns of the European medieval and modern world.
The pattern of the expansions and contractions is clearly laid out
and widely accepted among those writing about the late Middle Ages
and early modern times in Europe,28 although of course the direction of
the causality is subject to very intense disagreement.29 It is generally
agreed that the expansion and (relative) contraction of population, total
land area under cultivation, nominal prices, total production, and
amount of monetary transactions went up and down in parallel. In-
creasing demand and prices led to an increase in land area devoted to
arable production; decreasing demand and prices led to a shift away
from arable to either pastoral or viticultural production. Increased
demand led to more agricultural innovation, greater use of fertilizers,
higher yields, greater concentration on the more expensive grains
(wheat, then rye); decreased demand had the inverse effect. Increased
land use and population was correlated with increased numbers of farm
units, their average size being reduced; decreased demand led to greater
concentration of land units. Expansion was correlated with greater rent
income to rent receivers; contraction with less total income. Expansion
was correlated with more favorable terms of trade of agriculture with
industry; contraction with the inverse (the so-called price scissors). Real
wages went down with expansion and population increase; up with
25 26 27
Bois 1976. Wallerstein 1984. Kriedte 1983.
28
Anderson 1974b: 197±209; Bois 1976: 349±65; GeÂnicot 1966; Slicher van Bath 1977;
Wallerstein 1974: chapter 1; 1980: chapter 1.
29
See Brenner (1985a) and the responses in the same book.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 33

contraction. Industry was more urban in times of expansion, more rural

in contraction. Expansion in the feudal system led to more serfdom;
contraction to less.
It is the long swing that was crucial. Thus 1050±1250+ was a time of
the expansion of Europe (the Crusades; the colonizations in the east and
far north, and in Ireland), which were then halted or pushed back. It
was the time of ¯ourishing of the urban centers, the construction of the
great cathedrals, the strengthening of the state structures (and hence of
more internal peace, if more warfare at the edges of the system). The
``crisis'' or great contraction of 1250±1450+ included the Black Plague,
the period of numerous peasant revolts (and the ¯ourishing of ``egali-
tarian'' heresies in the Church), the crisis of seigniorial revenues and the
greater internecine struggles of the nobility (e.g., the Hundred Years
War, the Wars of the Roses), all of which involved violence and disorder
that added to the decline in both total production and productivity.
It is because of, or in the wake of, this long contraction of the
economy throughout Europe, this ``crisis'' of the feudal system, that
most commentators argue there occurred (or began) a ``transition'' to
capitalism, or to a ``modern'' commercialized economic system. Some
analysts lay emphasis on the rupture this represented. Others prefer to
see the picture from 1000+ to today as a relatively steady evolution, but
even the latter seem to recognize that a qualitative shift took place circa
1500+. This concept is consecrated in our accepted periodization which
sees circa 1500+ as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning in
Europe of ``early modern times,'' or sees the Renaissance plus the
Reformation as a critical turning-point.
But what are the explanations normally given as to why this ``transfor-
mation'' occurred? Here the literature is far more murky, since many of
the ``explanations'' are primarily empirical descriptions of what is
thought to have changed or evolved, rather than what caused the
changes to occur. Why in fact did any fundamental changes occur at all?
That is to say, that a particular variant of an agricultural system in which
some overclass exploited in some fashion the mass of the rural producers
gave way to another variant was nothing new ± in Western Europe or
elsewhere. This had been the story of mankind ever since the so-called
agricultural revolution. All the variants had been unstable, in the sense
that any given one had seldom lasted more than 400±500 years. But,
when any given one had collapsed, it had been replaced previously via
mutation or conquest by another variant which shared certain structural
characteristics: (a) the primacy of agricultural production, combined
with artisanal activity; (b) the limited global surplus; (c) the sustenance
of non-agricultural producers by a politically enforced transfer of

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 34 Immanuel Wallerstein

surplus to the upper stratum of (usually) warriors, clerics, and mer-

chants; (d) some networks of trade, usually at least one long-distance
network, combined with very local ones. Probably the most prosperous
of all these historical systems were located in the most fertile agricultural
zones, wherein we ®nd the ``great civilizations'' over the millennia.
Many of these historical systems had what we might call proto-
capitalist elements. That is, there often was extensive commodity
production. There existed producers and traders who sought pro®t.
There was investment of capital. There was wage labor. There were
Weltanschauungen consonant with capitalism. But none had crossed the
threshold of creating a system whose primary driving force was the
incessant accumulation of capital. Circa 1400+, when the relatively
insigni®cant, obscure, and short-lived system of European feudalism
was in full collapse, there was little reason to presume that anything
more than a new variant of a redistributive/tributary system of exploita-
tion would replace it. Instead, there was the genesis of a radically new
system. I cannot emphasize too strongly how much I agree with Sweezy
when he says that why this should have happened is ``a genuinely
puzzling question.''30

Civilizational explanations
Most solutions to the puzzle tend to look for some Western European
structural secret, some long-standing ``civilizational'' characteristic
which led inevitably to this development. These structural explanations
cross the great ideological divide of liberal and Marxist thought. A few
solutions to this puzzle, and only more recently, suggest conjunctural
explanations, citing developments that were contingent and therefore
not inevitable. Such explanations too do not necessarily correlate with a
particular ideology. In fact, the distinction between civilizational and
conjunctural explanations is somewhat factitious. The question turns
out to be really this: is the something that happened circa 1500+ in the
``West'' to be explained by phenomena that emerged much earlier, say
before 1000+, perhaps millennia before? Or were all these ``early''
factors only necessary conditions, still lacking the suf®cient condition,
which however was conjunctural, in the sense that it involved a ``con-
juncture'' of occurrences (during the two centuries immediately pre-
ceding the transition to a capitalist/``modern'' historical system), a
conjuncture that was unlikely, but without which the transition could
30
Sweezy 1976b: 106. Roberto Unger (1987) similarly builds his whole analysis around
the normality of ``periodic breakdowns'' of agrarian-bureaucratic societies and what he
calls their ``reversion cycles.''

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 35

never have occurred? That is to say, was it the case that the actual
outcome of the ``crisis of feudalism'' was only one possibility among
many, and not necessarily the most likely?
Obviously, any historical occurrence has immediate roots whose
derivation can always be traced further back, ad in®nitum. However, if
we believe that the crucial turning-point was 500±2500 years earlier, we
are coming up with a cultural±genetic explanation which in effect says
that the development of capitalism/``modernity'' in the West, and in the
West ®rst, had been rendered ``inevitable'' by this earlier ``civilizational''
system. If, however, we ®nd that as late as 1300+ there was no reason to
expect that the qualitative changes that would occur 200 years later were
built into long-standing historical trajectories, but rather were ``conjunc-
tural,'' we are freer to appraise the wisdom of the historical choices that
were made, and are liberated from the self-ful®lling and self-congratula-
tory qualities of the ``civilizational'' explanation.
The ``civilizational'' explanations are well known. Perhaps the most
in¯uential has been that of Max Weber, who made his agenda quite
clear in the very beginning of the analysis:
A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal
history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact
should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization
only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line
of development having universal signi®cance and value.31
We know what Weber found: that the Judeo-Christian tradition (thus
something going back thousands of years) took particular expression in
the sixteenth century, with the Reformation, in something he called the
Protestant ethic; that this ethic provided the normative support for the
activities of capitalist entrepreneurs; that such normative support was a
critically determining variable in the emergence of a capitalist system.
Although Weber's views are supposed to be contra-Marxist views, it
seems clear that a large number of Marxists also give ``civilizational''
explanations. Perry Anderson, for example, argues that capitalism could
only have emerged out of a feudal mode of production. This is of course
a standard view among Marxists. To this, however, he adds the insis-
tence that feudalism was not known in all parts of the world, but only in
Europe and Japan. Inveighing against ``a colour-blind materialism''
which ``inevitably ends in a perverse idealism,'' he denies that such
``social formations'' as the nomadic Tatar confederations, the Byzantine
Empire, or the Ottoman Sultanate, among others, may be described as
feudal at any point in their history. He is aware, of course, that there are

31
Weber 1930: 13.

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 36 Immanuel Wallerstein

respected scholars who have claimed precisely this about these systems,
but he asserts that these scholars:
have argued that [the] overt superstructural divergences [of these systems] from
Western norms concealed an underlying convergence of infrastructural relations
of production. All privilege to Western development is thereby held to disappear,
in the multiform process of a world history secretly single from the start.
Feudalism, in this version of materialist historiography, becomes an absolving
ocean in which virtually any society may receive its baptism.
The scienti®c invalidity of this theoretical ecumenicism can be demonstrated
from the logical paradox in which it results. For if, in effect, the feudal mode of
production can be de®ned independently of the variant juridical and political
superstructures which accompany it, such that its presence can be registered
throughout the globe wherever primitive and tribal social formations were
superseded, the problem then arises: how is the unique dynamism of the
European theatre of international feudalism to be explained?32
Still, if feudalism explains the ``unique dynamism'' of Europe, why then
did not Japan go forward to capitalism as early as Europe? To answer
this question, Anderson must appeal to deep (or at least longer) history;
he must give a ``civilizational'' response:
What, then, was the speci®city of European history, which separated it so deeply
from Japanese history, despite the common cycle of feudalism which otherwise
so closely united the two? The answer surely lies in the perdurable inheritance of
classical antiquity. The Roman Empire, its ®nal historical form, was not only
itself naturally incapable of a transition to capitalism. The very advance of the
classical universe doomed it to a catastrophic regression, of an order for which
there is no real other example in the annals of civilization. The far more
primitive social world of early feudalism was the result of its collapse, internally
prepared and externally completed. Mediaeval Europe then, after a long
gestation, released the elements of a slow ulterior transition to the capitalist
mode of production, in the early modern epoch. But what rendered the unique
passage to capitalism possible in Europe was the concatenation of antiquity and
feudalism. In other words, to grasp the secret of the emergence of the capitalist
mode of production in Europe, it is necessary to discard in the most radical way
possible any conception of it as simply an evolutionary subsumption of a lower
mode of production by a higher mode of production, the one generated
automatically and entirely from within the other by an organic internal
succession, and therewith effacing it . . . . The ``advantage'' of Europe over Japan
lay in its classical antecedence, which even after the Dark Ages did not disappear
``behind'' it, but survived in certain basic respects ``in front'' of it.33
It is thus the Roman heritage ± the legal system and in particular the
concept of quiritary ownership ± that distinguishes Europe in the period
1000±1500+ not only from China, India, and the Islamic world, but
from Japan as well.34
32 33
Anderson 1974a: 402±03. Ibid.: 420±21.
34
Note in this regard Talcott Parsons' modi®cation of the Weberian thrust. He acknowl-

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 37

Yet another version of what I am calling ``civilizational'' explanations

has been given by Michael Mann. He starts with the argument that
although, as of 1000+, Europe may have had less ``extensive'' power
than say China, it had nonetheless more intensive power, ``especially in
agriculture'' (Mann, 1986: 378). And this advantage in intensive power
was achieved early:
The medieval dynamic was strong, sustained, and pervasive. It may have been
implanted as early as A.D. 800. The Domesday Book, with its profusion of
water mills, documents its presence in England by 1086. The transition that saw
Europe leap forward was not primarily the late-medieval transition from
feudalism to capitalism. That process was largely the institutionalization of a
leap that had occurred much earlier, in the period that only our lack of
documentation leads us to label the Dark Ages. By A.D. 1200 that leap, that
dynamic, was already taking western Europe to new heights of collective social
power.35
For Mann, most of the explanations ``start too late in history.'' Chris-
tendom was ``necessary for all that followed,'' which takes us back at least
1500 years.36 It was necessary because the ``dynamic'' required a multi-
plicity of power networks (a theme common to many analyses), but
``these local groups could operate safely within the extensive networks
and normative paci®cation provided by Christendom.'' The content of
this civilizational explanation is a little hard to discern. The Christian
norms were spatially extensive, but so were Islamic or Confucian norms.
In what sense these Christian norms ``paci®ed'' anyone is hard to say,
unless norms do so by de®nition, in which case it is equally true of the
norms of other extensive religions. This is all the more true since, as
Mann himself notes in the very next phrase: ``Christendom was [in the
Middle Ages] itself split between being an immanent ideology of ruling-
class morale and a more transcendent, classless ideology,''37 a somewhat
pale rendering of the ®erce battles between the Dominicans and the

edges ancient Israel and Greece as ``seed-bed societies'' of what he calls ``the system of
modern societies.'' But he insists on the crucial role of the Roman Empire in the
``institutionalization'' of their cultural values. Its dual signi®cance was that, ®rst, ``it
constituted the principal social environment in which Christianity developed,'' and,
secondly, ``the heritage of Roman institutions was incorporated into the foundations of
the modern world'' (1971: 30).
35
Mann 1986: 413. Once again we can ®nd parallel shifts backwards of Marxists to those
of non-Marxists like Mann. Johsua goes back to the same point in time to see the
beginning of the long economic upward thrust of Europe. The key changes for him are
to be found not in the towns but in the countryside (a view that Mann shares in his
emphasis on agriculture). What Johsua singles out in northern or northwest Europe
(locus of later full capitalist development) as opposed to southern Europe is the
institution, as of the eighth century, of the ``classical manorial regime [which] will turn
out to be the antechamber of capital'' (1988: 368).
36 37
Mann 1986: 501, 507. Ibid.: 412.

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 38 Immanuel Wallerstein

Franciscans, to take but one instance. There is considerable question

whether we can in fact talk of a single set of Christian norms in this
epoch.
The epitome of the civilizational argument however is to be found in
none of these magni®cent total explanations. It lies in the ``hurrah for
England'' school, alongside of which exists a less well-known but equally
passionate ``hurrah for Italy'' school. For these schools, it is not Western
``civilization'' that explains all, but the narrower English or Italian
model.
That England's nineteenth-century triumphs were extraordinary is a
view that has had wide resonance ± in England to be sure, but not only.
Some ®nd that nineteenth-century triumphs were explained by eight-
eenth-century wisdom (inventing steam engines, or planting turnips, or
giving the gentry their due). Some trace the triumphs to sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century wisdom (moving from the elimination of serfs
toward the elimination of yeomen, or sustaining the new science, or
starting down the road to constitutional monarchy). But, of late, there
has been a tendency to move English wisdom further and further back
in time, to 1066+ or even further back, when the Lord blessed the
Anglo-Saxons. Two recent explanations, one in terms of ``culture'' by
Alan Macfarlane (very much a liberal) and one in terms of ``class
struggle'' by Robert Brenner (very much a Marxist) share this long
temporality.38
Macfarlane speci®cally seeks to debunk the standard Marx±Weber
view that there was a watershed in the sixteenth century between, on the
one hand, a traditional, peasant feudal society and, on the other, a
modern, individualist capitalist one. He says this is a false picture
because the country in which the industrial revolution occurred ``®rst''
(England) did not meet the criteria of being a peasant society ± in the
sixteenth century, in the ®fteenth century, or probably ever. He argues
this by drawing up a long list of features of a ``model'' peasant society
(extended household as the basic unit of production and consumption,
production for use, multi-generational households, high fertility, early
marriage, strong ``community'' bonds, unilineal descent, patriarchal
authority, etc.) and denying that England ever ®tted this model. Instead,
it was always a ```controlled' fertility society,'' one that was ``orderly,
controlled and non-violent,'' one that was ``unusually secure, and over
which ordinary people had an unusually developed control,'' one in
which ``ordinary people [were] accustomed to a world not of absolutes,
but of relative good and evil, where all could be changed by money.''

38
Macfarlane 1977 and 1987; Brenner 1985a and 1985b.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 39

England already had marriages that were ``modern'' in structure, Mac-

farlane says, by the eleventh century and ``in all probability [already]
between the fourth and ninth centuries.'' Far from tracing capitalist
virtue to Roman heritage, as does Anderson, Macfarlane ®nds England's
distinctive and, he says, critically important pattern of kinship and
marriage to be a ``Germanic'' heritage, one that ``never died out in
England, whereas in much of Europe it had been largely submerged by
old and renovated features of the preceding Roman civilization.''39
England escaped Rome; hence it became capitalist.
To be sure, feudalism did precede capitalism, but England had a
``rather unusual form'' of feudalism, one that ``already contained an
implicit separation between economic and political power, between the
market and government.''40 Indeed England was probably never really
``feudal'' at all.41 If England was the ``cradle of civilization''42 it is
because it had Adam Smith in its cultural genes, so to speak.
Robert Brenner is equally concerned to demonstrate that not only
was Europe ahead of Asia, and Western Europe ahead of Eastern
Europe, but England ahead of France (and to be sure the Low Coun-
tries, the Germanies, etc.). In early modern times, France was less
capitalist than England because it suffered from ``the predominance of
petty proprietorship,'' the consequences of which were manifold: tech-
nical barriers to improvement, especially within the common ®elds;
heavy taxation of the monarchical state which discouraged agricultural
investment; squeezing of the leaseholders by the landlords; subdivision
of holdings by peasants. All of these together ``ensured long-term
agricultural backwardness'' for France.43
But the sixteenth-century difference turns out to be explained by a
thirteenth-century difference, for England showed: ``no sign . . . of the
crisis of seigneurial revenues evident . . . in France and, in turn, there is
no tendency to substitute an emergent system of centralized surplus
extraction for an eroding decentralized system ± no embryonic rise of an
absolutist form of rule.''44 If England showed any signs of faltering, it
was ``only several decades into the fourteenth century, if then''; in any
case, the ``economic disruption appears to have been signi®cantly less
severe in England than in France.''45
But this thirteenth-century difference, it seems, goes still further
back, because the ``divergent evolutions'' of England and France of the
thirteenth century were caused ``not so much [by] the backwardness of
England's `economic' evolution relative to that of France, as [Guy] Bois
39 40
Macfarlane 1987: 6±7 (table I), 50, 55, 94, 121, 133, 138. Ibid.: 189.
41 42 43
Ibid.: 206. Ibid.: 184. Brenner 1985a: 29.
44 45
Brenner 1985b: 264. Ibid.: 270±71.

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 40 Immanuel Wallerstein

would have it, but rather [by] England's relative advance in terms of
`` `feudal' ruling-class organization.''46 And what accounts for this? Not
quite the doings of the Anglo-Saxons, to whom Macfarlane ultimately
gives the credit. Rather, English feudal centralization ``owed its strength
in large part to the level of feudal `political' organization already
achieved by the Normans in Normandy before the Conquest, which was
probably unparalleled elsewhere in Europe.''47 Fortunately for England,
God had arranged that the Normans did not conquer France.
Ultimately, the explanation of the difference is that the English state
was strong ± otherwise known as ``the extraordinary intra-class cohesive-
ness of the English aristocracy'' (let us overlook the Wars of the Roses) ±
and the French state was weak ± otherwise known as ``the relatively
extreme disorganization of the French aristocracy.'' This meant that the
former had a high ``capacity to dominate the peasantry'' and the latter
``made possible the French peasants' success . . . .'' In this sense, this
explanation is not ``merely political'' but is about ``the construction of
social-class relations which made possible the most effective `accumula-
tion' in the economic realm.''48 Aside from whether the description is
empirically correct ± ``Just as Brenner . . . minimizes [the] independence
[of the English peasantry], so he exaggerates the independence of the
French peasantry''49 ± there remains the very pertinent query of Bois:
``By virtue of what speci®c predisposition would French peasants have
fought better than English peasants?''50 Furthermore, given Brenner's
insistence on the particular political skills of Norman aristocrats, why
would they not have achieved these same results in Normandy itself, the
exact terrain in which Bois's analysis indicated remarkable peasant
strength?51
46
Guy Bois had argued that, in the thirteenth century, ``feudalism was most advanced'' in
France, consequently most pure in form, and hence, there was the strengthening of
small-scale holdings at the expense of domains, leading to the lowest seigniorial levels
(1985: 113).
47 48
Brenner 1985b: 254±55. Ibid.: 257±59.
49 50
Croot and Parker 1985: 83. Bois 1985: 110.
51
Unger goes further, by arguing that England is the deviant case in Western Europe in
the negative sense, that is, that England represents the case of Western Europe almost
not breaking with his ``reversion cycles'':
The fourth thesis of my argument is historiographical. Both Marxist and liberal
views of European history have been dominated by a stereotyped image of the
modern English road to worldly success: relentless agrarian concentration and
the triumphal march from domestic production and the putting-out system,
through centralized factories, to mass production. The political counterpart to
this economic picture is the gradual enfranchisement and assimilation of the
working classes on terms that make possible the reconstitution of a ruling and
possessing elite. Whatever departs from this English stereotype is made to
appear a deviation, qualifying or delaying an inexorable developmental
tendency. But the argument of this essay turns this prejudice upside down. It

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 41

And yet, curiously enough, the English aristocracy's stranglehold on

the poor peasants (as compared to the French aristocracy's ineptitude)
seems not merely to have disappeared by the sixteenth century, but it is
now the very opposite equation that is said to explain the English lead:
``It was the English lords' inability ever to re-enserf the peasants or to
move in the direction of absolutism (as had their French counterparts)
which forced them in the long run to seek novel ways out of their
revenue crisis,'' a crisis that had been previously discussed by Brenner as
relatively minor in England. ``Lacking the ability to reimpose some
system of extra-economic levy on the peasantry, the lords were obliged
to use their remaining feudal powers to further what in the end turned
out to be capitalist development.''52
The ``hurrah for Italy'' school is more obscure, for two reasons. In the
nineteenth century, Italy did not seem as resplendent as Great Britain
(although since the 1970s it may be getting its revenge). And fewer
people read Italian. Nonetheless, there has always been a strong voice
for this theme, most recently brought up to date by Pellicani.
For Pellicani, as for many others, ``the history of capitalism and the
history of the limitations on the powers [of the state] are an identical
story or, at least, have appeared on the historical stage as two tightly
interlinked histories.''53 Macfarlane might not disagree. But for Pelli-
cani, the story started in Italy, not England.
In order to present the case for Italy, Pellicani must deal with the
Weber argument on the critical importance of the Protestant ethic. He
acknowledges the historical correlation by the sixteenth century of the
economic leadership of northern Europe and the predominance of
Protestantism, but argues that the key element was not the ethic
motivating or justifying entrepreneurship but ``the weakening of the
spiritual control of hierocratic institutions which are all inspired by an
intense antagonism to Mammon'' combined with ``religious tolerance
and openness in relations with foreigners.'' This the Reformation en-
couraged, but more importantly this the Counter-Reformation elimi-
nated. This tolerance and openness made possible the distinction
between the civil society and the state, born historically, he says (citing
Jean Baechler), out of ``the inability of either to eliminate the other.''54

suggests that the English stereotype ± to the extent that it accurately describes
even the English events ± represents the least telling and distinctive aspect of the
European experience. The English route is the closest Europe could come to
Asia ± that is, to the situation of the agrarian-bureaucratic empires ± without
falling back into the Asian cycles. The supposed anomalies were and are the real
Western thing (1987: 7±8).
52 53 54
Brenner 1985b: 293. Pellicani 1988: 178. Ibid.: 102, 109, 119.

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 42 Immanuel Wallerstein

Pellicani argues that capitalism had always previously been thwarted

by ``megamachines,'' a term he borrows from Lewis Mumford, which
created ``insecurity of property,'' thus paralyzing initiative.55 The ques-
tion is why this didn't happen in Western Europe. The answer is that
there existed no megamachine because of ``the disintegration of the
Western Roman Empire,'' something that we may consider ``quasiprovi-
dential'' in that, ``by liberating European people from the `iron cage,' it
offered them the opportunity to construct . . . modern industrial
society.''56
This collapse of Rome is thus ``the most important'' of the factors that
accounts for the birth of capitalism in the West.57 The second was the
fact that the medieval struggle between the Papacy and the Holy Roman
Emperors was a draw, whose ultimate victor was the ``bourgeois
commune.'' Furthermore, at that time, it was in central-northern Italy
that ``the protobourgeoisie bene®ted from a particularly favorable his-
torical conjuncture and knew how to take maximal advantage of it.''58
So it is Rome once again, not in this case because it left a legacy (positive
for Anderson, negative for Macfarlane, but which the English fortu-
nately escaped) but simply because it collapsed. And once the Italian
city-states grabbed the ring (some eight centuries later or so), capitalism
could emerge.
The problem with ``civilizational'' explanations is that they tend to be
post hoc ergo propter hoc, and they therefore assume that the developments
were somehow inevitable. It is always dif®cult to ascertain in this genre
of explanation why the process was so slow. Between the deep root
(Germanic family patterns or the disintegration of the Roman Empire)
and the ®nal product (English capitalism in the nineteenth century or
even in the sixteenth century), there is a long interval of time. We are left

55
Ibid.: 130, n. 57. This is a strange usage since Mumford explicitly asserts that the
modern world has a ``new'' megamachine, which has one additional ``institutional
prerequisite.'' This prerequisite is ``a special kind of economic dynamism based on
rapid capital accumulation, repeated turnovers, large pro®ts, working toward the
constant acceleration of technology itself. In short, the money economy'' (1964: 241).
56
Pellicani 1988: 153±54. Once again, a curious usage, since this term is that of Max
Weber, who used it speci®cally to express his pessimism about rational capitalism.
Weber said that, with its ethic of duty and vocational sense of honor, it had created
``that iron cage . . . through which economic labor receives its present form and destiny
. . . a system which inescapably rules the economy and through it the everyday destiny of
man'' (cited in Mitzman 1970: 160).
57
Pellicani 1988: 157, n.24. Hall adds an important footnote to this concept of the
disintegration of the Roman Empire leading to a set of weak political entities in Europe.
``The fact that several sets of barbarians came into Europe at the end of the Roman
empire, rather than a single set as was the case with China and Islam, was doubtless an
initial condition in favor of a multipolar system'' (1985: 134).
58
Pellicani 1988: 189.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 43

with the impression that the deep root led to the ®nal product by a
process of slow maturation, as though it were organically programmed.
The least one can say about such a maturational process is that a strong
case needs to be offered that such ``programming'' actually operated.
But it is in fact seldom argued, merely presumed, and thus the explana-
tion is not very persuasive. It might be more reasonable to start with a
premise that is found in Pellicani himself: ``Wherever we look, we ®nd
traces of capitalism, but we also ®nd that economic life is somehow
`cooped in' by rigid political, religious and social structures which allow
little space for the game of catallactics [the science of commercial
exchange].''59 In other words, all other known systems have ``contained''
capitalist tendencies, in both senses of the word contain. They have had
these tendencies; they have effectively constrained them. If so, the
question then becomes what broke down in the historical system located
in Western Europe such that the containment barrier was overwhelmed?
This pushes us in the direction of exceptional circumstances, a rare
coming together of processes, or what was referred to previously as a
conjunctural explanation.

Conjunctural explanations
There are strong voices, from differing ideological camps, asking us to
recognize how unlikely was the emergence of a capitalist/``modern''
historical system. Ernest Gellner urges that our model be ``the fortui-
tous, contingent opening of a normally shut gate.''60 Michael Mann
speaks of it being ``a gigantic set of coincidences,'' even if he insists there
was ``also something of a pattern.''61 And Eric Hobsbawm suggests that
``it is very doubtful whether we can speak of a universal tendency of
feudalism to develop into capitalism.'' Rather, he tells us to look for the
``fundamental contradiction in this particular [Western] form of feudal
society'' which accounts for the outcome, even as he admits that ``the
nature of this contradiction has not yet been satisfactorily clari®ed.''62
We shall therefore discuss four elements of an explanation, empha-
sizing in each the particular conjunctural ``exaggeration'' of a long-
standing structural factor. We shall formulate each as a collapse, and see
what was the effect of the cumulated collapses. The four are the collapse
of the seigniors, the collapse of the states, the collapse of the Church,
and the collapse of the Mongols.
We have seen already that the relative power of seigniors or aristocrats
over ``peasants'' or at least over small agricultural producers is a
59 60
Ibid.: 16. Gellner 1988: 4.
61 62
Mann 1988: 16±17. Hobsbawm 1976: 160, 163.

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 44 Immanuel Wallerstein

frequently cited consideration. We are also aware of the vast literature

on what Marc Bloch called ``the crisis of seigniorial revenues'' in the
period circa 1250+ to circa 1450+. Everyone agrees there was a demo-
graphic collapse in Western Europe resulting primarily from the Black
Death. Whether this is to be treated primarily in its role as cause or
consequence is an issue that has been much debated, and with passion,
but for the purposes of this argument, the resolution of this question
matters little. The reality was clear. There were fewer persons to till the
land. Ergo revenues from their rents had to fall, even if the seigniors had
been able to increase the rates, which in fact they were not able to do.
Creating new tenures was by and large out of the question. Indeed,
quite the opposite was happening: lands were being ``abandoned,'' that
is, left uncultivated.
In this situation, each side utilized what political cards were available.
Initially, the feudal lords turned to the states:
The State, which was reviving all over western Europe at this time [fourteenth
century], intervened on behalf of the lords by ®xing wages at the pre-Black
Death level, and by legally restricting peasant mobility. . . .
The peasantry, on the other hand, was so situated as to be able to defend its
gain much more forcefully than ever before, for demand for labour was much
greater than the available supply. The desolate lands also provided the
opportunity to those peasants who had the other necessary means to emerge as
free peasants. The peasantry thus responded to the ``feudal reaction'' by
bursting out in a string of rebellions everywhere in western Europe.63
The seignior's appeal to the states for their intervention failed because
the dramatic demographic collapse gave the peasantry a strong weapon:
the ability to bargain with one seignior against another. This led both to
a reduction in rents (at a time when the total number of rent-payers was
already declining) and the disappearance of various servile restrictions.
The two combined ``allowed the retention of surplus on the peasant
holding,'' which Hilton calls ``the declining exploitability of the pea-
sants.''64
The peasant revolts did not have to succeed in the sense of achieving
state power. Their very occurrence changed the rapport de force, which is
why Dobb insists that it is on the ``revolt among the petty producers''
that we must ®x our attention in seeking to explain the ``dissolution and
decline of feudal exploitation.''65 To be sure, the seigniors resisted long
and hard. But the multiple modes of loss accumulated: non-cultivation
of marginal lands; reduction of rents; reduction of the price of land;
increase of arrears in rental payments by tenants in dif®culty; increase of

63 64 65
Mukhia 1981: 283. Hilton 1985: 128, 133. Dobb 1976: 166.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 45

demands by rural communities. Bois sees a long trend which culminated

in a major collapse ``between 1415 and 1450.''66
The landlords, in ®nancial trouble, failing to stem the tide of rising
retention of the surplus by the peasantry, turned on each other. This
started quite early. In his explanation of the crisis of feudalism, Perroy
argues:
It is in the decade 1335±1345 that the kingdoms of the West shifted, without
being in the least aware of it, from a peacetime economy to a wartime economy,
a shift that events would render permanent. They would thus come to suffer the
constraints of debilitating taxation, reduction of agricultural and artisanal
production as well as of interregional trade, the crisis of credit and of monetary
instability.67
Perroy lays particular emphasis on the ®scal consequences, but one
should not neglect that the wars had two other signi®cant consequences.
First of all, the wartime disruptions of production reduced revenues still
further, less by killing off small producers than by making it more
dif®cult for them to work or trade in zones directly involved. In addition,
however, the wars ± particularly the Hundred Years' War and the Wars
of the Roses, but not only these ± killed off the aristocracy. The severe
reduction in their numbers (over and above losses from the plague)
further weakened them politically vis-aÁ-vis the direct producers.
And if all this were not enough, real wages went up steadily for two
centuries, both in the towns and for rural wage workers. Bois notes of
Norman peasants, comparing 1320 with 1465:
From one century to the next, their wage (calculated in cereals) more than
tripled. . . . Facing this better-fed man, death retreated and life progressed. He
was different as well in the work world: should we not presume a greater
aptitude for work? Does not the Renaissance itself ®nd its roots in this marvelous
terrain?68
Dobb says that it was ``the inef®ciency of feudalism as a system of
production,'' along with the growing needs for seigniorial revenue, that
was ``primarily responsible for its decline.''69 Perhaps, although this
accounts less for permanent decline than for cyclical downturn. Sweezy
insists that the decline was due to ``the inability of the ruling class to
maintain control over, and hence to overexploit, society's labor
power.''70 No doubt this happened, but we must wonder why this
inability was so profound at this particular time. In any case, it is surely
true, as Bloch puts it, that ``at the end of the Middle Ages . . . the small
producers found that those over them were an enfeebled class, deeply
shaken in their fortunes and mentally poorly prepared to make the
66 67 68
Bois 1976: 201. Perroy 1949: 172. Bois 1976: 98.
69 70
Dobb 1946: 42. Sweezy 1976a: 46.

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 46 Immanuel Wallerstein

adaptations called for by an unprecedented situation.''71 The great

victor of this struggle was the yeoman farmer (or laboureur), the peasant
with the metal plow (charrue), the controller of a plot large enough so
that he had surplus to market and often needed wage laboring assistance
to complete the harvest.
If this were not enough to make the aristocracy tremble, the collapse
of the states could only add to their political discomfort, if not to say
their political desperation. The states were never strong in Europe
throughout the Middle Ages. But they were stronger at some times than
at others. The expansion of the economy in Europe between 1000 and
1250 which created new revenue bases for the states and new needs for
internal order, on the one hand, and the outward expansion of
``Europe'' (the Crusades, colonization in the east and far north) which
called for some military uni®cation, on the other, combined to create a
new life for nascent state machineries. The results were perhaps meager
by today's standards, but they mattered. These stronger states began to
relapse again into symbolic shells when the great downturn came after
1250.
In explaining the decline of the power of the seigniors, Bois lists two
background variables. One is of course ``the strengthening of the
middling peasantry''; the second is the ``hypertrophy of the state (royal
absolutism).''72 One of our dif®culties in interpreting what went on
between 1250±1300 and 1450 in the political arena is our ideological
insistence on interpreting ``Western'' history as one long, steadily
upward striving for democratic political institutions. In the beginning, it
is intoned, was the all-powerful monarch, whose power has been steadily
reduced ever since. But it was not like that at all. In the beginning
(1000±1250), there was a weak monarch seeking to establish some
semblance of central authority. These ``sovereigns'' had severe setbacks
in the period 1250±1450. It is true, as we shall discuss, that after 1450,
their powers grew again and quite considerably, but this was precisely
because the period 1250±1450 revealed the danger that the weakness of
the state represented for the seigniors.
What had been accomplished in the period 1000±1300? Some poli-
tical entities had begun to have an enduring existence, and hence a
certain legitimacy. England and France were the foremost examples.
Strayer notes that the beginnings of a bureaucracy had been put in
place, a chancery coordinating estate-managers, ®nancial agents, local
administrators, and judges. This had occurred to some degree every-
where in Western Europe. Then came the great economic depression.

71 72
Bloch 1976: 122. Bois 1985: 111.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 47

Strayer concludes that ``Europeans had created their state system only
in the nick of time,'' but he himself provides the evidence that the
¯edgling state system was sorely af¯icted by the economic downturn,
that ``many of the wars of the fourteenth and ®fteenth centuries
checked, or even set back the process of state-building.''73 There was a
resurgence of baronial power. Weakened vis-aÁ-vis the peasantry, the
seigniors could at least become stronger vis-aÁ-vis the kings. Indeed many
of the economic factors which enabled the peasants to gain advantage in
their dealings with their seignior landlords enabled the latter to gain
advantage in their dealings with their sovereign monarchs.
One result was that the internal cohesiveness of the central power was
seriously undermined by a now ``dangerously wide'' gap between the
policymakers and their bureaucrats:
The gap between policymakers and bureaucrats had not been serious down to
1300, but in the fourteenth century it was widened by faults of both groups.
Policy was made by the king and his Council, a body composed of members of
the royal family, royal favorites, heads of baronial factions, and the chief of®cers
of household and government departments. Attendance of princes and nobles
was sporadic; often the Council was composed completely of household and
administrative of®cials. Such a Council could deal with routine matters of
internal administration and could implement policies already agreed on, for
example, the mustering or supply of an army. But when the great (and
expensive) questions of peace and war, truces and alliances came up, the princes
and baronial leaders had to be consulted. Such men were usually not very well
informed, nor did they work very hard to repair the gaps in their information.74
Clearly the increased power of the seigniors, their inclusion in policy-
making was decisive in this process. This can be veri®ed in the fact that
there was a particular ``slowness in the development of the departments
dealing with defense and foreign affairs,'' which Strayer regards as a
``real puzzle.''75 But it is no puzzle at all. In a period of extensive warfare
and state disintegration, these are precisely the arenas in which ``heads
of baronial factions'' would be least willing to see the royal bureaucracy
strengthened since it would reduce their own margins of maneuver for
upward mobility.
Thus it was that ``most governments became bankrupt,''76 that they
were ``incapable of controlling their mercenaries, their currency, their
judicial system, [that] they were run by cliques and lived badly from day
to day.'' And thus it was that ``there was reborn in Europe a series of
principalities, micro-states, that were autonomous, even independent,
and that this phenomenon eventually undermined the illusion of a
kingdom by mutual consent.''77
73 74 75
Strayer 1970: 35, 57, 59. Ibid.: 74±75. Ibid.: 80.
76 77
Strayer 1955: 206. Fossier 1983: 116±17.

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 48 Immanuel Wallerstein

No wonder that Strayer could summarize this period by saying that

``the movement toward a new type of political authority was checked
just as it seemed to be acquiring irresistible momentum. During the
fourteenth and early ®fteenth centuries, secular governments grew
weaker rather than stronger.''78 No wonder Fossier could introduce his
discussion of the political situation on this somber note:
What a sad image the State offers us in this period [1250±1520]! Pontiffs who
are honorable but contested, becoming dubious and hated; emperors swollen
with projects, whose names we cannot recall; Western monarchies in full
disarray, old men, minors, madmen (openly acknowledged or probable); and a
kaleidoscope of Podesta, of princes and captains who have in common only the
brevity of their power and the irreality of their projects.79
One might think that the seigniors/aristocrats would have been over-
joyed with their increased liberation from central authority and basked
in the ``beautiful privileges'' which they ``wrenched'' from their sover-
eigns with the emergence of ``representative assemblies'' in these states
that GueneÂe says became ``democracies of the privileged.''80 Not at all,
as we shall see.
The collapse of the seigniors and the collapse of the states was
accompanied by the collapse of the Church. This is well known; it is not
always termed a collapse. But let us re¯ect on what happened. In the
®nal epoch of the Roman Empire, Christianity had become the state
religion. This was normal, in the sense that most world empires had
of®cial ``churches,'' that is, a set of religious functionaries who propa-
gated a world view which supported the imperial establishment and
which constrained disintegrative forces. A notable example is Confu-
cianism, but it is scarcely the only one. Among other things, these
religions constrained capitalist thrusts, in the form of preaching against
avarice (to be sure, more the avarice of private persons than the avarice
of emperors). The old Roman God system had lost its hold in the
Roman Empire for many reasons. One surely was the mistake of
beginning to deify living or just deceased emperors, which turned the
gods into political ®gures and ended their necessary minimal distance
from material existence. When Christianity surged forth to ®ll the gap,
Constantine moved to co-opt it as the state religion.
Christianity had created an integrated hierarchical structure and thus
was able to survive the fall of the Roman Empire. The result was a
unique situation, in which a hierarchical world religion became the
normative and even institutional cement of a politically disaggregated
civilization. For a long time, the Christian Church was therefore strong
enough to defend its organizational, economic, and ideological interests
78 79 80
Strayer 1955: 197. Fossier 1983: 110. GueneÂe 1971: 405.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 49

against any intrusion of particular political authorities. The ``cultural

consequences for later intellectual development were to be consider-
able,'' says Perry Anderson .81 Most analysts would agree.
Most would also assume that the consequences were positive. The
usual argument goes along the lines that the non-concordance of church
and state in the Middle Ages prepared the ground historically for the
modern separation of church and state, hence for secularism as the basis
of a capitalist, individualist civilization. There is however an alternative
way of looking at this evolution. One could argue that the Church's
organizational strength vis-aÁ-vis the multiple political entities was in fact
its fatal ¯aw. The fact that it was ultimately not subordinate to lay political
authority ± as in some sense had always been the case with religions
hitherto and elsewhere ± fatally undercut its ability to serve the political
authorities as their constraining force on proto-capitalist elements.
The constraint began to disappear quite early. Nuccio argues that
already in the late Middle Ages there occurred a ``profound detachment
from the religious and ethical attitude in the ®eld of political ideas.''82
And this detachment took place ®rst of all, of course, where the
capitalist thrust seemed strongest.
From the twelfth century onwards, Italian entrepreneurs had substantially
worked on the basis of a worldly ethic that had been put in the dock and
condemned by ecclesiological morality and they had defended it as best they
could, at the same time formulating the principles of their autonomy and the
``lay'' criteria of their economic activity, especially in the city statutes and the
mercantile codes.83
But why was the Church so weak? For one thing because the Church
was a major economic actor itself and was hurt by the economic down-
turn in the same way that both seigniors (as recipients of rents) and
states (as recipients of taxes) were hurt. To defend its own organizational
life, the Church became at this time even more involved in economic
and ®nancial matters.
The gulf between the Church's spiritual ideals and its members' failure to ful®l
them in their daily lives grew evermore paradoxical. What, for example, are we
to make of the fact that in Bruges, during this later period, the Collegiate
Church of St Donatian licensed several pawnshops on its property? These
numbered fourteen in 1380 and they were run, not by Lombards, but by
Flemings and Walloons. Because of the ecclesiastical licence, they were free of
municipal supervision. Or of the loans by Pope Clement V to Edward II
(169,000 ¯orins) for a mortgage on the revenues of Gascony? Or of Nicholas V,
who granted the great French merchant Jacques Coeur (1393±1456) a wide
licence to trade with the in®dels? . . .
The effect of the ®nancial crises was damaging to the papacy. Rightly or
81 82 83
Anderson 1974b: 152. Nuccio 1983: 121. Ibid.: 105.

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 50 Immanuel Wallerstein

wrongly, a great deal of the criticism directed at the papacy by the heretics, and
later by the Protestant reformers, is that it paid lip-service to spiritual values
opposed to capitalism, yet was itself deeply immersed in, and concerned with,
its fate as a shareholder in capitalism. Or again, if the papacy organized its
®nancial affairs properly, it did so with the aid of the bankers, and in return it
protected them by threatening excommunication and interdict. The weapon
was used against laity and churchmen alike, but it did not make the papacy any
more respected.84
The various heretical sects, which received a renewed impulse in this
era, were largely egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, and often ``communist.''
In the period of economic tightness, the internecine warfare of the
ruling strata for the declining global revenues was re¯ected in increased
con¯ict between the Church and the temporal rulers, and by great
struggles within the Church itself. This was the period of the Great
Schism of the West (1378±1417), which involved, among other issues,
the assertion of power by cardinals and bishops against the Pope,
parallel to the assertion of baronial power against the kings.
Had the Church been subordinate to the temporal rulers, it might
actually have had more moral authority. It might have been available for
use as the constraining moral force. The Church's very independence
transformed the Church into one more secular contender for power and
wealth. ``So far from Tawney's comment about the Church being unable
to compromise with capital being true, it seems only too certain that
compromise had been of little dif®culty in the accomplishment, and
virtually impossible to break.''85 Knowles, in his analysis of the last two
centuries of the medieval Church, concludes on this note: ``This, then,
is the religious climate of the ®fteenth century: a church sick, indeed, in
head and members, and crying for reform, but with no fear of a
catastrophe such as was so soon to occur.''86 The net result was the Sack
of Rome in May 1527, ``the terminal point of the Medieval Papacy.''87
Overall, 1250±1450 was a disastrous period for the ruling classes of
Western Europe, collectively. Their incomes were squeezed. They were
involved in an exceptionally high level of internecine struggle, which
negatively affected their wealth, their authority, and their lives. They
were faced with popular revolt ± peasant rebellions, heretical move-
ments. Public disorder was high, as was public intellectual turmoil.
What had been solid was melting away. There was a ``crisis'' in the
historical system. Perhaps most threatening to the seigniors, who were
the bulk of the ruling strata, was the rise of those ``one had begun to call
the `cocks'''88 ± the better-off peasants (yeomen farmers, laboureurs), the
84 85
Gilchrist 1969: 83, 95. Ibid.: 138.
86 87
Knowles and Oblensky 1968: 466. Binns 1934: 366.
88
Fossier 1983: 88.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 51

number and size of whose units of production had grown, and who
weathered the economic storm better (indeed pro®ted from it). As seen
by the aristocrats-landlords, Western Europe was moving in the direc-
tion of a paradise of the kulaks. And there seemed no way to slow down
this trend.89
The collapse of a ruling class is not unusual in history. It happens, if
not frequently, at least regularly. Normally, what happened in history
was that a collapse allowed for the possibility of external conquest. And
such conquest, or invasions, when the dust settled, put in place some
new ruling strata who could impose their exploitation effectively upon
the direct producers.
This did not occur in Western Europe at this time. We shall discuss
this crucial non-event under the symbolic rubric of the collapse of the
Mongols. Abu-Lughod argues that 1250±1350 represented the apogee
of a ``world-system'' that connected in a non-hierarchical fashion the
Chinese, Indic, Arabo-Persian, and European ``subregions'' on the basis
of long-distance trade. She argues that the inclusion of the Mongols in
this system provided a crucial element in its optimal functioning, since it
effectively added a ``northern'' route, reestablishing a link that had
previously existed in Roman-Han times:
The simultaneous operation of two different routes across Central Asia (a
southern and a northern) and two different routes between the Middle East and
Asia via the Indian Ocean (the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf ) meant that any
blockages developing at speci®c synapses of the circulatory system could be
bypassed. This ¯exibility not only kept the monopoly protection rent that
guarders of individual routes exacted from passing traders within ``bearable''
limits, but it guaranteed that goods would go through, in spite of localized
disturbances.90
None of the ``subregions'' was capitalist in structure. All permitted,
however, the functioning of long-distance merchants. The eleventh-
century economic upsurge in the West that we have discussed was
matched by a new market articulation in China, abetted by the improve-
ments in internal waterways. Both linked up to a Moslem trading
ecumene across the Middle East. China's commercialization reinforced
this model and, in McNeill's words, ``acted like a great bellows, fanning
smoldering coals into ¯ame.''91 The Mongol link completed the picture.
What disrupted this vast trading world-system was the pandemic
Black Death, itself quite probably a consequence of that very trading
89
Unger, whose detailed explanation only partially overlaps with the one given here,
wishes to argue that what accounts for the rise of capitalism was ``the very severity of
[the] collapse'' of the feudal system. He speaks of the paradox that ``the escape from
reversion'' may be explained by the very severity of the reversion episode (1987: 25).
90 91
Abu-Lughod 1989: 336. McNeill 1982: 53.

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 52 Immanuel Wallerstein

network. It hurt everywhere, but it completely eliminated the Mongol

link.
The shock appeared in the second third of the fourteenth century with the
outbreak of the Black Death, which apparently spread fastest among the most
mobile elements of the society, the army. Demographically weakened, the
Mongols were less able to exert their control over their domains, which, one by
one, began to revolt. Such revolts disturbed the smooth processes of production
and appropriation on which the rulers depended, which in turn led to a reduced
capacity to suppress the revolts. Once the process began, there was little to
prevent its further devolution.
As the plague spread to the rest of the world system, the impulse to conduct
long-distance trade was similarly inhibited, although it did not entirely
disappear. But when trade revived, the myriad number of small traders sought
more secure paths. These were, however, no longer in the forbidding wastes of
Central Asia. The lower risks, and therefore lower protective rents along that
route, were forever gone.92
The Mongol link might have broken down in any case, given the fact
that the Mongols faced technical limits they never overcame in sus-
taining a routinized extensive empire. In any case, the Black Death
occurred and its effects were immediate. The negative economic effects
occurred throughout the erstwhile trading system. We have already
described the impact in Western Europe. It was not so different for
China:
As was true in other subregions of that world system, the economic health of
China rested primarily on her own ontogenic developments in political
organization, technological inventiveness and skill, and commercial sophistica-
tion ± that is, her ability to harness her local resources. But another part of her
economic vitality ± a fairly large part by the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries ± came from her ability to extract surplus from the external system.
When the external system underwent retrenchment and fragmentation, it was
inevitable that all parts formerly linked to it would experience dif®culties,
including China.93
92
Abu-Lughod, 1989: 169.
93
Ibid.: 326±27. She states her views on how to analyze this period in Chinese economic
history even more provocatively in another passage:
[T]he real question is not why China withdrew from the sea but, rather, why
China experienced an economic collapse in the ®fteenth century that forced her
to scuttle her navy. Even when historians of China abandon the ``change of
philosophy'' argument and examine economic factors, they still tend to look
primarily at internal causes ± pointing to rampant corruption, political factions,
``bad government,'' and a growing gap between revenues and expenditures
under the later Ming dynasty. Although these explanations cannot be dis-
counted entirely, they have to be placed in the context of the rise and fall of the
world system traced in this book.
Could the economic dif®culties experienced by China have been caused, at
least in part, by the fact that the world system had collapsed around it? This is a
line of reasoning worth exploring. It is our hypothesis that the foundations of

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 53

But what has all this to do with the emergence of capitalism in

Western Europe? What Abu-Lughod is calling the ``Fall of the East,''
which she says preceded the ``Rise of the West,''94 had a straightforward
politico-military implication. It caused the various ``subregions'' to pull
into themselves. None had the strength at that moment to engage in
imperial expansion. Western Europe was unthreatened in the critical
period 1350±1450, when it would precisely have been most vulnerable
because of the triple collapse it was undergoing. The local West
European aristocracy/ruling strata would be neither replaced nor reinvi-
gorated by an outside force. They faced the rising kulak strata alone and
weak.
We must now renew the question, why did not capitalism emerge
anywhere earlier? It seems unlikely that the answer is an insuf®cient
technological base. It is not clear what kind of base is ``essential'' in any
case. Furthermore, most of the technological base of the capitalist/
``modern'' historical system is the consequence of its emergence, scar-
cely the cause. It is unlikely that the answer is an absence of an
entrepreneurial spirit. The history of the world for at least two thousand
years prior to 1500+ shows an enormous set of groups, throughout
multiple historical systems, who showed an aptitude and inclination for
capitalist enterprise ± as producers, as merchants, as ®nanciers. ``Proto-
capitalism'' was so widespread that one might consider it to be a
constitutive element of all the redistributive/tributary world-empires the
world has known. If therefore these proto-capitalist elements were
unable to assume the ``commanding heights'' not only of these various
historical systems as systems but even of their productive units, it must
be that something was preventing it. For they did have money and
energy at their disposition, and we have seen in the modern world how
powerful these weapons can be.
Who would have wanted to place limits on the ceaseless accumulation
of capital? The answer is obvious: all those who held existing power in
any historical system. The ceaseless accumulation of capital inevitably
permits new persons to challenge existing power, to undermine it, to
become part of it, and does so ceaselessly. Power in redistributive

that system had begun to erode early in the fourteenth century, that they were
precipitously weakened by the epidemic deaths in the mid- and later-fourteenth
century, and that they were ®nally undermined completely by the collapse of the
Mongol ``empire'' that, although it allowed the Ming to come to power, also cut
China off from its Central Asian hinterland. Thus, what is viewed in Chinese
history as a restoration of a legitimate dynasty must be viewed in world system
perspective as the ®nal fragmentation of the larger circuit of thirteenth-century
world trade in which China had played such an important role (1989: 323±24).
94
Abu-Lughod 1989: 338.

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 54 Immanuel Wallerstein

systems is based on rents, that is, on incomes that are politically assigned
and justi®ed. In a capitalist system, pro®ts may be politically obtained,
abetted, ampli®ed, but they are never justi®ed politically. Enough pro®t
can therefore lead to the ousting of existing rent receivers.
Of course, in non-capitalist historical systems, existing rent receivers
can be ousted militarily. But the military threat is visible, understand-
able, and acceptable. The insidious threat of market-generated wealth is
invisible, capricious, and ultimately totally irrational. It was therefore
always unacceptable. To let that genie out of the box one would have to
be very desperate indeed. I have tried to indicate the reasons for the
desperation of Western Europe's ruling state during the ``crisis of
feudalism,'' why it is they saw no way out within the parameters of social
organization as they knew it, and why therefore in effect the large
majority of the seigniors began to transform themselves into capitalist
entrepreneurs.
Remember, capitalist skills and methods were not unknown to them;
they had merely previously been rejected for fear of the long-term
consequences of utilizing them. Marc Bloch's description of the
behavior of the French seigniory at this time may stand as typical of the
new thrust:
Faced with the threatened catastrophe brought about by the transformations in
the economy, were French seigniors, because they were forbidden by law to
engross the land, simply going to give up? To believe this would be seriously to
misperceive the state of mind which the most recent entrants into the status of
®ef-holder, formed as they had been in the school of bourgeois fortunes, had
disseminated among the class they had just joined. Their methods merely had to
be more insidious, more supple. True seigniorial rights were far from being
worthless; but their value had become much reduced. Might it not be possible,
by means of tighter management, to obtain a higher return? The system that
had made of the seignior less someone whose income came from production
and more from rents had turned out to be disastrous. Why not try to reverse the
operation and, without using violence, since it was not permitted, work with
tenacity and shrewdness to reconstitute the demesne?95
As one seignior after another began to do this, it began to pay off, not
in more rent but in more pro®t. But the seignior was neither a
philosopher nor a social scientist. After a long crossing of the economic
desert, whether ``rent'' or ``pro®t'' the increased income was revenue,
increased revenue. Now as burgeoning capitalist and no longer so much
a military claimant to honor and rents, the seignior discovered the
importance of the state, as guarantor and facilitator of capitalist devel-
opment. Strayer puts it very well:

95
Bloch 1976: 134±35.

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 The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system 55

In short, the people [sic! I would have said the aristocracy] of Western Europe
had become convinced that the evil of weak government was worse than the evil
of strong government and that undeviating loyalty to the king was the only way
to prevent disorder and insecurity. Rebellion seemed more dangerous to society
than royal tyranny; it was better for individuals to suffer injustice quietly than
for them to make protests which might lead to new civil wars. These ideas were
extolled by almost all the political theorists of the period and were accepted by
the great majority of the people. In actual fact, the ``new monarchies'' were
rather inef®cient despotisms, and left a good deal of room for individual
initiative within the framework of the security which they had established.96
As Perry Anderson says, ``the rule of the Absolutist State was that of the
feudal nobility in the epoch of transition to capitalism,''97 except that he
should have added that it was that of the feudal nobility becoming
capitalist entrepreneurs.
What let the genie out of the box was the desperation of the ruling
classes. What made it possible for the seigniors to overcome their kulak
adversaries were the new rules of the game which ``disarmed'' the latter
by distracting them ± the more ``invisible'' exploitation of pro®ts. What
sustained the new system and allowed it to consolidate itself was that it
worked for the ruling classes, worked that is in the elementary sense
that, within 100 to 150 years, all threat to the position of the ruling
strata from the emergent kulak strata had disappeared and the
seigniorial (now capitalist) share of the absolute and relative surplus had
catapulted up once again, to maintain itself at a constantly high level
throughout the history of the capitalist world-system.
This is not the place to recount the history of this historical system,
something I am trying to do in the successive volumes of The Modern
World-System. There are however two more questions which should be
discussed, if brie¯y. One is the question of technological progress. The
second is the question of rationality.
As Brenner correctly states, the ``technologies capable of signi®cantly
raising agricultural productivity by means of relatively large-scale invest-
ments'' were available in medieval Europe, and we should add in many
other parts of the world. Furthermore, as he adds, these techniques
were even used on occasion. ``The question which needs to be asked,
therefore, is why they were not more widely applied.''98 The answer is
surely that there were signi®cant social constraints on these innovations.
Ceaseless growth was politically feared and seemed substantively irra-
tional as a social objective. Once however one creates the incentive for
technological transformation, there seems little reason to doubt ± we see

96 97 98
Strayer 1955: 222. Anderson 1974a: 42. Brenner 1985b: 233.

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 56 Immanuel Wallerstein

it clearly in retrospect ± that humans are ingenious and can develop

scienti®c knowledge and the derived technology.
But is it rational? It was none other than Max Weber, that great
protagonist of rationalism, who characterized the businessman's ``rest-
less activity'' as the leading of an irrational life ``where a man exists for
his business, and not the other way around.'' We are used to measuring
the gains that the capitalist/``modern'' historical system has brought,
and to neglecting the fact that the gains have gone to a minority, a large
minority perhaps, but still a minority of the world's population. We have
been less willing to calculate the costs to the majority ± in material
terms, in quality of life. And only recently have we begun to measure the
costs to the biosphere.
The capitalist world-system has been well established now for some
400 or 500 years. It covers the globe. The history cannot be undone. I
have tried to indicate here what were some of the peculiar failings, the
conjuncture of circumstances, that made it Western Europe that
launched humanity on this irrational adventure. This of course indicates
nothing of what might be the substantively rational alternatives possible,
given the fact that this historical system now exists and is in turn facing
its own ``crisis.'' Just as it was by no means inevitable that the capitalist/
``modern'' historical system be born anywhere in the sixteenth century,
so there is no inevitable outcome to the current ``crisis.''
The West invented this curious system where ``instead of economy
being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the
economic system.''99 All other civilizations had sensibly avoided this
inversion. Being substantively irrational, this system is ultimately unten-
able. It remains to be seen however what more fully rational system
mankind can invent now, and if it can.
99
Polanyi 1957: 57.

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