Commodity Chains in the World-Economy Prior to 1800

Abstract

During the course of the last ten years the political economy of the world-system has emerged as a major field of inquiry within social science in general and within sociology in particular. At the heart of the development of this new field has been the documentation of the patterns of the capitalist worldeconomy, a historical system marked by a world-scale division of labor and phases of expansion and contraction. Although there are an increasing number of scholars of social change who have come to accept the premises of an organizing capitalist world-economy for their accounts of trends and events occurring in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there remains considerable dispute about the very existence of a world-economy in the sixteenth, seventeenth,