World System
Description
Leonid Grinin et al.:
“The notion of ‘world-system’ .. can be defined as a maximum set of human societies that has systemic characteristics, a maximum set of societies that are significantly connected among themselves in direct and indirect ways. It is important that there are no significant contacts and interactions beyond this set, there are no significant contacts and interactions between societies belonging to the given world-system and societies belonging to other world-systems. If still there are some contacts beyond those borders, then those contacts are insignificant, that is, even after a long period of time they do not lead to any significant changes within the world-system – for example, the Norse voyages to the New World and even their settlement there did not result in any significant change either in the New World, or in Europe (see, e.g., Slezkin 1983: 16).
Within this framework, the ‘world-system’ can be characterized as a supersystem that unites many systems of lower orders, such as states, stateless societies, various social, spatial-cultural, and political entities – civilizations, alliances, confederations, etc. Thus, the evolutionary field with respect to a world-system has the maximum wideness in comparison with other social systems. The very process of social evolution is modified within a world-system, because contacts become denser, whereas the role of macroevolution becomes more and more salient. In a certain sense it appears even possible to say that independent evolution of separate societies tends to cease, because the evolution of particular societies becomes more and more influenced by macroevolutionary aromorphoses that diffuse within the world-system framework. That is why we observe different rates of development in societies belonging to world-systems and isolates, in the main (‘central’, Afroeuroasian) world-system (= the World System) and peripheral (e.g., American) world-systems (prior to their incorporation into the World System). In general, the larger the size and internal diversity of a social system, the more internal links it has, the more complex those links are, and, ceterum paribus, the higher is the rate of its development.
A formal criterion that allows us to regard (with Andre Gunder Frank) the Afroeurasian world-system as the World System is the point that during its entire history this world-system encompassed more territory and population than any other contemporary world-system. What is more, for the last few millennia it encompassed more than a half of the world population and this appears to be a sufficient criterion permitting to denote this world-system as the World System. Another point of no less importance is that the modern World System that actually encompasses the whole world was formed as a result of the expansion of that very system which, after A. Gunder Frank (1990, 1993; Frank and Gills 1993), is denoted in the present article as the World System (and which up to the late 15th century was identical with the Afroeurasian world-system). The world-system approach originated in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the works by Braudel, Frank, Wallerstein, Amin, and Arrighi, and was substantially developed afterwards (see, e.g., Braudel 1973; Frank 1990; 1993; Frank and Gills 1993; Wallerstein 1974, 1987, 2004; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1994, 1997; Arrighi and Silver 1999; Amin et al. 2006; Grinin and Korotayev 2009). Its formation was connected up to a considerable degree with the search for the actual socially evolving units that are larger than particular societies, states, and even civilizations, but which, on the other hand, have real system qualities.”