On 5 October 2020, US president Donald Trump appeared on the Truman Balcony of the White House. Days before, he had tested positive for COVID-19 as had many other individuals who had attended recent White House functions. On the balcony, he extoled his own leadership and strength. Many likened this event to Evita Peron's similar appearance on a balcony of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires on another October day in 1951 when she gave her final speech to supporters in the Plaza de Mayo. Given President Trump's COVID-19 status, and his checkered approach to combating the pandemic, critics dubbed this his Covita moment, and it was indeed emblematic of his administration and its approach to the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the world in many ways. For starters, it impacted growth, employment, investment and trade. The World Bank suggested that the pandemic-induced recession was the worst since World War II. It was more pronounced than the recessions of 1975, 1982 and 1991. In some respects, it even overshadowed even the global financial crisis of 2009. What is more, because the pandemic undermined several important growth factors, the recessionary effects were likely to be long term, particularly given the continued emergence of new variants, including Delta and Omicron.

In 2020, Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart put it this way:

Despite these dire economic conditions, some economic nationalists saw the pandemic as an occasion to further their cause. For example, as the deaths from COVID-19 reached 100,000 in the United States, US trade representative Robert Lighthizer referred to the pandemic as an opportunity to reshape trade relations and had the audacity to refer to these trade relations (and not the pandemic) as a “disease.”

In 2014, I began to write a book entitled No Small Hope about the universal provision of basic goods and services, drawing upon economics, ethics and human rights theory. In the middle of this project, the world began to shift. In 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Both these developments reflected economic nationalist and ethnonationalist political platforms. In 2018, I presented the No Small Hope book at the World Trade Organization's annual public forum. This was somewhat ironic because President Trump was beginning a full-scale assault on that institution, attempting to hobble the multilateral trading system he loathed.

About a year later, COVID-19 appeared on the global scene, setting off further expressions of economic nationalism, exacerbating an already fraught US–China relationship, and causing 15 million excess deaths worldwide. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson was “getting Brexit done,” while Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was ramping up his ethnonationalist Hindutva movement. During 2020 and 2021, the pandemic ravaged the world, fraying economic relations. In January 2021, US president Trump attempted to overthrow the country's electoral process while Brexit came into effect. A little over a year later, Russia invaded Ukraine in another ill-considered nationalist spasm.

Whereas No Small Hope was a statement of what could be, this book is a statement of what is, and it is decidedly less hopeful. The main message is that economic nationalism is often a recipe for worsened economic welfare, strained international relations, enflamed ethnic tensions, global public health setbacks and reduced effective innovation. Behind economic nationalism lies a zero-sum mindset that misapprehends many realities and thereby sets back the important project of human flourishing. This zero-sum mindset, however, is an ever-tempting default that must be overcome for continued forward progress. This book argues that we must resist its lure and recognize the possibility of non-zero-sum outcomes as embedded in the principle of multilateralism. This lesson was painfully learned after World War II and unfortunately needs to be learned again.

Some small fragments of this book were published in editorial form in the US-based The Hill, and I would like to thank The Hill's Daniel Allott for his support in that process.

Adjustments to the Śambūka episode covered up to this point have largely been part of a calculated reframing of this controversial moment in theUttarakānḍa in order to protect Rāma's image. The intent had not been to empathize with Śambūka, but rather to elevate Rāma and update the circumstances of their interaction to match prevailing religious sentiments regarding Rāma and his divinity. Throughout the twentieth century, however, we see a new battleground for the details surrounding Śambūka's death. In this new context, Śambūka is the central figure, not Rāma; the protagonist, not the antagonist. One reason for the shift in focus is the fact that new contributors to the Śambūka tradition came from the same social position as Śambūka himself, and their primary purpose in calling on his narrative was to present powerful challenges to the caste system. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that the perspectives on Śambūka—or even on how to approach the problem of caste—within these groups have never been monolithic. Anticaste ideation has had many different expressions throughout history and figures in the twentieth century representing numerous activist groups sought to reframe the details of the Śambūka story to promulgate their specific anticaste messaging. In formulating such messaging, some made references to a generalized, skeletal Śambūka narrative in hopes of evoking the tragedy of his death to expose long-standing casteism in Indian society. Others created entirely new works on Śambūka, digging deep into the narrative and adjusting its nuances to suit the exact type of message they were promulgating. While the precise message varied, the narrative framework within which these authors were working was often the same: Śambūka was a charismatic leader and teacher of the oppressed classes of India and he died a martyr.

In this chapter, I detail the sociopolitical background that allowed for activists to mobilize the Śambūka narrative against the caste system and I provide several examples of how such mobilization manifested. The anticaste activism covered here operated largely in the realm of literature, which featured new ruminations on the Śambūka story coming from India's socially oppressed communities. However, given that this body of literature advocated for the abolition of caste and typically—though not always—depicted Rāma in an unfavorable light, it often encountered robust challenges from more dominant segments of India's religious and political society.

Near the end of the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma returns to Ayodhyā to be installed as king after fourteen years of exile to the forest. His reign brings with it a long-awaited era of peace and prosperity. However, that peace is eventually disturbed when a Brahmin father brings the body of his dead son to the palace gates. The Brahmin questions how such a thing can happen, going so far as to accuse Rāma of failing to live up to his kingly responsibilities. Rāma becomes distressed and calls a meeting of his closest advisors. One among them, Nārada, explains to Rāma that when society loses sight of dharma as the ages progress, the birth-based system of societal segregation—the cāturvarṇya or system of four varṇas—begins to break down. By the time of the final age, known as the Kali Yuga, the lowest of these varṇas, the Śūdras, will begin to do the work of Brahmins, the highest of the varṇas. Nārada specifies that only in the Kali Yuga will a Śūdra be able to practice very intense austerities (tapas). Before that time, practicing of tapas is a crime for a Śūdra. Indeed, Nārada identifies the cause of the Brahmin boy's death as being a Śūdra engaged in tapas on the outskirts of Rāma's kingdom. He tells Rāma to survey his kingdom and rid it of all wrongdoing, including this errant Śūdra. Rāma obliges and, after traveling throughout his kingdom, finds an ascetic hanging upside down from a tree on a mountainside in the southern reaches of the Ayodhyā kingdom

As this book went into production in March 2023, Chinese president Xi Jinping met with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Moscow. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the two leaders “agreed to follow the principles of good-neighborliness, friendship and win-win cooperation,” “to promote global governance in a direction that meets the expectations of the international community” and “to practice true multilateralism, oppose hegemonism and power politics.” Ironically, these are the very values expressed in this book, ones undermined by China and Russia in practice. Are not the invasion of Ukraine and threatened invasion of Taiwan forms of hegemonism?

Unfortunately, China and Russia are not the only two countries undermining “win-win cooperation” and “true multilateralism.” It is something of a trend. Indeed, defenders of multilateralism are commonly seen as idealistic, stuck in the past or wedded to a vague “Western” hegemony. In reality, the liberal principles of a rules-based international system, open economic relations and respect for human rights are universal and comprise the best approach to facilitating broad-based improvement in human welfare.

Also in March 2023, the United Nations issue its “synthesis” climate change report, and the results were described as a “final warning” on the issue, stating that the “pace and scale of climate action are insufficient to tackle climate change.” No amount of further economic nationalism can help address this challenge. It would only exacerbate it. The imperative is for collective, multilateral action, most urgently in the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies and implementing carbon pricing.

As of the April 2023 annual IMF/World Bank meetings, more than twenty counties were either in debt default or seeking debt restructuring, with only Chad having been approved for the IMF's Common Framework discussed in Chapter 10. Further, China was refusing to either reduce the face value of debts or to increase payment periods, effectively refusing to seriously take part in the IMF's debt reduction process. The global public good of debt restructuring is proving to be elusive.

The United States continues it bipartisan consensus on techno-nationalism vis-à-vis China, with continued technological restrictions and threat of sanctions extending even to undersea cables, an unprecedented move. The evolution is from protecting legitimate security-related technologies to attempting to undercut China in all “foundational technologies,” including biotechnology. It seems that there is no end to technological realms that can come under the nationalistic umbrella.

For more than a half-century, Immanuel Wallerstein's creative and prescient thinking has been central to debates focused on how best to understand historical capitalism and large-scale, long-term change. This includes understanding people's place in the world as members of households, citizens of national formations, participants in the global community and agents of change. Wallerstein's contributions have been central, as well, to critiques of disciplinary knowledge, with emphasis on the limits of nineteenth-century paradigms. Yet, his consideration of gender within world-systems research has shown little explicit recognition of feminist analyses of gender, even as both world-systems and feminist inquiry share theoretical and methodological commitments and interests. In this chapter, I focus on two areas that characterize Wallerstein's rich corpus of intellectual engagement. The first is his understanding of historical capitalism and, in collaboration with Terence Hopkins, his elaboration of how world-systems approaches conceive of and engage women and gender relations. Second, if more briefly, I examine Wallerstein's (1977, 3) long-term preoccupation with and questioning of the foundational “presuppositions of the various social sciences as they emerged from the nineteenth-century Western world” to highlight the intersections, parallels and contestations between Wallerstein's epistemological arguments and those, broadly defined, within feminist inquiry.

Attentive to each of Wallerstein's major contributions, I begin by identifying how world-systems scholars examine women and gender relations at the intersections of national and transnational contexts to show where a feminist episteme both intersects with, and can further refine, relations between these traditions. In so doing, I draw attention to possible synergies and divergences between feminist inquiry and the Wallersteinian oeuvre. I conclude this section by showing, first, how Wallerstein's provocative framing influenced a rich literature on women in the world-economy, even as much of this literature fails to acknowledge Wallerstein's role in the emergent debates and discourses at the time or to engage the epistemic bases of world-systems analyses. Finally, in the last section of this chapter, I highlight Wallerstein's critical reading of the disciplines to suggest that far too little attention has been given to the shared and divergent intellectual commitments and critiques by feminist scholars. I conclude with a focus on the differences between the epistemic claims of world-systems and feminist analysts to stress the critical importance of showing that women not only respond to historical changes in world-systemic relations, but they also constitute their formation.

In January 2013, responding to a perceived rising tide of British opinion, Conservative UK prime minister David Cameron proposed a referendum on British membership in the EU. He said at that time: “It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics. I say to the British people: this will be your decision.” In doing so, he was attempting to mimic Labour's Harold Wilson who had successfully done the same thing in 1974 regarding membership in the European Economic Community (EEC). Cameron launched a years-long campaign that culminated in a June 2016 Brexit vote in which the British people “had their say.” In what has been called Cameron's “great miscalculation,” they voted to leave the EU or at least to try. Prime Minister Cameron resigned with his political career in tatters.

The Brexit campaign had deep roots in what is known as Euroscepticism, a mix of nationalist, ethnonationalist and populist ideas about the state of Britain in the world. Its rise is often linked to the signing of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty forming the EU, as well as to perceived economic decline in the UK. It is primarily but not exclusively linked to the political right in Britain and has some parallels with similar development in the United States. The vote was a close call, with majorities in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London voting to stay in the EU. It was a signature event.

Populism has been described as an antiestablishment movement that pits “the people” against “the elites.” The fact that populists are themselves often members of the elite does not seem to matter. Populism engages in mythmaking and the gross simplification of complex issues (heuristic substitution from Chapter 4). In the current era, these complex issues include economic globalization and multilateral relations. Mythmaking and the us/them cleavage work together in populist rhetoric, conjuring up “enemies of the people.” Further, as discussed in the previous chapter, “the people” can be defined in ethnonationalist terms (the “English”), and the results can be dramatic.

For example, Nigel Farage is a descendant of Huguenot refugees who fled from France to England in the seventeenth century to escape religious persecution. He became the face of the populist UK Independence Party (UKIP) that took up the pro-Brexit cause.

Introduction

In a letter published in the November 1971 issue of The American Sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein contended that, “There is no such thing as sociology if by sociology we mean a ‘discipline’ that is separate and distinct from anthropology, political science, economics, and history. […] They are all one single discipline which I suppose we may call social science.” For Wallerstein, “The ideological origins of these particular divisions lie in the philosophic frameworks of nineteenth century thought and are now antiquated” (1971, 328). These characteristically bold arguments were reiterated, reformulated and elaborated upon by Wallerstein over the next five decades and constitute an abiding theme of his game-changing version of world-systems analysis (WSA).

Wrestling with Wallerstein's positions on sociology seems important at the start of a volume that is part of a series on major sociological thinkers, because Wallerstein clearly refused to be narrowly categorized as such. In this chapter, we explore the question of what kind of sociologist Wallerstein was. As indicated, the question of sociology, and of the received intellectual division of labor in the university world, is addressed by Wallerstein in provocative fashion—he rejects the familiar divisions between nomothetic and idiographic scholarship; between past and present; between West and non-West; between state, market and civil society; between structure and agency and between the search for the good, true and beautiful. In place of such divisions, Wallerstein argues for unidisciplinarity, the singularity of knowledge, which he viewed as a really existing tendency shaped by world-systemic transformations, particularly those that followed what he called the world-revolution of 1968. From this vantage point, the prospects for sociology—once the sphere of the study of the distinctively sociocultural, and constituted by what Wallerstein viewed as the myths of societies as independent units of analysis and societal develop-ment—look decidedly dim.

On the other hand, Wallerstein's WSA was profoundly shaped by the concerns, themes, concepts and key thinkers most closely associated with the discipline of sociology—by Marx and Marxism (class, capitalism, the accumulation dynamic, contradiction, socialism), Weber (status groups, rationality, legitimation, the critique of reification), Durkheim (social groups), by confrontations with structural functionalism and modernization theory, by assumptions about the fundamental importance of hidden structures and by what Wagner (2001) views as sociology's postliberal thrust in the face of the crises of modernity.

Infectious diseases remain a persistent problem in many poor countries globally and, certainly, affluent countries are not immune to extreme suffering and death from communicable diseases. While the COVID-19 pandemic represents a salient example, “new” disease outbreaks, such as monkeypox (mpox), Zika, Ebola and HIV/AIDS are increasingly making news headlines and posing serious threats to human health globally. Infectious diseases have long been considered “diseases of the poor,” as these pathogens spread easily in crowded conditions, among malnourished populations and among people who lack adequate access to clean water, proper sanitation and other basic public health elements (e.g., Braveman, Egerter, and Williams 2011). While recent examples demonstrate that infectious diseases can infect people in affluent countries as well as impoverished ones, it is clear that the emergence of new infections and persistent suffering from communicable diseases remains concentrated in the Global South (e.g., WHO 2020).

In the field of public health, increased attention toward the social determinants of health sheds light on how various social conditions, such as level of education or income, working conditions and job security, food insecurity, housing, discrimination and access to affordable health services, impact the health of communities and individuals (e.g., Braveman, Egerte, and Williams 2011). While this framework importantly goes beyond biomedical explanations of health, it fails to consider the larger structural factors that impact the commonly articulated social determinants. Indeed, transformations such as colonialism and the establishment and continued expansion of the capitalist world-economy have greatly influenced how income, wealth and social determinants are distributed and used across and within countries. We must engage macro-level theory in order to truly understand the patterns in disease taking shape globally today.

Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974, 2004) articulation of world-systems analysis (WSA) offers meaningful insights on current global health dynamics. Although rarely referring to health or disease directly, his theorization on global inequality and development, including crucial elements such as unequal exchange, has keen relevance for patterns in infectious disease. Reflecting the significance of Wallerstein's articulations, a growing body of scholarship draws on WSA to explain important trends, including in infectious disease outcomes like HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis (TB), as well as the emergence of new zoonotic diseases (e.g., Austin 2015, 2021; Coburn et al. 2017; Maynard and Ong 2016; Maynard, Shircliff, and Restivo 2012).

Approximately three centuries before Albert Hirschman wrote National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, another book was written on the same subject. The author was Thomas Mun, a wealthy merchant trader born in 1571. Mun's early career was in the Mediterranean trade, particularly in Italy. These trade interests led to his becoming a very rich man. As a result of his commercial experience and his wealthy stature, in 1615, Mun became a director of the British East India Company (EIC), and he spent the rest of his career advocating on its behalf. In 1622, he was also appointed to a British government commission on international trade and thereby brought the interests of the EIC directly into government.

The EIC had its origin in a meeting that took place in London in September 1599. Present at that meeting were a group of traders, most notably the auditor of the City of London, Sir Thomas Smythe, as well as explorers, including William Baffin of Baffin's Bay fame. Their purpose was to request a royal charter granting them monopoly rights to trade, and they were quickly successful in this aim, the charter being granted in 1600. This set in motion a long series of events in which the EIC would expand into Asia with the largest private army in the world.

Along with his dedicated service to the EIC, Thomas Mun became the best-known member of a group of individuals who wrote on economic affairs in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their body of work became known as mercantilism. What exactly mercantilism was has been a matter of extensive debate and substantial disagreement to the present day. The prominent historian of economic thought, Henry William Spiegel, referred to the mercantilist idea as “economic warfare for national gain.” If that put it too strongly, mercantilism was most certainly a form of economic nationalism. Consider another description from the economic historians Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke:

Introduction

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, his most celebrated book almost did not make it into print. It was finally Charles Tilly who showed confidence in The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974a). Wallerstein had a similar experience with the book's companion article from the same year, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis” (1974b). Before it appeared in the pages of Comparative Studies in Society and History, the American Journal of Sociology passed on publication. Its editor described the work as having “many flaws.” Of the two reviewers, the first found it “rambling” and a “diatribe,” commenting “I do not find this paper novel.” The second reviewer was slightly kinder but remained unimpressed. Given Wallerstein's attention to “Marx and the ‘debates’ of the great Marxists on major issues regarding the nature and dynamics of capitalism,” this reviewer concluded that the leading sociology journal was not a “suitable” venue for publication (Bidwell 1973).

A half-century later, it is remarkable that the first fully formed expositions of world-systems analysis (WSA) initially struggled to make it into print. In retrospect, opposition from fellow sociologists was predictable, given that Wallerstein was, as he put it, a “heretic” within social science at the time (2000, xi). It was not merely that he challenged the field's conclusions. It was that he opposed its worldview, which he regarded as perpetuating inequality and political violence. Indeed, The Modern World-System inaugurated a new way of thinking about social science.

The notion of a world-system came only after nearly two decades of frustration with, and attempts to amend, popular models of national development. Africa confounded social scientific expectations. Ultimately, Wallerstein concluded that development was a relational process involving powerful core nations, the intermediate semiperiphery and the marginalized periphery. Wallerstein came to this view through his personal experiences, contemporary politics and the works of influential thinkers. This study presents a dialectic—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—on the beginnings of WSA. It argues that the world-systems tradition is both an important correction to conventional interpretations of development and a tool for liberation today.