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.’

Subscribe for just £36 and get free access to the archive Please login on the left to read more or buy the article for £3
Username:		Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The 'Crisis of the Seventeenth Century'’, NLR I/110: £3
Password:
If you want to create a new NLR account please register here

’My institution subscribes to NLR, why can't I access this article?’

By the same author:

• Structural Crises A world-systems perspective on the post-2008 crash, seeing in present imbalances a conjunction of cyclical downturn and secular trends, and highlighting the nature of coming struggles for another, better order.
• Reading Fanon in the 21st Century Immanuel Wallerstein draws on The Wretched of the Earth to set out three central dilemmas for today’s anti-systemic movements. Questions of violence, identity and class seen through an anti-colonial lens.
• The Curve of American Power Will strategic failure in Iraq hasten a decline in US hegemony? Immanuel Wallerstein surveys the global landscape that might emerge from the longue durée of American rule, with rival regional powers competing for energy, water and markets in an unstructured world-political order.
• Entering Global Anarchy A world-systems view of the prospects for the American imperium, after the occupation of Iraq. The confidence of the Republican Administration, the misgivings of its allies and the uncertainties of a transition to a new historical order.
• New Revolts Against the System The longue durée of resistance to the established order: after a hundred and twenty years of socialist and nationalist revolts, does the World Social Forum represent a qualitatively new alignment of forces and strategies for change?
• Questioning Eurocentricism: A Reply to Gregor McLennan
• Eurocentricism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science
• The Agonies of Liberalism: What Hope Progress?
• The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality