PREFACE

In discussing how we would preface this

collection we decided that describing how we

became interested in seemingly arcane topics

like prehistoric trade and ancient empires

would be a good start. We reasoned that a

narrative of how our interests shifted to such

topics might entice other social scientists to

join in our venture. We share values common

to all students of social change: curiosity

about how the world came to be as it is, what

forces and processes keep it that way, and

what -- if anything -- might help change it

for the better. We were both attracted to,

and have become active researchers and writers

in, the world-system perspective. Our paths

to this common meeting point were distinct,

but once crossed they have become increasingly

intertwined.

Chase-Dunn began his academic career as a

quantitoid sociologist performing

crossnational research to test propositions

about the effects of international economic

dependence in the post-World War II world-

system. His encounter with the world-systems

perspective led to an effort to formulate an

explicit theory of the structures and

processes of the modern world-system which was

published as Global Formation: Structures of

the World-Economy in 1989. In 1986, as he was

completing the last chapter of Global

Formation, Chase-Dunn tried to confront the

problem of transformation -- how the

contemporary world-system might change its

fundamental logic. His earlier work on a

world-systems interpretation of the emergence

and reintegration of the socialist states led

to some tentative conclusions, but he realized

that the scientific basis for understanding

the transformation problem would be found in

the comparison of instances in which whole

world-systems had undergone transformations of

their basic logics in the past. The

provocative essay by Ekholm and Friedman,

"'Capital' imperialism and exploitation in the

ancient world-systems" (Review 6,1, 1982)

stimulated him to write a 140 page manuscript

entitled Rise and Demise: The Transformation

of World-Systems which proposed a working

typology to determine similarities and

differences between stateless, state-based and

capitalist world-systems. Though this

manuscript was circulated among colleagues and

is cited in some of the chapters in this

collection, its preliminary nature has delayed

publication. Chase-Dunn and Hall plan to

rework and redesign this into a comprehensive

introduction to the comparative study of

world-systems.

Hall came to world-system theory as a

refugee from the "my village separate from the

world" school of anthropology. As is typical

of graduate student tyros, he did not

appreciate that this was a dying tradition.

Working on the Navajo Nation in the early

seventies pushed Hall into sociology from

anthropology, and primed him to appreciate

world-system theory's promise, if not its

delivery, of a globally and historically

connected approach to the study of society and

change. Many years of study, rumination, a

dissertation, and more rewriting than anyone

likes to admit, led to Social Change in the

Southwest, 1350-1880.

Two of that book's major themes are

germane to this collection: the

reconceptualization of incorporation as

something that starts much earlier, and is

more profound, than Wallerstein used to

recognize and a comparative strategy that

examined the impacts of Mesoamerica (albeit

briefly), Spain, Mexico, and the United States

on ethnic relations and group formation in

what became the U.S. Southwest. That

comparative strategy was groping toward

examining both how the "modern world-system"

evolved, and how it differed from earlier,

precapitalist world-systems. A subsidiary

interest developed along the way: How were

the nomad/sedentary relations Hall was

studying in Hispanic New Mexico similar to,

and different from, those that occurred

elsewhere in the world, especially on the

fringes of China?

Hall and Chase-Dunn crossed paths for the

first time on a BART train from Berkeley to

San Francisco in the process of getting from

cheap digs to the 1982 American Sociological

Association meetings. Over the years we found

an increasing convergence of interests and

began to work together. We co-organized an

ASA round table discussion on "Comparing

World-Systems" in 1986, and then a series of

panels and papers at the 1988, 1989, and 1990

annual meetings of the International Society

for the Comparative Study of Civilizations

(ISCSC).

After organizing the 1989 ISCSC panels we

began to think about putting some of the

papers together in a collection. Meanwhile,

Social Change in the Southwest had been

finished and was published, and Global

Formation had gone to press, and the out-takes

on precapitalist world-systems had been

proposed and accepted at Westview Press as

Rise and Demise. In our original proposal for

this collection Chase-Dunn was going to write

a theoretical opening, and a chapter exploring

the idea of stateless world-systems through a

study of California Indians, and Hall was

going to push his ruminations on Southwestern

and Central Asian nomads into presentable

form. In order to do that, Hall had to

rethink, for the umpteenth time, what a

world-system is. To complicate, but

tremendously enrich, his ruminating, Thomas

Barfield published The Perilous Frontier and

Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony,

with the result that we merged our theoretical

musings into what is now Chapter 1. The

discussion of California Indians has been

postponed until more research can be

completed, and Rise and Demise has become a

joint, bigger -- and we hope better --

project.

Meanwhile, the Braudel Center's journal,

Review, has published a somewhat different,

and considerably longer piece by Andre Gunder

Frank and a series of articles thinking about

where world-system theory has been and where

it might be going (Review 13, 2 Spring, 1990).

A good deal of the emerging discussion and

debate is contained in the following pages.

These circumstances present a reader who is

just coming upon these issues with a few

obstacles. First, and foremost, almost nobody

has staked out permanent positions. Rather,

nearly everyone's thinking and research is

evolving (dare we use that word?) fairly

quickly. Second, new parties have joined in

these debates (e.g. Wilkinson, Feinman and

Nicholas, Peregrine) from very different

theoretical, disciplinary, and substantive

backgrounds, and hence with somewhat different

vocabularies, or even more troubling, the same

vocabularies with different meanings. So far,

we have succeeded in talking to, rather than

past, each other, but not without a lot of

backtracking to define terms and usages.

Finally, the attempt to study world-systems

comparatively has led many of us into new

research areas and new literatures. This has

been exhilarating and frightening as we

explore new territories, learning who's who,

what's what, and which way is up all over

again. We hope that this collection will

provoke and inspire others to join us.

We would like to thank the members and

officers of the International Society for the

Comparative Study of Civilizations, especially

its President Michael Palencia-Roth, for

graciously encouraging us to organize sessions

on world-systems. We also are indebted to

Mitchell Weyuker and Joanne Fennessey at Johns

Hopkins and Catherine Day at DePauw for their

extraordinary deeds in the preparation of this

book. A grant from DePauw's Faculty

Development Committee for Completion of

Scholarly Work substantially assisted in

production of this volume. At Westview Press

we are grateful to Dean Birkenkamp and Ellen

Williams.

Chris Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall