New Left Review I/110, July-August 1978

Immanuel Wallerstein

The ‘Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’

‘It is clear that the seventeenth century—with a world-economy larger than it had been in the sixteenth—saw a new division of wealth, under the banner of a many-sided competition, unfettered by loyalty, ferocious and premeditated, since decline and stagnation were poor counsellors: nothing was yielded, everything taken that could be taken, whether from neighbour or from distant rival.’

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