Using world - systems to narrate world history

 

 

What is clear is that Wallerstein's world -systems narrative is not a world history narrative. Wallerstein provides an historico - logical explanation of how the modern world came to be all inside the modern world - system, by recounting the internal history of that system. His focus is thus on the emergence, development and growth of that system from small beginnings in Europe to encompass the entire globe by the mid nineteenth century. But for the first three centuries of this narrative, Wallerstein's world - systems narrative does not tell us anything at all about the major part of the world. It is only from the around 1840 on that Wallerstein's world - systems narrative becomes a world history.

 

So the question that arises from this is: can a world history be constructed that uses the world -systems paradigm, but is more than an account of the immanent and historical logic of the modern world - system? How can the narrative of the modern world - system be incorporated into a narrative of world history?

 

The starting point I think is with an early observation of Wallerstein's, that more than one world-system can coexist, and that indeed that has been the norm for most of human history. The dominance of the modern world - system over the entire globe is unique and unprecedented in history. So I want to approach the history of the world since around 1500 in terms of multiple world systems initially.

 

World - systems are characterised by a unitary division of labour across the system, devoted to the production of necessities, with all production processes linked by commodity chains. (This is discussed in another post here). Theoretically it should be easy to determine the numbers and boundaries of the world -systems existing at any one time. The problem is that data has never been collected for such an exercise. (Now that would be a worthy project for a research institute, if funding could be found). So for the moment we are driven back on intuitive reasoning from anecdotal evidence.

 

I am taking as a starting point the map of the "eight commercial circuits of the thirteenth century world system" from Janet Abu Lughod's book Before European Hegemony. Now I will state upfront that I have a number of methodological criticisms of the book, but those can be discussed in another place. Abu Lughod did undertake a substantial project of research and reading, and did attempt to model the flow of commodities in the old world, albeit based on impressionistic rather than quantitative analysis. There are two further provisos to be made:

 

1.       Abu Lughod wrote about the period 1250 - 1350, and I am concerned here with around 100 - 150 years later; and

2.       In her narrative the thirteenth century world -system collapsed after 1350 due to the impact of the bubonic plague in Central Asia.

 

That said, here is the map:

 

 

 

 

 

Pasted from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Abu-Lughod>

 

 

My suggested development of this for the late fifteenth / early sixteenth century would be:

 

1.       A North sea / Baltic sea circuit, at this stage possibly peripheral to 2) below but from which the modern world - system will develop;

2.       A Mediterranean world - system, running from Portugal to Cyprus, extending northwards into the Germanies below the Main River, eastwards to Bohemia and Hungary and including the Maghreb, extending to West Africa (Songhay and Mali), with the core located in the Maghreb;

3.       Egypt, possibly extending into modern day Sudan;

4.       Ethiopia;

5.       The Indian Ocean littoral, including Arabia, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, across to Malacca and Sumatra and the east coast of Africa to Mozambique island;

6.       Iran and central Asia;

7.       China, East Asia including Japan, and South East Asia to Java;

8.       Muscovy / Russia

9.       The Ottoman empire including the Levant and the Balkans.

 

My evidence for this is at this stage inchoate - it is an anecdotal and impressionistic intuition gained from decades of reading history. But I would suggest it as  a starting point for research anyway. One area that is open to significant revision is the areas 2 and 3 and 3 and 4. If Egypt (the granary of the classical world) was still supplying grain to 2 and / or 4, then those areas all need to be merged. In either case, the core would then be Egypt, with the Maghreb possibly fulfilling a semi peripheral role to the European Mediterranean littoral.

 

So far so good. Assuming my breakdown holds, it should then be possible to construct a world historical narrative that focuses on the interactions among these world - systems, and how those interactions contingently intersect with the internal cycles and trajectories of each world - system. The narrative of the modern (European world - system) would thus for example develop the peripheralisation of the European Mediterranean lands, the attempt to break out of this peripheralisation by an alliance of Genoese capital and the Portuguese state seeking direct access to, and control of, the critically important source of gold in West Africa; the other Genoese enterprise to establish direct contact with the source of luxury goods for elite conspicuous consumption in east Asia, which leads to both the Portuguese protection racket in the Indian Ocean world - system and the fortuitous stumbling over the New World. The contingency of this underpins the attempt by the Habsburgs to build a world -empire, which comes to grief in the bankruptcy of 1567, laying the stage for the absorption of the old Mediterranean world - system into world - systems 1 and 9.

 

In India this period sees the reverse of what happens in Europe. In India a multi polar world system is transformed into a classic world - empire by the Moguls, detaching northern India from the Indian Ocean world -system and absorbing the central Asian periphery from the Iranian system. The Indian Ocean world - system continues to operate with the core in the south Indian peninsula. The strength and wealth of this system is shown by its ability to absorb the piratical incursions of the Portuguese and the century long protection racket the latter impose on the system.

 

Of particular interest however is the linking of the entire globe into a unified circuit of with the opening of the port of Manilla in the 1580s and the institution of the Acapulco -Manilla galleon route. Once the VOC begins trading with both the Indian Ocean and East Asian world - systems the mass of silver that had flown into Europe in the previous century starts to move east to pay for imports of luxury goods. Silver also flows to the east Asian system via the Manilla route. Essentially over the next century, Spain hauls silver out of Peru and Mexico and the bulk of it ends up in China, either directly, or through an Indian circuit first. This phenomenal flow of silver east is well accounted for in the work of Gunder Frank in "ReOrient" and in various articles by Dennis Flynn. (It is also the reason why the shipwreck gallery in the city of Fremantle, in my state of Western Australia, has such large displays of sixteenth and seventeenth century Mexican silver coins recovered from Dutch shipwrecks along the West Australian coastline.)

 

At this point I am writing of this circuit as an exchange of precocities between world - systems. But this is the interesting point. China (and South Asia in second place) had highly monetised economies in this period, and the Chinese was the most liquid and monetised economy in the world until the late eighteenth / early nineteenth centuries. (The work of Bin Wong and Ken Pomeranz is brilliant on this - I need to write about them at another time). Chinese currency was based in silver, and large quantities of silver were needed to keep minting coinage. This if course is why China is the world's "silver sink" from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. So for China, silver is actually not a precious or luxury commodity, but an essential bulk good, a necessity. Does this therefore mean that China was the core of a global world - system from around 1600 onwards? Following the logic of commodity chains of production I think we have to say yes!

 

So what does this do to my narrative? It suggests that once direct commercial contact is established with China in the last twenty years of the sixteenth century (and direct was still at arms length - Chinese authorities would not permit foreign vessels to carry good to Chinese shores, and most exchange occurred at Manilla when the annual Chinese fleet called) the emerging European world - system (with its extension into the Americas and the west African littoral) was rapidly absorbed into a Chinese centred world - system. Europe in that system should be seen as a semi - periphery, sourcing materials (mainly silver, later also plantation crops from its American peripheries and providing basic manufactured goods in turn, while conveying silver the Chinese core and receiving high value manufactured items in return (e.g. silks, porcelains, tea, lacquer work). A lot more detailed empirical work on the flow of commodities and the reconstruction of commodity chains in the areas discussed here needs to be one to make the argument stick, but this outline is worth pursuing.

 

I want to explore some other aspects of this construction later - the English construction of an Atlantic economy in order to compete with the privileged position the Dutch hold as a link in this hypothesised China centred early modern world -  system; the actual "great divergence" between Europe and China circa 1780  - 1840; the position of South Asia in this world - system especially given it was the supplier of the highest quality cotton textiles to Europe in this period, again in exchange for silver; and the whole theoretical issue this historical reconstruction raises of sub systems within a system. Arguments to be developed.

 

Review of Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts (Harper Perennial, pap. edition, London and New York: 2005).

Today is the anniversary of the first train from Salonika to Auschwitz, the start of a process which ended with the murder of 90% of the 45 000 Jewisn inhabitants of the northern Greek city Thessasalonica. The atrocity is well covered in Mark Mazower's history of the city. I reviewed this book eight years ago, and am posting it here today (16/3/13) in memory of the victims of that atrocity.

 

Visitors to Greece who venture to the second biggest city and northern ‘capital’, Thessalonica, will discover a architecturally extremely modern, if not modernist, and thoroughly Hellenic city. A city moreover which proclaims its Greek antiquity through monuments and myriad displays of ancient stonework. A prominent memorial to the supposed founder Alexander the Great (actually it was his sister and he never visited) can be seen in the central plaza.

 

A discerning visitor who looks carefully will find a holocaust museum which documents the in murder of the local Jewish community by German invaders. The visitor will also find, after much very careful searching, some traces of Muslim Turkish remains. These traces in turn contextualise the second big equestrian statue in the city – that of Prince Constantine who delivered this ancient Greek city of Christians from the infidel yoke in 1912.

 

Mention of Greek Christianity illuminates the other pole of the modernist ideology of Hellenism – the heritage of Byzantium. Medieval Byzantine churches are prominent in Thessalonica, as are other Byzantine ruins and fragments. The cursory visitor thus is left with a clear impression – this is a Greek city, and a Christian city, and it always has been, even when occupied by infidel Turks. And this Hellenism and Christianity, proudly touted as legacies, are wrapped in a modern and modernist package, showing that Greece is a European, not an Oriental, country; it belongs to the West, not the East. As most of modern Thessalonica was constructed in the 1950s and 1960s a clear Cold War text is also present. The east to which Greece did not belong included not only the ‘past east’ of ‘oriental’ Islam, but the ‘present east’ of Slavic anti-Christian communism. Reinforcement for these messages will be found in elaborate public monuments to the 1922 refugees from Turkey and the 1949 expellees from the Crimea, Bessarabia and southern Ukraine. For modern Thessalonica is the place where modern Greece gathered in the descendants of Greek communities more ancient than the polieis of the Peloponnesus – the remnants of the Archaean immigration to the Black Sea and Asia Minor of the seventh century BC - reversed by the ethnic cleansing nationalism of the twentieth century.

 

Mark Mazower, historian of Greece under Nazi occupation, the modern Balkans and of a very insightful history of twentieth century Europe, has turned his eye to one city; a city he first encountered as student backpacker in the 1980s when, turning away from the obvious tourist signposts he found the remains of a different Greece to that constructed by modern Hellenism. As he puts it, this was a Greece “less in thrall to an ancient past, more intimately linked to neighbouring peoples, languages and cultures”. What Mazower proceeds to do is to bring this forgotten city, this ‘city of ghosts’ to life.

 

At a recent conference, this reviewer heard a suggestion that history was generally written forwards, to account for and underwrite the emergence and existence of modern identities. What was needed it was suggested, was to write history backwards, to find the identities that have been submerged or lost, written out of history. Mazower has done this with regard to the city to which he refers by the old name, Salonica, for the period from the Turkish conquest in1430 to 1950.

 

As Mazower starts his story, Salonica was under siege. Indeed the city had been occupied previously by Turkish forces, and found the experience on the whole unexceptional. The population were in favour of surrender, the bishop not; and in the inevitable three day sack that followed the population paid the price. After 1430, the population was reduced to a third, living among ruins. The rebirth of Salonica occurred two generations later. Reconstruction had been one of the goals of Sultan Murad from the start, but protection of surviving Christains, their churches and community structure, as well as settlement with Muslims and the foundation of mosques and vakfs (religious, charitable and educational property trusts) had done little to reverse the drastic consequences of conquest. Repopulation, and with it the economic ability of the city to play its appointed role in the Ottoman imperial economy, came after 1492. In that momentous year, Jews were expelled from Spain and Spanish possessions in Italy. (The King of Portugal followed suit about ten years later). Iberian Jews found protection and welcome in Islamic lands (in contrast to the current assumption of eternal hostility between the Abrahamic faith communities). Many were resettled in Salonica, and from the sixteenth century until 1943, Salonica was the largest Jewish city in all of Europe. Indeed in early nineteenth century censuses, Jews accounted for half the population, with Christians in third place. The character of old Salonica was thus irrevocably diverse, with three faiths co-existing. Linguistically it was even more diverse – most Jews were actually Spanish speaking (or Ladino, a dialect of medieval Spanish), although some spoke Portuguese or Italian. About half of the Christians at any one time were Slav speaking, immigrants from the countryside of Thrace and Macedonia. They became Greek speaking after a generation or two of urbanisation. Among Muslims actual Turks were a minority; there were many Albanians, some Slav speakers, (proto Bulgarians mainly, Bosnians came after the Austrian occupation of Bosnia in 1908), Arabs, Circassians, Berbers from North Africa. Black and white slaves were found, as were Armenian and Georgian Christians. Salonica thus looked like a pre modern ‘oriental’ city – religiously, culturally and linguistically diverse – ‘multi-cultural’ in modern parlance.

 

It has become a popular commonplace in current political commentary that multiculturalism breeds hostility and conflict. It is Mazower’s main purpose to prove the opposite by concrete historical example. Occurrences of inter communal violence and hostility were rare. Communities were largely self administering under the Ottoman system and while suspicion and prejudice were present, they rarely boiled over. The administration protected each religion equally, ensuring their places of worship were inviolate, their holy days and festivals licensed, making conversion and intermarriage effectively illegal. Conversion to Islam was always protected, but active proselytisation was frowned upon. Rabbis, imams and priests attended the major festivals of each religion, and called on each other and the Turkish governors to show respect and tolerance. Christians and Jews had responsibility for the upkeep of portions of the walls, and for manning the fortifications in the event of war (which never happened – Salonica’s longest period of peace was 1430 to 1912). Where some churches were converted to mosques, Christians still retained visiting rights to saints’ graves and other holy places, which were generally guarded and maintained by Muslim caretakers, often Sufis.

 

Hidden in this narrative, and subtly communicated with great skill, is Mazower’s account of the downfall of the Ottoman tradition over the nineteenth century. Key aspects here are the invention of a Greek identity attached to the late eighteenth century emergence of a Greek commercial elite, pirates as much as traders. Western intervention in the Greek war of independence led to a privileged position for western powers in Ottoman Turkey, with consuls at Salonica becoming in many ways an alternative administration. The arrival of western capital with shipping lines once the pirates were cleared and the railway built from central Europe, led to commercial prosperity as Salonica became the outlet for the agricultural produce of the Thracian and Macedonian plains. Soon local industry emerged, and old divisions within the religious communities and among them, became transformed into class divisions. While Jews were prominent among the commercial and industrial elite, so were Christians, and the working class remained predominantly Jewish. Muslims were found among the officials and the landowning classes, with the peasantry divided between Muslim and Christian. Against this backdrop nations were invented and the residents of Salonica found themselves wooed by Greek or Bulgarian or Macedonian nationalists, while the Ottoman state sought painfully, in an era of nationalism, to modernise itself into a multinational modern state. Theoretically educated readers will see in this narrative a local study of the incorporation of an old style world-empire into the modern world-system with the consequent peripheralisation that process entailed.

 

Another theme deals with the response of west Europeans to Salonica, both in travel literature and in novels. Here we see a disdain for both medieval Byzantine survivals and anything Turkish. Travellers sought Greek and Christian antiquity (St Paul had founded the church in Salonica, according to Scripture). The actual reality of the city was disdained as dirty, unsanitary, corrupt and at best, picturesque. By the end of the nineteenth century, Salonica was a setting for exotic and erotic novels dealing with love affairs between harem women and western men. The Turk in this literature was transformed from the once feared martial conqueror into a passive, effete, depraved and corrupt figure; only capable of rule by brutal cruelty and too weak to even protect his harem against the charms of western seducers. Mazower does not use the term ‘orientalism’ but readers of Said while see here a confirmation of his analyses of the stereotype, and readers of Bernal will find some interesting examples of the essentially western and racially inspired creation of Hellenism.

 

Old Salonica died in the twentieth century. Readers familiar with east European history will know that the real past of eastern European is one of multiculturalism. That world was destroyed by the invention of nations. The process of nation state building in south east Europe in particular involved war, massacre, terror and ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. In the region of Salonica this tragic history began with the operations of the world’s first modern terrorist group, IMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, with its campaign of terror against Muslim peasants in the 1870s, which led directly to the infamous “Bulgarian massacres” of 1876 and the 1878 Russo-Turkish war. A partial reprieve for the Ottoman Empire came with the victory of the Young Turk movement in 1908, a modernising, parliamentary movement which sought to build a transnational identity from all groups.[i] Founded in Salonica and supported by people from all communities, the aftermath of the 1908 coup initially brought great enthusiasm for reform; but soon the junta itself fell to the forces of nationalism, this time Turkish. The Balkan war of 1912 saw the occupation of Salonica by Greece. The chaos of the First World War, whose dire impact on Greek politics is well documented by Mazower followed, leaving Salonic under allied occupation. The great fire of 1917 destroyed much of the old town, particularly the Jewish quarter, which allowed for the first spate of modernist rebuilding. The Greek war with Turkey in 1922 led to the first great round of ethnic cleansing with the Muslim population generally classified as Turks (even when they were not) and expelled and the Christian population of Turkey classified as Greeks and resettled in Salonica. Paradoxically the use of the Turkish language, and the survival of Turkish music (in the form of zembetiko) and of food ways, increased after the population exchange, as many so called Greek refugees were Turkish speaking Christians.

 

Greek politics between the wars resembled a state of nearly constant simmering civil war and Mazower is on sure ground in guiding the reader through this maze. He illustrates the rise of extreme right wing politics in Greece in this time, with fascist and anti –Semitic tendencies. These elements were keen to co-operate when the Nazis arrived, and local collaboration, particularly the desire to reappropriate the enormous Jewish cemetery for urban development (it is now the location of the university), played into the hands of Nazi racial policies. Over a matter of a few weeks in 1943 the entire Jewish population – more than 40,000 people - was dispossessed, classified and transported to Auschwitz and to death. Barely 5% of Salonica’s Jews survived the war, compared to 50% in Athens, where the Archbishop specifically spoke out against Nazi policies. Salonica elites by contrast remained silent. Mazower also documents the shameless grab for Jewish businesses, properties and possessions pursued by Greek businessmen and civil servants during and after the war.

 

Mazower achieves four worthwhile objectives in this fine book. He shows that multicultural societies have as much chance of producing civil peace as any other; that the root of many modern tragedies lies in the invention of nationalism; that the Hellenist façade of Thessalonica (and by extension, modern Greece) is built over buried identities for whose demise the current state has some responsibility; and that the old Ottoman empire on the scale of human values, was not such bad place after all.[ii] At a methodological level, the book is a fine of illustration of the ability of a micro scale study to illuminate macro themes. This is an excellent example of a complex story well written, a story worth reading and pondering for its lessons; a fine exemplar of history ‘written backwards’.

---

[i] Indeed Salonica was rhe birthplace of Mustapha Kemal, later Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern secular Turkish republic.

[ii] The reviewer is of course fully aware of the Turkish complicity in the 1876 Bulgarian massacres and the massacres of Armenians from 1908 on, culminating in the 1915 genocide. The reference here is to the older tradition.

Modelling the world-system I: Commodity Chains

Ever since his first exposition of the world -systems perspective in 1974, Wallerstein has insisted that the defining characteristic of a world - system is a unitary division of labour across the world - system. Furthermore he has emphasised that this division of labour is constituted to produce necessities; products essential to the continued existence of the world-system.  Exactly how this unitary division of labour functioned was not spelled out until Wallerstein and his colleague Hopkins began their work on commodity chains at Binghamton in the late 1970s. The following quote from Wallerstein summarises their ultimate conclusions very well: "A world-economy is constituted by a cross - cutting network of interlinked productive processes which we may call 'commodity chains,' such that for any production process in the chain there are a number of 'backward and forward linkages,' on which the particular process (and the persons involved in it) are dependant."

 

What Wallerstein is arguing here is that commodities are the outcome of complex process of manufacture, and that said manufacture is conducted in diverse geographical locations within the world-system. A final commodity - one that is marketed to end consumers - is itself composed of a number of other commodities and may well have been part processed, manufactured or assembled before taking its final form. To illustrate this let us take two examples from the early days of the world - system and the present.

 

Let us look at a nice, simple commodity, fundamental to life in the mid sixteenth century - bread. At this point in time the emerging economic core of the world -system was the Netherlands. Rye bread is the bread of choice for good Dutch burghers and was generally bought at neighbourhood bakeries. The rye flour from the bread was milled from rye grown in Poland; the salt used to flavour the bread came from the Basque country; the copper baking trays and iron stove would have been made in Germany, most likely in Franconian towns like Nuremburg and Augsburg and the metals were mined in the Alps, the Ore Mountains of Saxony or in Bohemia. The wood from which the oven was fired and out of which the bakery was constructed came from Norway. Specifically Dutch in this mix was the yeast and the water.

 

Turning to our own times, what product could be more universal than a pair of Levi jeans? It transpires that a pair of jeans is the outcome of around 43 different process (including growing cotton and mining copper and zinc) conducted across 4 continents).

 

What Wallerstein is therefore emphasising is that commodities, even in the early years of the world -system, were and are produced not in one locality but on a system-wide basis. Hence the emphasis on the unitary division of labour. We can thus (theoretically at least) trace the contours of the world -system by tracing out the lengths of the commodity chains. Commodity chains thus constitute the geographical bounds of a world -system.

 

More significantly, commodity chains actually structure the component parts of the world -system - the famous core - periphery dichotomy. Let us read Wallerstein's own words again:  "As the commodity chains have become longer and more complex, and involved more and more machinery, there has been a constant pressure of the strong against the weak. The pressure has concentrated more and more of the processes in the chains that are easiest to 'monopolise' in a few areas - 'core' processes in 'core' areas - and more and more of the processes that require less skilled  and more extensive manpower that is easiest to keep at a low income level in other areas - 'peripheral' processes in 'peripheral' areas."

 

Now this is a very revealing quotation. Most summaries of Wallerstein's world - systems model take the existence of core and periphery as axiomatic and start by stating that a world - system is divided into core and periphery. Well clearly that is correct, BUT the two poles are in themselves the product of way the commodity chains function. Cores and peripheries are produced because the core and peripheral processes are concentrated in those areas. It is the clustering of production processes and their relative complexity and automation that produce core and periphery. The commodity chains are thus not only geographically, but structurally constitutive of the world -system.

 

In my reading this has not been a point that Wallerstein has emphasised, and perhaps he himself has not fully drawn the implications of his argument. (Although given the first 1974 volume of The Modern World-System does dwell at length on the development of the grain supply to north western Europe from Poland - Lithuania he could argue that it is there the be teased out). But the commodity chain explication does strongly imply - to my reading - that we need to see the establishment of commodity chains ad both logically and historically prior to the formation of the modern world -system, and possibly all others too. (although Wallerstein is always admirably cautious in retrospectively extending categories of analysis developed for the capitalist world market).

 

We are not down with commodity chains quite yet either. Obviously for such a geographically diverse process of production to function, commodities and part commodities must ne transported between locations. Again Wallerstein has some interesting points to make: "These production processes usually require physical transportation of commodities between them, and frequently the transfer of 'rights' to commodities in a chain are made by autonomous organizations, in which case we talk of the existence of 'commerce.'  Commerce is frequent, but far from universal, as the mode of linkage, and in no way essential to the functioning of a commodity chain, except at the very end when the final consumable product is sold to the final consumer. Both the great merchant companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the contemporary multinational corporation have been structures that eliminated much (though seldom all) of the commerce in the interstices of given commodity chains."

 

The above quote is extremely significant. One of the consistent criticisms of Wallerstein from orthodox Marxists is that his model of the world market is geared towards exchange and commerce and slights production; that it is to quote the first such critique by Robert Brenner in 1975, "neo Smithian". Sadly this critique persists to the point of being recycled by Heike Gerstenberger in 2005. But what is clear is that Wallerstein is actually talking about production and subordinated to exchange and / or commerce to production. In his model exchange is not about "trade" but about the changing title to commodities or part commodities during the process of production. In some case, the transfer of title is between discrete economic actors, located in divergent political entities and so can be (mis)represented as trade; in other cases, it occurs as internal transfer within horizontally integrated economic entities. "Trade" for Wallerstein remains merchant trade, and occurs between world -systems, and invariably involves precocities. This is the arbitrage business of merchants and is quite separate to the activities conducted within a world - system which remain oriented to production.

 

Wallerstein also asserts that early modern merchant companies were similar in operation to contemporary multinationals in that they often conducted a form of vertical integration of commodity production. This is an assertion that raises the ire of orthodox Marxist critics, who insist that chartered companies are pure representatives of merchant capital. But is this always the case? There is powerful empirical evidence to support Wallerstein's view. The VOC, for example, can be seen as a merchant capitalist enterprise engaged in the exchange of precocities between two world - systems - silver from the European world - system and spices from the China centred east Asian world -system. But the VOV very quickly transformed itself into a carrier within that East Asian system, shipping silver to India where it was exchanged for textiles, which were shipped to Japan for copper and gold, shipped in turn to Manilla to exchange fro Chinese manufactures which were in turn exchanged for spices at Batavia and Malacca. In this case the VOV functioned as an element in the transfer of necessities within the East Asian system, subordinated to production of commodities. Even more significantly, the VOC itself became the producer of the spices sought in Europe. Thus the inhabitants of Ambon were exterminated in a war in the 1630s and the island resettled with slaves required to grow and supply cloves to the VOC. Here we see the VOC practising vertical integration, producing, transporting and storing a commodity that was turning into a necessity in Europe. And what about the Dutch West India Company, pioneering the sugar plantation complex in Brazil? Here is another case of a merchant company operating as a vertically integrated producer and supplier of a commodity, which as Wallerstein points out, became a necessity for European population growth and manufacture, providing as it did a quick burst of energy to workers engaged in production in the core. And as a final example, the British Royal Africa Company, engaged in the supply of slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean. Slaves after all are also a commodity - labour power - and were a necessity to the production of that new nutritional necessity of the European world -system, sugar. The acquisition and transport of slaves across the Atlantic is thus more than merely merchant capital - it constitutes part of the production of the commodity labour power. The production component of the Africa Company lay precisely in delivering a quantity of slaves, healthy enough and rendered compliant by the brutality of the voyage, to the plantations of Jamaica.

 

my argument here is that the orthodox Marxist insistence on this distinction of merchant capital from productive capital is very hard to delineate in the actual historical record, and depends upon a great degree of abstraction to work. The insistence on maintaining this distinction seems to me more idealist and even moralistic, than anything else. The evidence I suggest, lies with Wallerstein.

 

The starting point then for modelling the world - system, lies in identifying and mapping (as far as possible) the commodity chains at the relevant point in time. Identifying the relative complexity of the production processes involved will allow us to determine the core and peripheral regions within the system. Political entities that contain a predominance of core regions within their borders can be considered as core countries or states, and the same applies with regard to peripheral countries. (As Wallerstein stresses, these are labels of convenience and not accurate; no country is entirely given over to core processes, and peripheral processes can also be found within political borders. Indeed the German world - systemist H -H Nolte, has developed this conception further in his work on "inner peripheries". Core and peripheral countries are shorthand; such concepts are actually not found in Wallersteinian world - systems analysis.)