Some see the world-system paradigm as a ‘precursor’ to globalization theories, and
indeed, as Arrighi has observed, ‘world-systems analysis as a distinctive sociological
paradigm emerged at least 15 years before the use of globalization as a signifier that
blazed across the headlines and exploded as a subject of academic research and
publication’ (Arrighi 2005: 33). Yet what is distinctive to world-systems theory is
not that it has been around longer than more recent globalization theories. Rather,
this paradigm – and certainly its principal progenitor, Immanuel Wallerstein – tends
to view globalization not as a recent phenomenon but as virtually synonymous with
the birth and spread of world capitalism, c. 1500.