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Key metaphors in world-system analysis are profoundly spatial, but there have been few attempts to understand how space, location, and topography affect world-system organization and process. To fill this gap, this book examines case studies of the restructuring of space and transport in core, semiperipheral, and peripheral economies. It addresses such topics as the role of ocean transport in linking terrestrially based units of the capitalist world economy, the role of land transport systems in the construction and restructuring of relationships between raw materials peripheries and core economies, and the role of the airplane in transforming and representing changing spatial, economic, and social relations in the capitalist world economy. World-systems theory and many other perspectives on the world economy, including international political economy and analysis of globalization, typically pay only limited attention to issues of space, location, and the role of transportation in the world economy. This book identifies key theoretical and empirical issues and provides the basis for formulating research strategies to address this gap in our understanding.
Mobility is fundamental to economic and social activities such as commuting, manufacturing, or supplying energy. Each movement has an origin, a potential set of intermediate locations, a destination, and a nature which is linked with geographical attributes. Transport systems composed of infrastructures, modes and terminals are so embedded in the socio-economic life of individuals, institutions and corporations that they are often invisible to the consumer. This is paradoxical as the perceived invisibility of transportation is derived from its efficiency. Understanding how mobility is linked with geography is main the purpose of this book. The third edition of The Geography of Transport Systems has been revised and updated to provide an overview of the spatial aspects of transportation. This text provides greater discussion of security, energy, green logistics, as well as new and updated case studies, a revised content structure, and new figures. Each chapter covers a specific conceptual dimension including networks, modes, terminals, freight transportation, urban transportation and environmental impacts. A final chapter contains core methodologies linked with transport geography such as accessibility, spatial interactions, graph theory and Geographic Information Systems for transportation (GIS-T). This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the field, with a broad overview of its concepts, methods, and areas of application. The accompanying website for this text contains a useful additional material, including digital maps, PowerPoint slides, databases, and links to further reading and websites. The website can be accessed at: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans This text is an essential resource for undergraduates studying transport geography, as well as those interest in economic and urban geography, transport planning and engineering.
This book offers a historically sweeping yet detailed view of world-systemic migration as a racialized process. Since the early expansion of the world-system, the movement of people has been its central process. Not only have managers of capital moved to direct profitable expansion; they have also forced, cajoled or encouraged workers to move in order to extract, grow, refi ne, manufacture and transport materials and commodities. The book offers historical cases that show that migration introduces and deepens racial dominance in all zones of the world-system. This often forces indigenous and imported slaves or bonded labor to extract, process and move raw materials. Yet it also often creates a contradiction between capital’s need to direct labor to where it enables profitability, and the desires of large sections of dominant populations to keep subordinate people of color marginalized and separate. Case studies reveal how core states are concurrently users and blockers of migrant labor. Key examples are Mexican migrants in the United States, both historically and in contemporary society. The United States even promotes of an image of a society that welcomes the immigrant—while policy realities often quite different. Nonetheless, the volume ends with a vision of a future whereby communities from below, both activists and people simply following their communal interests, can come together to create a society that overcomes racism. Its final chapter is a hopeful call by Immanuel Wallerstein for people to make small changes that, together, can bring real about real, revolutionary change.
Integrating environmental and world-systems analyses in chapters ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, from the global to the local, from West to East, and from North to South, this book is the first collection to analyze environmental issues from the world-systems perspective. The introduction provides Immanuel Wallerstein's fullest explication of the role of ecological constraints in the world-system. Early chapters diagnose the increasing environmental threats to global sustainability and suggest ways to arrive at an integrated theoretical understanding of those threats. The work then shows the historical and geographical range necessary to do justice to ecological considerations in chapters considering ancient civilizations, capitalism, the circumpolar North, the dam-builders of Asia, and the polluters of East Central Europe. The final chapters analyze the successes and limits of environmental movements in the United States, South Africa, and South Korea.
The rise and decline of great powers remains a fascinating topic of vigorous debate. This book brings together leading scholars to explore the historical evolution of world systems through examining the ebb and flow of great powers over time, with particular emphasis on early time periods. The book advances understanding of the regularities in the dynamics of empire and the expansion of political, social and economic interaction networks, from the Bronze Age forward. The authors analyze the expansion and contraction of cross-cultural trade networks and systems of competing and allying political groupings. In premodern times, theses ranged from small local trading networks (even the very small ones of hunting-gathering peoples) to the vast Mongol world-system. Within such systems, there is usually one, or a very few, hegemonic powers. How they achieve dominance and how transitions lead to systems change are important topics, particularly at a time when the United States' position is in flux. The chapters in this book review several recent approaches and present a wealth of new findings.
Contributors Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Agustin Lao, Lewis Gordon, James V. Fenelon, Roberto Hernandez, James Cohen, Santiago Slabosky, Susanne Jonas, and Thomas Reifer. By the mid-twenty-first century, white Euro-Americans will be a demographic minority in the United States and Latino/as will be the largest minority (25 percent). These changes bring about important challenges at the heart of the contemporary debates about political transformations in the United States and around the world. Latino/as are multiracial (Afro-latinos, Indo-latinos, Asian-latinos, and Euro-latinos), multi-ethnic, multireligious (Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, indigenous, and African spiritualities), and of varied legal status (immigrants, citizens, and illegal migrants). This collection addresses for the first time the potential of these diverse Latino/a spiritualities, origins, and statuses against the landscape of decolonization of the U.S. economic and cultural empire in the twenty-first century. Some authors explore the impact of Indo-latinos and Afro-latinos in the United States and others discuss the conflicting interpretations and political conflicts arising from the "Latinization" of the United States.
This book brings together some of the most influential research from the world-systems perspective. The authors survey and analyze new and emerging topics from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, from political science to archaeology. Each analytical essay is written in accessible language so that the volume serves as a lucid introduction both to the tradition of world-systems thought and the new debates that are sparking further research today. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Although the United States is currently the world's only military and economic superpower, the nation's superpower status may not last. The possible futures of the global system and the role of U.S. power are illuminated by careful study of the past. This book addresses the problems of conceptualizing and assessing hegemonic rise and decline in comparative and historical perspective. Several chapters are devoted to the study of hegemony in premodern world-systems. And several chapters scrutinize the contemporary position and trajectory of the United States in the larger world-system in comparison with the rise and decline of earlier great powers, such as the Dutch and British empires. Contributors: Kasja Ekholm, Johnny Persson, Norihisa Yamashita, Giovanni Arrighi, Beverly Silver, Karen Barkey, Jonathan Friedman, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rebecca Giem, Andrew Jorgenson, John Rogers, Shoon Lio, Thomas Reifer, Peter Taylor, Albert Bergesen, Omar Lizardo, Thomas D. Hall.
Despite prognostications of the "end of history," the 21st century has posed new challenges and a host of global crises. This book takes up the current global economic crisis in relation to new and changing dynamics of territory, authority, and rights in today's global system. The authors explore long simmering conflicts in comparative perspective, including settler colonialism in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. They discuss indigenous struggles against environmental land grabs and related destruction of indigenous lands by the US nuclear weapons complex. The book uniquely considers the sacred in the context of the global system, including struggles of Latina/o farm workers in the U.S. for social justice and for change in the Catholic Church. Other chapters examine questions of civilizations and identity in the contemporary global system, as well as the role of world-regions.
'Unlike so many books that analyze material and energy flows in society and the developments therein, this is one of the few that link such information to developments in social organization and that discusses how limits in one sphere influence the other and in reverse.' – Arnold Tukker, Journal of Industrial Ecology 'This book is a neat summary of the main research developments achieved by the editors and their colleagues at the Institute of Social Ecology at Klagenfurt University in Vienna, and represents an interesting and important landmark in the social metabolism approach to sustainable development. The book is arranged over eight chapters, each of which can stand alone as an interesting paper with a specific focus, though several chapters are complimentary. . . The various chapters are largely written in an interesting and engaging style and the material covered is well presented, so that the largely social science content should be easily assimilated by a wide general readership. . . The book is well laid out. . . Any ecologists interested in flows of energy and materials within changing agrarian and industrial landscapes would be well served by reading this approachable text.' – Robert A. Francis, Landscape Ecology 'In an important contribution to sustainability science, Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl extend the frontiers of contemporary socio-ecological research to articulate a theory of material, energy and land-use transitions across multiple scales based on detailed empirical studies in Europe and Asia. The insights it presents on agrarian-industrial transitions are crucial to understand the potential impact of emerging nations like India and China on global change.' – Aromar Revi, India China Institute, The New School University, US 'This volume represents the culmination of several years of empirical research and refinement of the social metabolism approach. That approach is one of the most exciting and illuminating innovations in the fields of human ecology, industrial ecology, and environmental history. Here the team from Vienna's Institute of Social Ecology shows masterfully how the insights of social metabolism shed light on transitions to high-energy society in Austria, in Britain, and in the world at large.' – J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University, US This significant new book analyses fundamental changes in society-nature interaction: the socioeconomic use of materials, energy and land. The volume presents a number of case studies addressing transitions from an agrarian to an industrial socioecological regime, analysed within the materials and energy flow accounting (MEFA) framework. It is argued that by concentrating on the biophysical dimensions of change in the course of industrialization, social development issues can be explicitly linked to changes in the natural environment. From the historical transition in Europe, to current transitions in developing countries, the book offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of transition processes across scales, from local to national. The comparison of historical and current assessments allows a theory of the underlying patterns of the agrarian-industrial transition to emerge. On this basis, future trends and possible pathways towards (or indeed further departures from) sustainability are discussed. Empirical in character and cautious in its assumptions, this insightful book provides rich and in-depth material for further studies in socioecological research. It will be essential reading for students and researchers of ecological economics, industrial ecology, human ecology, environmental sociology, environmental history, geography as well as land, energy and development studies.