Wallerstein on early modern capitalism and global inequality: a reevaluation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A critical review of Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World-System is far more than just an obligation sociologists and historians owe to one of the most influential social scientists of the last fifty years. Rather a reconsideration is both timely and urgent for two reasons: On the one hand, the theme he dealt with most intensively—early modern capitalism—is more topical than ever in the early twenty-first century because with the demise of industrial capitalism structural similarities between early modern forms of mercantile capitalism like the putting-out system and today’s attempts of platform or digital capitalism to monopolize market access become more and more obvious. And on the other hand, Wallerstein’s dominant concern with the asymmetrical power relations between center, semiperipheries and peripheries can still serve as a powerful reminder to seriously engage the global dimension of capitalist development today.This article although written from the perspective of a historian will try to do justice to Wallerstein’s theoretical ambitions as well will be extremely simple. It will be shown that although some critical points were well taken Wallerstein’s general approach to early modern capitalism is by no means completely outdated and superseded. Even if some of the answers he gave may seem indefensible today, there can be no doubt that he asked crucially important questions which still are in need of answers today.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it