Traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This title encompasses the nineteenth century from the revolutionary era of 1789 to the First World War.

“Wallerstein is a pleasure to read for his lucid organization of vast materials and his eye for the telling detail. Following a more narrative method than earlier volumes, Volume IV of The Modern World-System is full of clever and surprising turns of interpretation of what might seem the well-worn territory of nineteenth-century ideologies, politics, and movements. Wallerstein shows himself a graceful and accomplished historian as well as grand theoretician of the historical social sciences. This installment also includes the best analytical overview of Wallerstein’s entire multi-volume project.”

—Randall Collins, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania



“This is an exciting and significant work, at once an important account of how centrist liberalism came to dominate political ideology worldwide and a vital contribution to world-system analysis, one of the truly major innovations in the last fifty years of social science. Here its most important innovator carries forward the project he launched in 1974 not only chronologically but conceptually, advancing the idea of a ‘global geoculture’ and deepening understanding of the relationship among political, cultural, and economic dimensions of the world-system.”

—Craig Calhoun, President, Social Science Research Council





Immanuel Wallerstein's highly influential, multi-volume opus, "The Modern World-System", is one of this century's greatest works of social science. An innovative, panoramic reinterpretation of global history, it traces the emergence and development of the modern world from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. This new volume encompasses the nineteenth century from the revolutionary era of 1789 to the First World War. In this crucial period, three great ideologies - conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism - emerged in response to the worldwide cultural transformation that came about when the French Revolution legitimized the sovereignty of the people. Wallerstein tells how capitalists, and Great Britain, brought relative order to the world and how liberalism triumphed as the dominant ideology.