International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Author Podcasts   Comment on this article   World system history is an orientation toward the study of the global sociopolitical and economic system that is structural in its methodology, long term in its vision, and transdisciplinary in its scholarship. In this essay we will briefly review the intellectual origins of the study of world system history. Then we will consider the structural, long-term and transdisciplinary nature of this perspective. As these elements co-evolved, they will be presented here in a necessarily arbitrary order. The study of world system history did not emerge from a single intellectual direction. While there may be a number of ways to divide and identify important intellectual precursors, three general trajectories are most relevant. There is a long line of global historians who have worked to write a “history of the world”. This tendency is probably as old as the writing of history itself. Some of the earliest treatments may be found in the works of Polybius (d. c.120 BCE), Si-ma Qian (d. c.–90 BCE), and Juvaini (d. 1283) who recounted the rise of the Roman, Chinese, and Mongol world empires. Immanuel Kant's pleas for a “universal history” prompted scholars like Comte, Spenser, and Weber, as well as Marx, to devise schemes to apprehend and explain global-level social processes. This desire for a more comprehensive historical vision was devised in ... log in or subscribe to read full text