Few American sociologists have succeeded in forming academic cults around themselves, and until recently none had ever done so through the writing of social history. Yet this is precisely what Immanuel Wallerstein has done, and it is worth examining the reasons for this before discussing his intellectual biography and analyzing the substance of his work.

Although known as an Africanist in the 1960s and as the author of a provocative book about universities that was sympathetic to the student rebels of the late 1960s, Wallerstein did not achieve great prominence until the publication in 1974 of The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. This book was an attempt to create a new grand synthesis of the economic and social history of European expansion from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries.

The basis of Wallerstein's synthesis was the idea that whatever small technological and organizational advantage Western, particularly northwestern, Europe may have possessed at the end of the fifteenth century, it was turned into a much greater superiority by the West's exploitation of non-Western peripheries. Peripheral areas were primary product-exporting regions, at first in Eastern Europe and South America, whose economies and societies were subordinated by the power of the Western (or core) states arms and markets.