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Resumo

This article synthesizes a new account of world‐system evolution from contending cultural materialist, Marxist, and Weberian theories of very long‐run social change. We explain the increasing size of world‐systems, the rise of more and more hierarchical and larger empires, and the creation of a single global capitalist political economy in terms of iterations of a basic model of population growth, intensification of production, transformation of modes of accumulation, and uneven development in which semiperipheral actors construct transformational innovations. Our theory spans the twelve thousand years since the mesolithic establishment of sedentary societies. We comparatively analyze chiefdom formation, state formation, empire formation, and the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers in the modern world‐system.

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