Modernisation, dependency and world system analyses
A more optimistic assessment of ‘modern' or ‘Western' civilisation was also offered in the works of modernisation scholars. Of interest to them were the historical paths of development in the West that might be used to study and foster development in the ‘developing' world.
Key contributions to modernisation analysis included W. W. Rostow's How it all Began: Origins of the Modern Economy (1975), Cyril Black's The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (1966), Reinhard Bendix's Nation-Building and Citizenship (1977) and E. L. Jones' The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (1986).A disparate group of neo-Marxist scholars disagreed, noting the inability of modernisation scholars to explain Latin American economic development, and suggested an alternative in the form of dependency and, later, world system theory. While modernisation scholars looked to the internal characteristics of particular civilisations, dependency and world system theorists stressed the need to study networks of economic and political exchange and more particularly inequalities in the distribution of roles, functions and power that fostered states of dependency. Dependency theory was advanced first in the writings of Latin American scholars like Paul Baran (The Political Economy of Growth, 1957) and then taken to a global audience in Andre Gunder Frank's World Accumulation, 1492-1789 (1978) and Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (1979). Frank's work, in turn, influenced Immanuel Wallerstein, who went on to elaborate world system theory in a series of works including The Modern World System (three volumes, 1974-89) and Historical Capitalism (1983). In The Modern World System, he argued that the system of the title originated in fifteenth-century Europe and that it was composed of a ‘core' (advanced industrial states), a ‘periphery' (weak states engaged in raw materials production) and a ‘semi-periphery' (intermediate states).
World system analysis was combined with a range of methodologies, including anthropology (Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, 1982), archaeology (N. Kardulias (ed.), World-Systems Theory in Practice: Leadership, Production, and Exchange, 1999), geography (Paul Knox and Peter Taylor, World Cities in a World-System, 1995) and cultural history (John Obert Voll, ‘Islam as a Special World-System', Journal of World History, 1994). The spatio-temporal scope of world system studies also increased, with Leften Stavrianos (Global Rift, 1981), Janet Abu-Lughod (After European Hegemony, 1989), Andre Gunder Frank (ReOrient, 1997), Frank and Barry Gills (The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, 1993) and Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds, 1991) exploring Afro-Eurasian systems of exchange up to 7,000 years ago.