Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein was an American sociologist and historical social scientist best known for developing world-systems theory, presented across the multi-volume work The Modern World-System (1974 to 2011). He argued that the appropriate unit of analysis for understanding modern history is not the individual nation-state but the capitalist world-economy as a whole, structured since the sixteenth century into a hierarchy of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones bound together by unequal exchange. His framework, which drew on dependency theory and the French Annales school of history, became one of the most influential large-scale accounts of the origins and dynamics of global capitalism.