Immanuel Wallerstein’s highly influential, multi-volume opus, The Modern World-System, is one of this century’s greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This new volume encompasses the nineteenth century from the revolutionary era of 1789 to the First World War. In this crucial period, three great ideologies―conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism―emerged in response to the worldwide cultural transformation that came about when the French Revolution legitimized the sovereignty of the people. Wallerstein tells how capitalists, and Great Britain, brought relative order to the world and how liberalism triumphed as the dominant ideology.
The fourth volume analyzes the era from the French Revolution to the start of World War I. Wallerstein discusses the dominance of centrist liberalism and its impact on the global system. This period saw the consolidation of national states, the expansion of the industrial revolution, and the spread of liberal ideas, which collectively shaped the modern world-system's structures and hierarchies.
Each volume of Wallerstein's work provides a detailed and complex analysis of different historical periods, contributing significantly to the understanding of how the modern world system, characterized by a complex network of economic, political, and social relations, came to be.
