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Brazil and the World System
Edited and with an introduction by Richard Graham; with chapters by Fernando A. Novais, John R. Hall, and Luís Carlos Soares
University of Texas Press, 1991

Has the world economy shaped and defined Brazil’s economic and political history and, if so, to what extent? Is Brazil’s past to be explained principally by its insertion in a single world capitalist system? The authors of the three essays in this volume reflect critically on these questions along with the following: Should the determining factors be understood as sociological-cultural (as in a heritage of patrimonial rule) or were they based on material reality? What was the connection between the presence of slavery in the Americas and the emergence of capitalism in Europe? What accounts for Brazil’s centuries-long reliance on exports and the slow development of its industry?

The chapters in this book draw contrasting judgments on virtually every major issue in Brazilian history because they begin from divergent premises. In arguing their cause, noted scholars John R. Hall, Fernando A. Novais, and Luís Carlos Soares provide a formidable intellectual point and counterpoint whose theoretical assumptions bear heavily on all social scientists engaged in exploring colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, dependency, and relative international poverty.

Brazil and the World System provides provocative insights not only about Brazil but also about the nature of colonialism in general and its relationship to the rise of capitalism in Europe. It should appeal to Latin Americanists of all disciplinary persuasions as well as to general readers curious about great patterns of change in history. Stuart Schwartz, director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota, says, “ . . . an excellent collection . . . North American scholarship will find these essays an eye-opener.

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The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism
The Post-Soviet Economy in the World System
Ruslan Dzarasov
Pluto Press, 2013

The Conundrum of Russian Capitalism looks at the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. Ruslan Dzarasov provides a detailed analysis of Russian corporate governance, labour practices and investment strategies.

By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behaviour of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system.

This groundbreaking study shows that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but in fact the continuation of that tradition.

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Empire of the Periphery
Russia and the World System
Boris Kagarlitsky
Pluto Press, 2007

Leading writer Boris Kagarlitsky offers an ambitious account of 1000 years of Russian history. Encompassing all key periods in Russia's dramatic development, the book covers everything from early settlers, through medieval decline, Ivan the Terrible - the 'English Tsar', Peter the Great, the Crimean War and the rise of capitalism, the revolution, the Soviet period, finally ending with the return of capitalism after 1991.

Setting Russia within the context of the 'World System', as outlined by Wallerstein, this is a major work of historical Marxist theory that is set to become a future classic.

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Folded Selves
Colonial New England Writing in the World System
Michelle Burnham
Dartmouth College Press, 2014
Folded Selves radically refigures traditional portraits of seventeenth-century New England literature and culture by situating colonial writing within the spatial, transnational, and economic contexts that characterized the early-modern “world system” theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein and others. Michelle Burnham rethinks American literary history and the politics of colonial dissent, and her book breaks new ground in making the economic relations of investment, credit, and trade central to this new framework for early American literary and cultural study. Transcontinental colonialism and mercantile capitalism underwrote not just the emerging world system but New World writing—suggesting that early modern literary aesthetics and the early modern economy helped to sponsor each other. Burnham locates in New England’s literature of dissent—from Ma-re Mount to the Salem witchcraft trials – a persistent use of economic language, as well as competing economies of style. The brilliance of Burnham’s study is that it exposes the transoceanic material and commercial concerns of colonial America’s literature and culture of dissent.
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Paper Empire
William Gaddis and the World System
Edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Celebrates and illuminates the legacy of one of America’s most innovative and consequential 20th century novelists

In 2002, following the posthumous publication of William Gaddis’s collected nonfiction and his final novel and Jonathan Franzen’s lengthy attack on him in The New Yorker, a number of partisan articles appeared in support of Gaddis’s legacy. In a review in The London Review of Books, critic Hal Foster suggested a reason for disparate responses to Gaddis’s reputation: Gaddis’s unique hybridity, his ability to “write in the gap between two dispensations—between science and literature, theory and narrative, and—different orders of linguistic imagination.
 
Gaddis (1922-1998) is often cited as the link between literary modernism and postmodernism in the United States. His novels—The Recognitions, JR, Carpenter’s Gothic, and A Frolic of His Own—are notable in the ways that they often restrict themselves to the language and communication systems of the worlds he portrays. Issues of corporate finance, the American legal system, economics, simulation and authenticity, bureaucracy, transportation, and mass communication permeate his narratives in subject, setting, and method. The essays address subjects as diverse as cybernetics theory, the law, media theory, race and class, music, and the perils and benefits of globalization. The collection also contains a memoir by Gaddis’s son, an unpublished interview with Gaddis from just after the publication of JR, and an essay on the Gaddis archive, newly opened at Washington University in St. Louis.
 
The editors acknowledge that we live in an age of heightened global awareness. But as these essays testify, few American writers have illuminated as poignantly or incisively just how much the systemic forces of capitalism and mass communication have impacted individual lives and identity—imparting global dimensions to private pursuits and desires—than William Gaddis.
 
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Sexual Hegemony
Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System
Christopher Chitty
Duke University Press, 2020
In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.
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The Two Churches
Catholicism and Capitalism in the World System
Michael L. Budde
Duke University Press, 1992
The single most important change now well under way within Catholicism is its transition from a First World to a Third World entity. How this enormous shift will affect the Catholic church's role in the world economy is the subject of Michael L. Budde's book, the first world systems study of the mutual interaction of religion and political economy in the 1990s.
Budde's argument here is twofold. He contends that world Catholicism, led by its Third World majority (most notably in Latin America), will continue to develop in an increasingly anticapitalist direction; and he suggests that once-dominant First World Catholic churches (exemplified by the U.S. Catholic church), are poorly placed to respond in solidarity with their coreligionists from the Third World.
Covering a wide range of theoretical and substantive matters, The Two Churches examines religion as a source of both social legitimation and social rebellion. It demonstrates the importance of ecclesiology, a branch of theology dealing with "theories of the church," and it highlights the effect of capitalism on world Catholicism, as well as the latter's influence on the development of the capitalist order.
In his original, far-reaching analysis of the Catholic church's role in world affairs, Budde revises current views of religious institutions as subordinate social phenomena. By relating developments in the world political economy to material conditions in the Third World and in turn to the practice of Catholicism, he reveals how the Catholic church functions as a worldwide institution. He also shows how core-periphery conflicts within the church affect transnational capitalism.
As the Third World becomes more and more volatile, and as its relations with the First World further complicate the politics of the Catholic church, the questions addressed in The Two Churches demand attention with increasing urgency. Timely, thoughtful, and lucid, this book will inform and enhance our understanding of this complex, pressing issue.
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The United States in Central America, 1860–1911
Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System
Thomas D. Schoonover
Duke University Press
In a work of unprecedented scope, Thomas D. Schoonover combines exhaustive multicountry archival research with a sophisticated theoretical framework grounded in world systems theory to elucidate the relations between the United States and Central America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Schoonover’s archival research in Central America, Europe, and the United States encompasses public, business, organizational, and individual records. In analyzing this material, Schoonover applies a world systems theory approach with that of social imperialism and dependency theory to underscore the broad, multistate dimension of international affairs. In exploring the international history of Central America, Schoonover describes the role of personalities such as John C. Frémont, Otto von Bismarck, Theodore Roosevelt, Manuel Estrada Cabrera, and José Santos Zelaya; the impact of railroad building and canal projects; and the role of pan-Americanism, nationalism, racism, and anti-Americanism.
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