Journal of World-Systems Research

Poetry After Gaza

2024-04-10T15:44:10-04:00

Editors' introduction for the Special Issue on Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work Winter/Spring 2024, 30 (1).

Empire, Marxism, and Nationalism

2024-03-27T17:30:47-04:00

World-Systems at Fifty

2024-03-27T13:57:22-04:00

Palestine and Global Crisis

2024-03-19T12:47:04-04:00

Palestine and the Commons

2024-03-19T12:45:17-04:00

Israel and the End of International Law

2024-03-19T12:41:54-04:00

The Brazilian Indigenous as an Uneven Identity

2024-02-09T04:17:00-05:00

Orality has always been the main channel through which culture and knowledge has passed onto generations of Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Yet, today, the need to resist cultural assimilation or, even worse, annihilation, has led to the creation of new, written materials where Indigenous people can speak for themselves by relating their history, defending their identity, and their cultural territory. Among these, Brazilian geographer, poet, and activist Márcia Wayna Kambeba of the Omágua/Kambeba people uses literature as a space where decolonial thought and traditional knowledge meet to build a philosophical, political, and poetic view on indigenous identity in general and on the experience of Indigenous women in particular. Drawing from previous studies on Brazilian Indigenous literature, decolonial theory, and decolonial feminism, this paper discusses Kambeba’s works and underpins the relevance and need to examine the specificity of the experience of Brazilian Indigenous women writers as fundamental participants in the periphery of the world-literature to discuss the postcolonial configurations of identities in present-day Brazilian society.

A Woman’s Work is Never Done: Exhaustion and Alienation

2023-10-20T06:51:20-04:00

This concluding coda to the “A Woman’s Work is Never Done” Special Issue focuses on themes of exhaustion and alienation in women’s work. This coda builds on the Introduction and papers in the issue to examine how women’s labor often negotiates between and beyond the world-systemic wage relation, yet, women of course still operate within the capitalist world-system. Here I bring together the papers in this Special Issue to consider how, if “a woman’s work is never done” at the same time as there being “no such thing as an easy job” in our current world-system, this system of exhaustion and alienation can be mapped onto the gendered enmeshment of work with non-work, especially around care, pleasure, and emotional investment, which alienates us from those very same things in our current capitalist formations. I demonstrate how this enmeshment is thought through in literature by comparing the lyrics from c. 1629’s “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” with Kikuko Tsumura’s recent bestseller, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (2021), to frame the key themes that have emerged in this Special Issue, using Audre Lorde’s theorization of the erotic as a form of unalienating activity and energy.

Reading Hunger and Exhaustion in Clarice Lispector’s A Hora de Estrela

2023-10-16T05:05:29-04:00

Coined by Karl Marx in Capital (1867), the “metabolic rift” or “ecological rift” model describes the cycle of extraction, exportation and exhaustion present in agricultural production and, in particular, highlights the unsustainability of this ecologically-unequal exchange. This article integrates world-literary theory, Social Reproduction Theory, and the model of the metabolic rift to explore how Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star (1977) illuminates the peripheralization of women within the capitalist mode of production. The increasing pressure on women to be producers causes contradictions in the protagonist’s materiality and exposes the pressures placed on writing—especially women's writing—to meet the expectations of literary production. The novel’s commodity consumption, crisis of social reproduction, and meta-narrational features become windows to view the women’s work and women’s narratives which simultaneously sustain and are exploited by the capitalist mode of production. By connecting these various threads, I suggest the ignored labor of social reproduction under capitalism signals a crisis of consumption and a loss of capitalistic futurity, alerting readers to the unsustainable nature of the current capitalist mode of production.

Containers of “Meat, Blood, and Madness”

2024-01-17T10:56:04-05:00

In the capitalist world-system, the gendered dynamics of power often deny women autonomy to their own bodies, force upon them the responsibilities of care work and motherhood while criminalizing abortion to further subjugate the feminized body. The sexist state, Lola Olufemi (2021: 3) argues, discriminates against women in allocating resources, “…reinforces gendered oppression by restricting women’s freedom and ensuring that poor women have no means to live full and dignified lives.” By analyzing two novels—Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby (2018), translated from French by Sam Taylor, and Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born (2022), translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey—this paper examines how neoliberal capitalism exploits women’s labor and often reduce them to being mere vessels for reproduction. The texts present the commodification and exploitation of women’s labor who inhabit the gendered and uneven world-system. Drawing on the theorization of the combined and unevenness of the modern world-system by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), social reproduction, and feminist theories from scholars like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Verónica Gago, Silvia Federici, Lola Olufemi among others, this paper aims to critically examine the exploitative care work, reproductive labor, and the body politic as depicted in the two texts, arguing that neoliberal capitalism turns women into disposable commodities.

“When the Skin Comes Off, Their True Selves Emerge”

2023-11-06T04:38:20-05:00

This article considers how a contemporary wave of Caribbean short story writers re-work the language of folkloric irrealism as a tool of critique against the structural inequalities ingrained in the patriarchal capitalist world-system. Building on the Warwick Research Collective’s (2015: 72) examination of how irrealist aesthetics correspond to the “violent reorganization of social relations engendered by cyclical crisis,” it considers how transplanted folk figures attend to the distinctly gendered geographies of unevenness produced by the expansion of capitalist modernization. This article first unpacks the significance of the short story as a distinct vector for folkloric re-inscription, tracing the form’s dialogic interconnection with folk orality and its unique responsiveness to registering the processes of uneven development in Caribbean societies. Secondly, it offers close readings of selected short stories from collections including Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk (2018), Breanne Mc Ivor’s Where There Are Monsters (2019) and Leone Ross’s Come Let Us Sing Anyway (2017). Tracking a resistant aesthetic of folkloric corporeality, it considers how these writers re-animate oral poetics to critique the interrelated problems of global racial capitalism and what Silvia Federici describes as capitalism’s new war waged against women’s bodies in the current phase of accumulation (Federici 2018).

Compassion as Commodity

2023-11-08T05:57:18-05:00

While it was common for Victorian working-class women to be employed outside of the home, a paid occupation spelled the end of gentility for their bourgeois counterparts. Yet many of these ladies found respectable alternatives to make a living. For our research of the nineteenth century, we rely to a great extent on numbers – census data, population statistics, percentages. However, few contemporary employment records give an accurate or reliable account of the respective household constellation, particularly with regard to women. Looking at these numbers, we have to bear in mind that we are also looking at numbers accrued with certain assumptions about the role of women in society. Unlike the New Woman of the fin de siècle, who is a typist or clerk, some held positions which fell outside of the common labor categories. From Charles Dickens to Neo-Edwardian literature, these ‘odd women’ appear as caretakers, companions, and assistants performing various duties. Broadening the scope of investigation into women and work in England during the long nineteenth century beyond considerations of manual and educational employment into the realm of emotional labor, we can obtain more information on the restrictions of contemporary ideology and the power dynamics of affective care.

“What Will Set Yuh Free is Money”

2024-02-02T13:21:24-05:00

Studies have noted a dependency on sex work to “make do” in economies ravaged by foreign debt (Harrison 1991; Obregón 2018), necessitating a framing of the dynamics of sex work through a globalized system of enforced debt. This paper explores sex workers’ rights in post-quake Haiti and contemporary Jamaica, through an examination of Makenzy Orcel’s The Immortals (2020) and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2017). Like global debt systems, the exploitation of sex workers relies on a politics of dependency and constructed narratives of victimhood. This results in the refusal to recognize sex work as autonomous labor, meaning sex workers do not possess the protections of labor rights (Mgbako 2019). A literary examination of these debates exposes global debt’s modes of subject creation and the powerful resistance inherent in resubjectifying sex workers as conditionally agential rights claimants. This therefore reflects the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) suggestion that world-literature registers the “single but radically uneven world-system” in its form and content (2015). By exposing the tensions in subject-making at the heart of both debt economies and sex workers’ rights debates, Orcel and Dennis-Benn create feminized spaces to narrate sex workers’ negotiations of patriarchal-capitalist structures that peripheralize them.

A Woman’s Work: Making Something Out of Nothing

2023-10-03T13:28:44-04:00

This paper introduces this Special Issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research, “Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work” by making the case that the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC 2015: 9) conception of “combined and uneven development” can not only be applied to women’s writing in conversation with materialist feminist theory, but perhaps misses the ways in which women, Black feminists, indigenous lifeways, and queer world-making shows us a form of work that is not bound by the wage or value-exchange system, as many acts of care or favors often described as “women’s work”—cannot be repaid (Walton and Luker 2019). Missing from the WReC’s framework is an explicit engagement with women’s writing and how women contribute to, and are exploited by, the world-system. This Special Issue thus focuses on only one aspect of women’s engagement with the world-literary system: women’s work. From the labor market, motherhood, sex work, affective work, to knowledge production and storytelling, to the very work of consumption itself. Social reproduction theory and materialist feminists have made the case that capitalism relies on the invisible labor of women, particularly domestic work and community work. Yet, if we consider the creative dimensions of women’s work, do we discover gaps in world-systems frameworks which, when refracted through literary analysis, actually upset capitalism’s insistence upon the inevitability of exchange value? To exemplify this, I turn to Silvia Federici’s explanations of the witch as a tool to think about how we might “make something out of nothing.”

Editorial Note

2023-08-19T16:42:27-04:00

The editor's introduction for the Summer/Autumn 2023 issue of Journal of World-Systems Research.

Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part II

2023-08-22T13:54:06-04:00

Immanuel Wallerstein

2023-08-17T17:53:00-04:00

Cancelling Apocalypse by Risking to Envision

2023-08-16T15:59:41-04:00

Review Of: Does Skill Make Us Human?

2023-08-12T15:53:24-04:00

The Travesty of “Anti-Imperialism"

2023-08-22T13:54:16-04:00

Immanuel Wallerstein’s Lasting Legacies

2023-08-22T13:54:17-04:00

Where are Fossil Fuels Displaced by Alternatives?

2023-12-13T14:52:42-05:00

In light of ongoing and accelerating climate change driven by human combustion of fossil fuels, researchers have found evidence that national-level inequality influences whether nations are able to replace fossil fuels with alternative energies. This paper asks whether the inequality between nations also influences the rate at which nations replace fossil fuels. I use multilevel modeling techniques, World Bank data and data aggregated by Our World in Data for 146 nations from 1960–2021 to better understand the variation in national-level displacement of fossil fuels. Findings suggest there has been only partial displacement of fossil fuels at the global level during this period. In examining whether the variation in displacement of fossil fuels with alternative fuels at the national level can be described by lasting global inequality among nations, here measured by world-systems position, I find that semiperiphery nations displace fossil fuels at a higher rate on average as compared with core nations. This is further evidence for the importance of fossil fuel infrastructure and global inequality for implementing energy transitions to address climate change.

Europe in a State of Denial

2023-07-31T20:51:29-04:00

The Case for a Decolonization of Global History

2023-08-22T13:54:21-04:00

Carceral Power in World Historical Context

2023-11-17T11:14:34-05:00

This paper invites a conversation between world-systems perspective and radical criminology to contribute to a more robust materialist, historical, and global understanding of policing, prisons, and carceral power. We trace the genealogy of these two approaches to the larger transformations of global capitalism in the 1960s and 1970s, including ruling class responses to capitalist crises vis a vis neoliberal restructuring as well as the social struggles waged by antisystemic movements. Both world-systems and radical criminology brought a critical and Marxist perspective to the liberal social sciences, yet dialogue between them has been lacking. On the one hand, world-systems analysis offers a structural explanation of capitalism but often side steps the role that carceral power plays to manage the system’s deepening contradictions. On the other hand, radical criminology focuses on carceral power but often limits its analysis to advanced core countries and not to the entire capitalist system. We argue that bringing these two critical approaches together can offer us a renewed Marxist perspective to the interrelated issues of capitalist crisis and carceral power and thus make possible new lines of inquiry and research best suited for grappling with the major contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

The Mexican Haunting of Venezuela’s Oil Workers (1912–1948)

2023-07-03T19:14:01-04:00

This paper examines early twentieth century labor movements in Venezuela and Mexico that offer an opportunity to better specify how global capitalism can spawn divergent, not just convergent, resistance movements. It zeroes in on the oil workers in the decades when Venezuela became incorporated into global oil production (1912–1948). Their bread and butter demands for improvements to wages and labor conditions paled in comparison to those of their anticapitalist counterparts in Latin America’s first oil powerhouse: Mexico. This study elaborates why Venezuela’s labor movement is surprising, devises a world-historical approach to explain it, and illustrates the potential of this approach to help us reconcile differences in resistance despite apparent universalizing pressures of global economic forces. It demonstrates that Venezuela’s less radical forms of labor resistance derived from the earlier lessons the oil capitalists brought from Mexico to Venezuela on how to avoid anticapitalist labor militants. In unraveling the Mexican origins for Venezuela’s less anticapitalist labor resistance, this study spotlights incorporation as a process which can forge distinct resistance agendas even in nations on apparently parallel development trajectories. It calls for delving into histories of incorporation and exploring how their legacies create conditions more, or less, conducive for anticapitalist resistance today.

Anarchy in the World-System

2023-07-03T19:05:33-04:00

The world-system has been in a crisis for a while. The decline of U.S. hegemony, the rise of China, and Russia’s assertive foreign policy are the most important issues regarding the course of the world-system. On the one hand, the United States and its allies (in Samir Amin’s words, “the triad”) have desperately tried to protect the status quo. On the other hand, China and Russia have tried to create an alternative to sustain the capitalist world-system instead of U.S. hegemony. For this reason, to analyze the world-system, I argue that core-periphery relations should be reevaluated regarding China and Russia with the concept of semi-core. This study aims to evaluate the possible outcomes and prospects in the world-system in light of the rivalry between core and semi-core, and asserts that the world-system is in the phase of interregnum that consists of instabilities and disorders. This phase of interregnum has stemmed from the existence of semi-core and the structural crisis of the system.

The Political Economy of the Carnation Revolution (1974–75)

2023-08-22T13:54:23-04:00

Following the military coup of April 25th, 1974, Portugal experienced a revolutionary period characterized by unprecedented levels of labor unrest and political radicalization. As the social landscape suffered a profound transformation, key-sectors of the economy were nationalized, many firms went into self-management, and large areas of the south were swept by land occupation. When the country’s democratic Constitution was brought to vote on April 2, 1976, it contained numerous references to “socialism,” “self-management,” “planning,” and “agrarian reform,” bearing witness to a widespread commitment to build a “classless society.” What eventually took shape, however, was a mixed economy under a parliamentary regime, very similar to that of countries like Greece and Spain, both of which experienced far less dramatic democratic transitions. Drawing on the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this article analyzes the plans and strategies devised to ensure a socialist transition in the semiperiphery of the capitalist world-system during the 1970s.

Cultural Seascapes, Regional Connections, and Colonial Powers in the Southwestern Pacific

2023-05-31T15:01:58-04:00

Between the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, Australia and the islands of the southwestern Pacific were the setting of a wide context of encounters between Europeans and Indigenous peoples, in regions that could be perceived as disconnected at a first glance. However, it was part of a wider project of colonization that overlapped on a not less wide set of Indigenous networks of interconnection. Such a colonial project had landscape modification as a main common goal, added to projects of ethnic and cultural separation and segregation. This article suggests an approach to cultural seascapes as an approach to power relations between European colonizers and Indigenous people in this region. I suggest that this level of analysis allows to connect realities that could be perceived as disparate, but which were coherent with global projects of imposition of colonial identities according to a dominant global matrix of power. I aim to highlight the value of local spaces of interconnection as expressions of wider realities, approachable throughout the analysis of cultural seascapes as mobile spaces of power relations.

Wallerstein’s Decline and Fall of the Capitalist World-System

2023-08-22T13:54:26-04:00

Immanuel Wallerstein

2023-08-22T13:54:28-04:00

A Theorist’s Appreciation of Immanuel Wallerstein’s Analysis of Inter-Societal Dynamics

2023-08-22T13:54:31-04:00

Immanuel Wallerstein and the Genesis of World-Systems Analysis

2023-08-22T13:54:34-04:00

Ibn Khaldun’s Labor Theory of Value and the Question of Race

2023-06-21T17:55:36-04:00

In the first volume of Capital, Marx argued that the labor theory of value could only be discovered in capitalist societies. Building on Marx’s premise, this article examines Ibn Khaldun’s (1377) The Muqaddimah, which presents one of the first labor theories of value in world history. After explaining different elements of Ibn Khaldun’s labor theory of value, the article revisits what Giovanni Arrighi referred to as the “nondebates of the 1970s” and proposes that North Africa was already incorporated into an Italian centered capitalist world-economy in the fourteenth century. Since a key element of Marx’s argument was the impossibility of the emergence of abstract labor in societies (e.g. ancient Greece) which do not have the idea of equality of human beings and human labor, in the latter part, the article analyzes Ibn Khaldun’s theory of race and human equality. We show that Ibn Khaldun, through his comparative and historical observations, acknowledged the equality of all humans and the constructed nature of race, influenced by geography, history, and political economy. The world-historical analysis and theoretical interventions of the article helps us rethink capitalism and racism as two major pillars of modernity.

Global Commodity Chains and the Pandemic

2023-05-03T14:11:54-04:00

The availability of labor-power is a critical element of all commodity chains. This is especially true of labor-intensive production processes such as agriculture. The COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on this, as well as on many other aspects of the economy and everyday life. The institutions of the modern world-system responded in various ways to the new situation influenced by COVID-19, taking measures to mitigate and avert the detrimental effects. This paper examines these responses and their impact on the availability of labor-power in the agricultural areas of Nakuru County, Kenya, and O’Higgins Region, Chile. By practically applying world-systems analysis, we shed light on the significance of institutions during periods of stagnation and their impact on the availability of labor-power in global commodity chains. This allows us to draw conclusions about the general impact of institutional responses to stagnation phases at the worker level. We show that the institutions studied responded in very different ways to the stagnation phase affected by COVID-19. As a result, O’Higgins Region experienced a labor-power shortage that Nakuru County had not, which may have a lasting impact on labor-power availability.

Every Day I Write the Book

2023-08-22T13:54:36-04:00

The article examines the concept of geoculture understood as a form of dominant ideology in the twenty-first century. It situates this in the context of the attempt by conservative and liberal elites in the core states to frame a coherent understanding of the post-Cold War world with which to guide, justify, and legitimize policies and actions. The dominant geoculture has come to be framed by two contrasting grand narratives which establish a framework for legitimate intra-elite debate and understanding of the post-Cold War era: Neoliberalism and the Clash of Civilizations. The significance of these two intra-elite grand narratives is that they represent a break with what Wallerstein has called “centrist liberalism,” which has tended to dominate the geoculture of the modern world-system.

Assessing Core-Monopolization and the Possibilities for the Semi-Periphery in the World-System Today

2023-08-22T13:54:38-04:00

Drawing upon both classic and more contemporary world-systems analysis, along with oft-forgotten sections of Arghiri Emmanuel’s work on technology, this paper studies, through a quantitative and qualitative comparative method, the history and development of the global semiconductors industry, its selective spatial re-organization/peripheralization over time, and the logic of technology transfers within the context of core-monopolization of high profit industries. The paper then draws comparisons between semiconductors and prior core-monopolized industries like the automobile industry, and analyzes attempts at entry into core-like production by the large semi-peripheries such as China and India and the difficulties faced by them not only by the structural limitations of the world-system but also due to opposition from the core nations (like the U.S.-China Trade War). Resultingly, the analysis concludes that significant upward mobility for the large semi-peripheries through entry into core industries is, within the current capitalist world-system, largely unfeasible.

Erratum: Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

2023-03-28T13:55:21-04:00

Volume 29(1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included a review of the book Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires by Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă. Due to editor error the review was uploaded with Anca Parvulescu's name misspelled. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site, and the editors apologize for any confusion.

Erratum: Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

2023-03-28T13:53:37-04:00

Volume 29 (1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included a review of the book Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania Across Empires by Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă. Due to editor error the review was uploaded with Anca Parvulescu's name misspelled. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site, and the editors apologize for any confusion.

Erratum: Introduction to the Symposium

2023-03-28T13:47:45-04:00

Volume 29 (1) of the Journal of World-Systems Research initially included the article "Introduction to the Symposium: Parasitism and the Logics of Anti-Indigeneity and Antiblackness" by Marilyn Grell-Brisk. When first published the article was missing a key citation. Accordingly, a slightly revised version of the review has been restored to its original publication site.

Shades of Red

2023-08-22T13:54:46-04:00

To address literature on U.S.-China hegemonic competition, this paper examines the properties of China among select Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) states which pertain to the features of hegemony per world-systems analysis and how it compares to the United States and regional powers Brazil and South Africa. I demonstrate that Beijing has made significant progress propagating its modus operandi by way of greater yuan use and imposing its legal code on examined BRI states, economic dominance through besting competitors in exports to these states, achieving an overall trade surplus as well as setting up free-trade zones to maintain and enhance this, and establishing a stream of revenue from examined states via high-interest, short-term loans, income from projects, and trade surpluses. In military dominance, China has made gains in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Pakistan. Meanwhile, Washington remains dominant in Peru, and, with Paris, more culturally dominant in SSA.

Incineration, Urbanization, and Municipal Solid Waste in the World-System

2023-06-21T17:35:42-04:00

Incineration, or waste-to-energy, is a widespread means of greenwashing municipal solid waste collection worldwide. This paper looks at incineration and the trade of bottom ash to discuss how urbanization in one country pressures urban expansion elsewhere in the modern world-system. Incineration is a coping mechanism for excess waste produced by cities under capitalism. It generates energy, reduces the volume of waste, and creates ash that can be used in cement production. However, it is far from sustainable, as it facilitates expansion-oriented growth. Using UN Comtrade data, we find that incineration is a material and metabolic process that promotes global urbanization in the following ways: 1.) Corporations producing and selling incineration are part of a transnational growth machine that fuels the treadmill of production. 2.) North-North, North-South, and South-South relationships encourage incineration as a means of ecological modernization. 3.) These relationships have both hierarchical and polycentric dimensions—allowing us to create a typology for understanding such processes within the modern world-system.

Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

2023-03-15T15:28:43-04:00

Review Of: Creolizing the Modern

2023-03-14T18:07:25-04:00

Editorial Note

2023-03-14T17:42:22-04:00

The editor's introduction for the Winter/Spring 2023 issue of Journal of World-Systems Research.

Introduction to the Symposium

2023-03-31T11:01:07-04:00

The Field is Upon Us

2023-03-21T12:07:11-04:00

The Silence of the Intellectuals

2023-03-21T12:07:13-04:00

Insights from General Complexity Evolution for Our Current Situation

2023-03-21T12:07:18-04:00

Will the pace of change in our global technological society continue to accelerate? Or will it follow the path of most previous technological waves, which slowed down as they matured? The purpose of this paper is to explore how historical general evolutionary processes involving increased energy flows and corresponding higher complexity levels might have contributed to the global problems we face today with regard to energy, environmental, inequality, and demographics. This situation will be compared with various integrated complexity evolutionary models of three major phases in evolution (life, humans, and civilization). While natural ecosystems seem to have both positive and negative feedback mechanisms to prevent the onset of senescence, the current economic system seems to have avoided constraints to enter a positive feedback loop that results in unsustainable resource use and pollution. There are still many contrasting interpretations of what this means for the near future, but integrating insights from these perspectives may help us better understand these processes.

A Thermodynamic Interpretation of the Progression of Historical Processes

2023-03-21T12:07:20-04:00

This article examines the long-term rise of human civilization in terms of the emergence of socio-physical dissipative structures, including cities, agricultural systems, infrastructure and relevant economic enterprises. The laws of thermodynamics, the Principle of Least Time, and the phenomena of complexity and emergence are briefly reviewed and accepted as assumptions. The concepts of thermodynamic work, power and efficiency are likewise reviewed. Also examined are the emergence of medium-term dissipative structures, such as the rise and fall of dynasties, resource and economic bubbles in terms of thermodynamic theory. The impact of thermodynamic constraints on the emergence and fall of such structures is examined. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between physical resource use and the social progression of those structures. Areas of applicability to World-Systems is discussed.