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"World-Systems Analysis" published on by Oxford University Press.

World-systems analysis studies the development of our world-system. Its units of analysis to explain social change are not nation-states, but world-systems. There were until the nineteenth century many different and dissimilar types of world-systems – world-empires and world-economies - in the world. These have over the centuries been subjugated by the capitalist world-economy which emerged at the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. Analysing these long term historical processes is central in world-systems analysis. It focusses not on the newest features of globalisation, but on the processes which over the centuries have formed our modern world-system. This started as an European world-economy and has always functioned as a capitalist world-economy. It has over the centuries gone through several distinct phases of development and has subsequently incorporated all areas on the globe. The peripheralisation of these areas enabled the core to prosper. World-systems analysis focusses on the complex processes through which the inequalities in the world-system are reproduced at the systems level, but are changeable at the state level. The semi-periphery plays an important role in both stabilising the world-system as a whole and enabling some states to improve their position in the world-system. These changes in position in the world-system are linked to its economic cycle of growth and stagnation and its political cycle of rivalry and hegemony. Besides these recurrent cycles there are also trends which change and undermine the present world-system.

This is a review of recent research on world-systems. We cover studies of the current system and studies that compare the contemporary global system with earlier, smaller intersocietal systems. Research on the cycles and secular trends found in the modern world-system is discussed at length. This includes an examination of economic cycles of various lengths as well as their links with broader cycles like the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers, international financial crises, and the cycle of global war. We also survey recent studies of core-periphery hierarchy.

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future. Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another -- such as history, political science, economics, and sociology. He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968. Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein's work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova's La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti's Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply "distant reading" more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner's model of the "global SF field" identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed "Anthropocene fictions" and Daniel Bloom "cli-fi", which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.