A Message of Hope

...My intention is merely to indicate how hard it is for a theory of a single market force to resolve a great many discrepancies, even major ones...

...Since the dynamics of this volume hinge on the similitudes of French and British interests, these questions go to the heart of economic interpretations of development...

...Hence, we are left with a paradox and questions, rather than a sense of unity and answers...

...Summarizing his work, he says: "The transition from feudalism to capitalism had long since occurred...

...The transformation of the state structure was merely the continuation of a process that had been going on for two centuries...

...To the contrary, "they represented its further consolidation and entrenchment...

...Whether or not the efforts of Toussaint L'Ouverture were as alarming to the great powers (France, Great Britain, the United States, and Spain) as is suggested, the more interesting questions just are not asked...

...Yet the breathtaking activities of a bourgeoisie dedicated to industrial growth, the internal battles that develop, the incorporation of new areas into the capitalist cycle, and colonization with a flair and abandon turn the colonial experience Wallerstein details into a downright thrilling story...

...Why are there more than 100 years separating the political revolutions of the European superpowers in the era under examination...

...Nowhere is this strange situation more apparent than with the establishment of the United States, where the revolution that took place against England led to "settler decolonization of the Americas" yet enhanced the position of capitalism and enlarged the scope of the system by including new players...

...The 19th century would bedifferent, wearetold, "these forces (or rather their successors) would reflect on their failures and construct a totally new strategy of struggle, one that was far more organized, systematic and self-conscious...

...It is too much to expect the author of a world system to take note of the creases and crevices in his own grand design...

...The author finally settles on a reasonable explanation: The loss of the Americas by England in the late 18th century permitted the unimpeded expansion of British colonial activities elsewhere in the world...

...But where that leaves his concept of a macroworld system becomes increasingly doubtful...

...Curiously, Wallerstein does not add that the 19th century was also even more successful than the 18th in the consolidation of world capitalism and the integration of new regions into its orbit...

...Haiti's recently ousted President Leslie Manigat, an accomplished social scientist, has argued (in accord, I should note, with the best historians of the period) that his country is best understood in terms of Daniel Lerner's The Passing of the Traditional Society —that much despised classic on modernization that Wallerstein's position ostensibly buries...

...Alas, theanalysesof people like William L. Langer, Hans Kohn, Hans J. Morgenthau, and Jacob L.Talmon, to name some of the prominent students of Europe who placed things like nationalism and political interests at the center stage of the period that is under examination, simply do not exist for Wallerstein...

...and about the struggles for political independence in Latin America against a background of European power machinations...

...His big picture gets larger than any given nation...

...Hannah Arendt's notion that the political ideology of England and America led to a compassionate and legal, rather than passionate and violent, set of relationships bet ween the colonizers and the decolonizers has no place in Wallerstein's world system...

...Whatever problems arise in such a reading of history —and an admixture of reason and resentment is obvious in Wallerstein's tone, no less than in his use of evidence —it represents a serious effort to balance the record: to elucidate the effects of past policies upon both the underdeveloped regions of the world and the advanced portions of Europe...

...The approach brings into sharp focus countries that were the recipients of colonial blessings...

...how exports from West Africa to Europe retarded African development as a whole...

...At that level, in fact, Wallerstein often wisely opts in favor of traditional interpretation by the foremost historians in the fields covered...

...Thisisespecially apparent in the opening segment of the book, where Wallerstein offers a brilliant defense of his thesis...

...The overall project's grand effort to reconstruct, or perhaps construct, the story of the evolution of capitalism continues the work of Fernand Braudel...

...Indeed, Wallerstein is at great pains to rationalize why first colonization and then decolonization each resulted in strengthening world capitalism...

...In this he goes far beyond Marx' account of the achievements of the bourgeoisie, into a Weberian appreciation, almost a Schumpeterian understanding, of what capitalist enterprise has meant to the world...

...Why has Haiti become a model of corrupt administration and feudal armies...

...Further, it fails to tell us why strong cultural continuities persisted, leading to the present Anglo-American alliance...

...Wallerstein's dismissive attitude toward ideology also underwrites a deeper disdain for the role played by political life apart from, and sometimes in contradiction to, economic life...

...It is, I submit, the denial of liberalism as an independent operative force within the British states, and of authoritarianism as the essence of the the pro- and anti-revolutionary forces in France that provides some of the answers...

...The rot of Communist and Fascist varieties of totalitarianism that haunts this book at the " periphery " will become the "core" of the next one...

...But I have a nagging suspicion such an encomium will not truly satisfy the author, who is a professor of sociology and director of the program on world systems at the State University of New York at Binghamton...

...But there is a useful dimension to essaying a study of The Modern WorldSystem, instead of concentrating on the behavior of the economic elites of France and England...

...It is precisely these breaks with the deadening uniformity of the earlier volumes—the grudging recognition that all is not well in the Marxian edifice— that make this an especially remarkable work...

...That is the whole argument of these volumes...

...Either the success of the slave rebellion was less complete than the author seems to believe, or it was not all that different from what would take place elsewhere...

...Ultimately, though, one is left with what is surely an unanticipated effect of The Modern World-System III that sets it apart from the earlier two volumes— namely, an enormous respect for the villain in this historic drama: world capitalism, with its rationalist elements, its unifying capacities, its ability to transcend the bourgeois class and serve liberal ideology and its "antisystemic" ends...

...This is not the place to argue about whether Haiti is in the terminal phase of traditional society or in the final embrace of colonial powers, but the issue points to a central problem of the sort that exist throughout the volume: the weakness of dependency theory as one draws closer to specific nations, specific events, and specific bilateral conflicts...

...It was the consequence of the transition, not its cause nor the moment of its occurrence...

...39.95...

...Thus, one finds out what happened to and in India as a result of British control...

...In particular, Wallerstein shows a regard for the ability of the capitalist class to transcend its parochial interests in order to survive as a social order...

...I suspect that Immanuel Wallerstein will end up a lonelier but wiser man as a consequence of his long march with capitalism from the 16th through the 20th centuries...

...I would have appreciated more attention to the subtitle of the series as a whole, Studies in Social Discontinuity, and less emphasis on the invention of economic connections...

...In pointing out the discrepancy between the important third and fourth sections of this volume, I do not mean to minimize the difficulty of the task Wallerstein has cut for himself...

...Reasonable as that may be, however, it hardly accords with emphasizing a unifled world capitalist market...

...System builders rarely pause over such small matters as national idiosyncrasies and bilateral struggles...

...One eagerly awaits the fourth installment, for as the project gets closer to the present the author, a mature scholar, will be compelled to get closer to the marrow of national politics and social revolution...

...Why, if this revolution was so pure, did theresuits turn out to be so desultory...

...It is very much worth the careful attention of any scholar or individual interested in the foreign policies of France and England when those nations vied for European supremacy and the control of world markets...

...Why has it remained as stratified as the worst regimes in Latin America...

...Immanuel Wallerstein convincingly shows how military battles and heroic figures were a consequence of deep economic structures and flawed political systems...

...Let me cite one example: the treatment of Haiti as auniquecase.The country's dramatic differences from the rest of Latin America prompt Wallerstein to speak of it "as the most successful slave rebellion in the history of the capitalist world economy...

...But saying that only confronts us with more puzzles: How did England, without a precise revolution, develop a policy of class accommodation that enabled its bourgeoisie to flourish better than the French...

...Wallerstein himself appears irritated by anawarenessof his predicament...

...For his goal in this third volume of an ongoing venture—which he began with Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974), followed by Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 16001750 (1980)—is to describe the wellsprings of universal history...

...author, "Beyond Empire and Revolution " This is a provocative book...

...He closes out the present volume with the declaration that " none of the great revolutions of the late 18th century represented fundamental challenges to the world capitalist system...

...In the light of almost three quarters of a century of Communism in the Soviet Union, and its failure to generate the kinds of commercial and intellectual goods created by France and England and now the United States and Japan, one would have to say that Wallerstein III has a message of hope for world capitalism...

...The French Revolution was, in terms of the capitalist-world economy, the moment when the ideological superstructure finally caught up with the economic base...

...Insisting on global conjecture when more modest explanations are at hand actually detracts from the effort at holism in historical discourse...

...Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz Hannah Arendt Professor of Sociology and Political Science, Rutgers...