PREFACE




In discussing how we would preface this
collection we decided that describing how we
became interested in seemingly arcane topics
like prehistoric trade and ancient empires
would be a good start.  We reasoned that a
narrative of how our interests shifted to such
topics might entice other social scientists to
join in our venture.  We share values common
to all students of social change: curiosity
about how the world came to be as it is, what
forces and processes keep it that way, and
what -- if anything -- might help change it
for the better.  We were both attracted to,
and have become active researchers and writers
in, the world-system perspective.  Our paths
to this common meeting point were distinct,
but once crossed they have become increasingly
intertwined.
      Chase-Dunn began his academic career as a
quantitoid sociologist performing
crossnational research to test propositions
about the effects of international economic
dependence in the post-World War II world-
system. His encounter with the world-systems
perspective led to an effort to formulate an
explicit theory of the structures and
processes of the modern world-system which was
published as Global Formation: Structures of
the World-Economy in 1989.  In 1986, as he was
completing the last chapter of Global
Formation, Chase-Dunn tried to confront the
problem of transformation -- how the
contemporary world-system might change its
fundamental logic.  His earlier work on a
world-systems interpretation of the emergence
and reintegration of the socialist states led
to some tentative conclusions, but he realized
that the scientific basis for understanding
the transformation problem would be found in
the comparison of instances in which whole
world-systems had undergone transformations of
their basic logics in the past.  The
provocative essay by Ekholm and Friedman,
"'Capital' imperialism and exploitation in the
ancient world-systems" (Review 6,1, 1982)
stimulated him to write a 140 page manuscript
entitled Rise and Demise: The Transformation
of World-Systems which proposed a working
typology to determine similarities and
differences between stateless, state-based and
capitalist world-systems.  Though this
manuscript was circulated among colleagues and
is cited in some of the chapters in this
collection, its preliminary nature has delayed
publication. Chase-Dunn and Hall plan to
rework and redesign this into a comprehensive
introduction to the comparative study of
world-systems.
      Hall came to world-system theory as a
refugee from the "my village separate from the
world" school of anthropology.  As is typical
of graduate student tyros, he did not
appreciate that this was a dying tradition. 
Working on the Navajo Nation in the early
seventies pushed Hall into sociology from
anthropology, and primed him to appreciate
world-system theory's promise, if not its
delivery, of a globally and historically
connected approach to the study of society and
change.  Many years of study, rumination, a
dissertation, and more rewriting than anyone
likes to admit, led to Social Change in the
Southwest, 1350-1880.
      Two of that book's major themes are
germane to this collection:  the
reconceptualization of incorporation as
something that starts much earlier, and is
more profound, than Wallerstein used to
recognize and a comparative strategy that
examined the impacts of Mesoamerica (albeit
briefly), Spain, Mexico, and the United States
on ethnic relations and group formation in
what became the U.S. Southwest.  That
comparative strategy was groping toward
examining both how the "modern world-system"
evolved, and how it differed from earlier,
precapitalist world-systems.  A subsidiary
interest developed along the way:  How were
the nomad/sedentary relations Hall was
studying in Hispanic New Mexico similar to,
and different from, those that occurred
elsewhere in the world, especially on the
fringes of China?
      Hall and Chase-Dunn crossed paths for the
first time on a BART train from Berkeley to
San Francisco in the process of getting from
cheap digs to the 1982 American Sociological
Association meetings.  Over the years we found
an increasing convergence of interests and
began to work together.  We co-organized an
ASA round table discussion on "Comparing
World-Systems" in 1986, and then a series of
panels and papers at the 1988, 1989, and 1990
annual meetings of the International Society
for the Comparative Study of Civilizations
(ISCSC).
      After organizing the 1989 ISCSC panels we
began to think about putting some of the
papers together in a collection.  Meanwhile,
Social Change in the Southwest had been
finished and was published, and Global
Formation had gone to press, and the out-takes
on precapitalist world-systems had been
proposed and accepted at Westview Press as
Rise and Demise.  In our original proposal for
this collection Chase-Dunn was going to write
a theoretical opening, and a chapter exploring
the idea of stateless world-systems through a
study of California Indians, and Hall was
going to push his ruminations on Southwestern
and Central Asian nomads into presentable
form.  In order to do that, Hall had to
rethink, for the umpteenth time, what a
world-system is.  To complicate, but
tremendously enrich, his ruminating, Thomas
Barfield published The Perilous Frontier and
Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony,
with the result that we merged our theoretical
musings into what is now Chapter 1.  The
discussion of California Indians has been
postponed until more research can be
completed, and Rise and Demise has become a
joint, bigger -- and we hope better --
project.
      Meanwhile, the Braudel Center's journal,
Review, has published a somewhat different,
and considerably longer piece by Andre Gunder
Frank and a series of articles thinking about
where world-system theory has been and where
it might be going (Review 13, 2 Spring, 1990). 
A good deal of the emerging discussion and
debate is contained in the following pages. 
These circumstances present a reader who is
just coming upon these issues with a few
obstacles.  First, and foremost, almost nobody
has staked out permanent positions.  Rather,
nearly everyone's thinking and research is
evolving (dare we use that word?) fairly
quickly.  Second, new parties have joined in
these debates (e.g. Wilkinson, Feinman and
Nicholas, Peregrine) from very different
theoretical, disciplinary, and substantive
backgrounds, and hence with somewhat different
vocabularies, or even more troubling, the same
vocabularies with different meanings.  So far,
we have succeeded in talking to, rather than
past, each other, but not without a lot of
backtracking to define terms and usages. 
Finally, the attempt to study world-systems
comparatively has led many of us into new
research areas and new literatures.  This has
been exhilarating and frightening as we
explore new territories, learning who's who,
what's what,  and which way is up all over
again.  We hope that this collection will
provoke and inspire others to join us.
      We would like to thank the members and
officers of the International Society for the
Comparative Study of Civilizations, especially
its President Michael Palencia-Roth, for
graciously encouraging us to organize sessions
on world-systems.  We also are indebted to
Mitchell Weyuker and Joanne Fennessey at Johns
Hopkins and Catherine Day at DePauw for their
extraordinary deeds in the preparation of this
book.  A grant from DePauw's Faculty
Development Committee for Completion of
Scholarly Work  substantially assisted in
production of this volume. At Westview Press
we are grateful to Dean Birkenkamp and Ellen
Williams.



             Chris Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall