A theory arguing that macro-level patterns govern social and economic change; that history is not about singular events but about materially structured ways of life. See I. Wallerstein (1974, 1983) and S. Babones and C. Chase-Dunn (2012).

The core consists of the most economically developed countries, the periphery the less economically developed countries, and the nations of the semi-periphery, such as the newly industrialized countries, have aspects of both core and periphery—actively part of the capitalist world system but with limited authority therein. J. M. Blaut (2000) has used the theory, for example, to criticize historians who argue that the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe rather than Africa, Latin America, or Asia because it possessed special features these other regions did not. Rather, the extraction of peripheral countries’ surplus allowed core countries to develop, at the expense of those places whose surplus they took.

These three economic classes are continually changing, and nations move up and down in the system. See A. Ash (2003) and Sheppard (2005) Antipode 37, 5. Furthermore, core–periphery relationships operate not only at the global scale, but also at national and even local levels. This theory has been criticized for representing the global economic system as a predominantly capitalist phenomenon, for neglecting the historical and cultural differences of developing countries, and for overlooking the core–periphery inequalities existing within nations. ‘World systems approaches…tend to theorize hegemony chiefly on a global scale’ (Sparke (2004) PHG 28, 779).