Abstract
One approach to our topic, representing almost the polar opposite of peripheral explanations, is that which sees it as yet another, albeit striking, episode in the steady creation of the modern world economy. Developing perspectives derived from Marx, A.G. Frank and Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein has started from the proposition that imperialism is the essential servant of an expanding capitalism [294; 295; cf. 277; 279]. He has published three of the four volumes intended to link historical fact with his theoretical argument, and his ideas are clear. Imperialism represents part of an inexorable process of incorporation by which the European capitalist ‘core’ of the world economy, needing to expand in response to internal pressures, gradually draws areas hitherto wholly external to it into a ‘peripheral’ or still closer ‘semiperipheral’ position. This process, which has gathered momentum since the late fifteenth century, is portrayed as one of deepening capitalist development in the areas being linked in a global economic hierarchy to the highly developed core. Its outstanding features include the redirection of major trades, their replacement with new trades in primary products or raw materials required by the core, the transformation of production processes and global divisions of labour, and the enlargement of state structures, not least in the form of Europe’s colonial empires, to organise the expanding economy.
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© 1994 Andrew Porter
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Porter, A. (1994). Other Recent Approaches. In: European Imperialism, 1860–1914. Studies in European History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10544-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10544-1_5
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