Africa: The Politics of Independence and Unity combines into one edition for the first time Africa: The Politics of Independence and Africa: The Politics of Unity. With a new introduction by the author, this edition provides some of the earliest and most valuable analysis of African politics during the period when the colonial system began to disintegrate. The influential Africa: The Politics of Independence was written as Africa was just realizing independence and still reveling in the optimism it brought. Immanuel Wallerstein was one of the few scholars who had traveled throughout Africa...

In this book prominent scholars from around the world debate two major themes: the past and future of the capitalist world-economy, and the ways in which a capitalist economy shapes Western research, the academy, and broader knowledge structures. Putting the two themes together, they also analyze the relationship between scholarship and the rest of the world. The book is published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Fernand Braudel Center. Contributors Samir Amin, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Bart Tromp, . Claudia von Werlhof, Giovanni Arrighi, Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova, Marcel van der...

This book tells the story of how the very idea of two cultures-the so-called divorce between science and the humanities-was a creation of the modern world-system. The contributors, working from a common research framework, trace the divorce of "facts" and "values" as part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This led to a polarization between universalist "science" and the particularist "humanities" and finally to the creation of the social sciences as an uneasy intermediary in this epistemological debate. The book addresses the contemporary attempts to overcome the division...

How ideas such as civilization and progress have been used as a smoke screen for western dominance, by the world-renowned sociologist.
Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intervention around the world has been justified by appeals to notions of civilization, development, and progress. The assumption has been that such ideas are universal, encrusted in natural law. But, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues in this short and elegant philippic, these concepts are, in fact, not global. Rather, their genesis is firmly rooted in European thought and their primary function has been to provide...

Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences--the relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences--the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international group of scholars--six from the social sciences, two from the natural sciences, and two from the humanities. The report first explores how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a...

This book examines the intimate link between the micro-structures of households and the structures of the world-economy at a global level. It seeks to explain differences in wage levels for work of comparable productivity by examining the different structures of households as "income-pooling units." The authors argue that the boundaries and sources of income of households are molded by the changing patterns of the world-economy, but are also modes of defense against its pressures. Empirical data is drawn from eight local regions in three different zones: the United States, Mexico and southern...