Introduction
I credit my African studies with opening my eyes both to the burning political issues of the contemporary world and to the scholarly questions of how to analyze the history of the modern world-system. It was Africa that was responsible for challenging the more stultifying parts of my education.
– Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, 2000a, xvii
Few today associate Immanuel Wallerstein with African studies, yet this field helped to define his academic career and played a pivotal role in shaping the school of thought for which he later became renowned. As his close friend and academic collaborator Terence K. Hopkins remarked, ‘world-systems analysis had its origins in Africa’ (Hopkins, as cited in Derluguian 2015, 454). Indeed, Wallerstein first publicly articulated his newly developed perspective in his 1973 presidential address to the African Studies Association (ASA), where he declared, ‘Africa is today part of a single world-system, the capitalist world-system, and its present structures and processes cannot be understood unless they are situated within the social framework that is governing them’ (Wallerstein 1973, 10).
While Wallerstein’s engagement with Africa during the decade preceding the publication of The Modern World-System in 1974 is sometimes acknowledged, crucial aspects of this period have often been overlooked in analyses of his intellectual development. His time as an Africanist saw him progressively distance himself from modernisation theory and gravitate towards a Marxist perspective – albeit one deeply informed by the realities of the underdeveloped world.
Cosmopolitan roots
From a young age, Wallerstein was politically active and displayed a keen interest in global affairs. In high school, he developed a strong affinity for journalism and briefly entertained the idea of pursuing it as a career (TV UNAM 2019, 6:39). This was a formative period during which his political beliefs were still taking shape, particularly against the backdrop of escalating Cold War tensions in post-war America. Upon his enrolment at Columbia University in 1947, he claims he found himself in a state of uncertainty, caught between the Social Democrats and the Communists, unsure of which side to align with (Wallerstein 2000a, xv). He was swayed by the Social Democrats’ critique of the Communists, agreeing with their condemnation of Stalinism, terror and unprincipled shifts in party line. However, he was also sympathetic to the Communists’ critique of the Social Democrats, particularly their perceived tendency to succumb to Western nationalism, weak resistance to capitalist polarisation, and lack of genuine activism against racial inequality.
Wallerstein characterised his intellectual interests at the time as being wide-ranging and not limited to a specific social science discipline (Wallerstein and Lemert 2016, 114). He was therefore drawn to sociology largely due to its tolerance for cross-disciplinary exploration, as it allowed him the most leeway to ‘wander into other fields’ (TV UNAM 2019, 7:42). Wallerstein later mused that had he anchored his scholarly endeavours in any department other than sociology, he might have faced much greater constraints (UC Berkeley Events 2013, 2:59).
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in sociology from Columbia University in 1951, Wallerstein was reluctantly drafted into the Korean War, and then later assigned to the task of protecting the Panama Canal (Williams 2020, 20). Upon concluding his military service in 1953, he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he decided to focus his master’s thesis on McCarthyism, drawing inspiration from C. Wright Mills’ work The New Men of Power (1948). Although Wallerstein’s master’s thesis centred on the American political scene, he remained interested in global affairs throughout this time. In his teenage years, he developed a fascination with India and the Indian National Congress, initially considering it as a potential area of study at university (GUS 2016, 1:48). He immersed himself in extensive reading about the country, exploring the lives and contributions of Gandhi and Nehru, eventually inspiring him to visit India in 1954 (Aguirre Rojas [2005] 2016, 12).
Starting from the late 1940s, Wallerstein’s interest gradually shifted from India to Africa, influenced by his involvement with the Young Adult Council (YAC), a coalition of American youth organisations (GUS 2016, 2:20). His participation in YAC led to his membership in the World Assembly of Youth (WAY) in 1951 (Aguirre Rojas [2005] 2016, 13). During that period, WAY was the sole international non-governmental organisation that counted African colonies among its full members (Wadlow 2019). Through WAY, Wallerstein participated in an international youth congress in 1951, where he had the opportunity to interact with numerous African delegates, some of whom held significant political roles in their countries (Wallerstein 2000a, xvi). Notably, there was a strong representation from francophone African countries, and Wallerstein’s proficiency in French proved to be an advantage in these interactions. After being elected vice president of WAY, he attended another congress in Dakar, Senegal, the following year, where he once again interacted with individuals from various African independence movements (GUS 2016, 6:52). Wallerstein returned to Dakar in 1955 and by 1956, when he had to select a dissertation topic, he was naturally drawn to studying the continent. This decision was bolstered by his broad network of international contacts, combined with his fluency in several languages.1 Consequently, he set himself on the path of becoming an Africanist.
While studying at Columbia University, Wallerstein extensively travelled across Africa, establishing contacts in most parts of the continent (GUS 2016, 3:07). He was, however, barred from entering South Africa, as well as all Portuguese-speaking Africa, as he was blacklisted by the apartheid regime and the Portuguese colonial authorities (GUS 2016, 8:59). In his early study of Africa, Wallerstein chiefly directed his attention to Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which later formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation.2
After completing his master’s degree in 1954 and enrolling in Columbia’s PhD programme, Wallerstein found that Mills was unavailable to serve as his PhD adviser, largely due to his ostracisation by the University’s graduate department (Calhoun 2023, 261). Consequently, he started working as a research assistant for Seymour Martin Lipset, an increasingly influential figure in American sociology and early proponent of the ‘theory of modernisation’. However, Lipset moved to UC Berkeley in 1956, leaving Wallerstein in the midst of his doctoral research. This departure led to Hans L. Zetterberg and Robert Staughton Lynd taking over as his advisers. Additionally, Wallerstein would dedicate a significant amount of time to research in Paris under the guidance of Georges Balandier, a French sociologist recognised for his work on African colonialism (Chase-Dunn and Inoue 2011, 396).
At this point in time, Wallerstein followed the modernisation theory paradigm and its associated methodological nationalism. As he himself stated, his doctoral dissertation was founded on the premise ‘that the nation is the most significant unit of social structure, the only complete social system existing in the modern world’ (Wallerstein, as cited in Welch 1965, 202). Yet, while his early work aligned with modernisation theory, it did not mean that he was fully in agreement with thinkers like W.W. Rostow and his stages of development thesis, or with other right-leaning proponents of similar views. Modernisation theory was a broad and widely accepted school of thought within the social sciences during this period, and Wallerstein was schooled in this tradition by his predecessors (Wallerstein 2000a, 106).
Although he was consistently opposed to colonialism and did not believe that imperialism could serve as a progressive historical force, unlike many of his contemporaries, Wallerstein’s early work did exhibit some of the key tenets of modernisation theory. In particular, he treated the nation state as the primary unit of analysis, assuming that societies were largely contained within national borders. Additionally, during this time, he accepted aspects of the liberal notion of historical progress, often referred to as the Whig interpretation of history. This belief in progress would give way to a much more critical perspective. Some years later, Wallerstein forcefully rejected these assumptions, writing:
We do not live in a modernizing world but in a capitalist world. What makes this world tick is not the need for achievement but the need for profit. The problem for the oppressed strata is not how to communicate within this world but how to overthrow it. (Wallerstein [1975] 2000b, 107)
Importantly, it was his doctoral research that would begin to set him on the path towards this critical realisation. Through this work, Wallerstein became increasingly aware of the interconnected political economy of postcolonial states and their former colonial rulers. That led him to recognise that a comprehensive understanding of contemporary Ghana required an examination of its historical economic relationship with the UK, and vice versa. This realisation also led him to acknowledge the significant influence of European and American actions on ongoing events in Africa (McNeill 1994, 269). Such a shift in perspective is clearly reflected in the progression of his writings pertaining to Africa.
Africa and the world beyond
In 1960, Wallerstein had his first encounter with the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, a figure he would come to regard as one of his most significant mentors. He spent a week in Accra with Fanon, who at that time was representing the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in Ghana (Wallerstein 1979, 250; Aguirre Rojas [2005] 2016, 5). They met once again the following year, but this time in a Washington DC hospital, where Fanon was battling late-stage leukaemia.
Before arriving in the United States, Fanon had recently completed what would become his most influential work, Les damnés de la terre (1961).3 Wallerstein was pivotal in arranging the American publication of this book and played a significant role in bringing Fanon’s work to wider attention in the United States (Goldfrank 2000, 157). Fanon passed away in December 1961, just months before the final victory of the National Liberation Front (FNL) in the Algerian War of Independence, a cause to which he had dedicated much of his adult life. Some years later, Wallerstein expressed his admiration for Fanon in these words: ‘If Fanon has become an intellectual of world renown since his early and untimely death in 1961, it is because he combines passion, lucidity and relevance’ (Wallerstein 1967c).
During his time in Africa in the early 1960s, Wallerstein would also meet the Egyptian-French Marxian economist Samir Amin, then working at the UN’s Institut Africain de Développement Économique et de Planification (IDEP) in Dakar.4 According to Wallerstein, they quickly realised the striking convergence of their perspectives (Wallerstein 2018b). Shortly afterwards he met the Marxist dependency theorist André Gunder Frank (Calhoun 2023, 271). In the latter part of the 1960s, his path crossed with that of Giovanni Arrighi, an Italian Marxist economist who would later rise to prominence as a world-systems analyst and become an important collaborator with him on a number of projects (Arrighi 2009, 64–65).5 At that time, Arrighi held a lecturer position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, which Wallerstein frequently visited. Through these visits he would also become acquainted with the Guyanese Marxist historian Walter Rodney, whom he would eventually invite to the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton (Calhoun 2023, 270).
In the following decades, Amin, Arrighi, Frank and Wallerstein would come to be known as ‘the gang of four’, due to their shared methodological approach to capitalism as a system and their collaborative intellectual endeavours (see, for instance, Amin et al. 1982, 1990). This affectionate appellation was apt, given their mutual, albeit varying, intellectual connections to Maoism.6 Another commonality was their initial academic focus on the Third World. Apart from Frank, who directed his attention to Latin America, the other members of the group all began their academic careers studying Africa.7 Wallerstein did, however, stand out from the rest as the only one without any formal background in economics, though none of them showed much allegiance to their disciplinary roots.
Toward the latter half of their careers, notable differences began to emerge among the group, particularly Frank. By the mid 1990s, Frank had abandoned the concept of the capitalist mode of production as a distinct category, marking a decisive break with both Marxism and Wallerstein’s formulation of world-systems analysis, which he criticised for their purported Eurocentrism – a critique that Wallerstein strongly contested (Frank 1998, xv–xvi; Wallerstein 1999a, 355). However, Wallerstein always remained close to Amin in his outlook. Following Amin’s death in 2018, Wallerstein wrote a tribute referring to him as a ‘comrade in the struggle’ and emphasised their shared understanding of Marxism as an open-ended critique (Wallerstein 2018b).
In 1961, Wallerstein published his first book, Africa, The Politics of Independence ([1961] 1971a). Recognised as one of the earliest contemporary histories of African politics, the book’s detailed and descriptive nature somewhat obscures Wallerstein’s own analysis (Park 2006, 480). Nonetheless, it clearly embodies a deep appreciation for African civilisation and culture, while expressing sympathy for the continent’s liberation movements. Primarily written during the pivotal ‘Year of Africa’, the book presents an optimistic and slightly idealised view of the decolonisation process.8
The Politics of Independence also appears to tacitly endorse the principles of modernisation theory, depicting pan-Africanism as effective insofar as it acts as a driving force for ‘modernisation’ (Wallerstein [1961] 1971a, 119). In contrast to his subsequent books, this work does not address the capitalist system and uncritically adopts the notion of a ‘democratic society’ (sensu lato). However, in the introduction, possibly hinting at Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Wallerstein writes that the study of past history is ‘important for men who wish to understand their world in order to act upon it’ (Wallerstein [1961] 1971a, 7).9
The Politics of Independence differed notably from the more nuanced analysis of decolonisation offered by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, released later the same year – a work that would profoundly impact Wallerstein’s thinking. In his 1971 epilogue to The Politics of Independence, Wallerstein reflects on his initial, overly optimistic view of decolonisation, which he saw as a short-term process, acknowledging that this was an ‘egregious error’ (Wallerstein 1971a, 169). This epilogue, titled ‘Looking at African Independence Ten Years Later’, offers valuable insight into Wallerstein’s intellectual growth from the early 1960s to the 1970s, indicating his shift towards a more Marxist perspective during this time. Here, he critically reassesses his book, highlighting three main areas of self-critique.
The first is his underestimation of class conflict and ‘rural discontent’, about which he later observed, ‘It seems clear to me now… that the colonial order was very disorderly indeed’ (Wallerstein 1971a, 170–171). Curiously, Wallerstein’s revised view displays certain parallels with the changes in Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s thinking after his overthrow by a CIA-backed military coup d’état in 1966 (Blum [1986] 2014, 198–200). Nkrumah’s initial vision of pan-African socialism mostly emphasised the hostility of foreign imperialist forces, seeing African societies as being largely harmonious internally, free from European-style class conflicts due to their unique ‘spirit of communalism’ (Nkrumah [1964] 1970, 74). However, in his 1970 book Class Struggle in Africa, Nkrumah changed his stance, acknowledging the significance of class antagonisms within Africa and focusing on the African bourgeoisie’s role in neocolonialism (Nkrumah [1970] 1972).10 Walter Rodney pointedly noted this shift, stating, ‘it was only after his overthrow by a reactionary petty bourgeois coup d’état that Nkrumah became convinced that there was a class struggle in Africa’ (Rodney 1975).
Wallerstein’s second self-criticism concerned his neglect of the political compromises between the metropolitan powers and the nationalist leadership during decolonisation, which he noted were often to the detriment of the lower classes (Wallerstein 1971a, 171). His third self-criticism addressed his depiction of the one-party system and national heroes within the African context. Rather than retracting his generally positive depiction of the one-party system, he reinforced it, arguing that it was ‘more viable and more beneficial’ than other existing alternatives (Wallerstein 1971a, 175).11 However, he acknowledged underemphasising the postcolonial state’s tendency to become a ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’, a concept he adopted from Fanon (Wallerstein 1971a, 172). While conceding that he had overestimated the enduring influence of ‘national heroes’, whose strength he now saw as ‘fragile and conjunctural’, he continued to express admiration for figures like Nkrumah (Wallerstein 1971a, 173). Despite Nkrumah’s continued exile at the time of his writing, Wallerstein still regarded him as a figure of ‘impressive acumen, foresight, and political courage’ (Wallerstein 1971a, 172).
The overarching theme of Wallerstein’s epilogue, highlighting the evolution of his thinking, centres on the significance of considering class struggle in social analysis. This is succinctly articulated in the concluding paragraph:
We talk of systems, of institutions, of influence. All these words exaggerate the articulation of the structures and do not sufficiently evoke the image of rumbling forces beneath the surface which are far more determinative of the present and the future than the things that are immediately apparent. (Wallerstein 1971a, 175)
Between his writing The Politics of Independence and its tenth anniversary epilogue, Wallerstein released another significant publication that would mark a transitional phase in his thinking, Africa, The Politics of Unity (1967). Acting as a conceptual successor to his initial publication, this work, despite not matching the popularity of his first, laid the groundwork for key themes and discussions that would feature prominently in his later writing. Shifting away from the more descriptive approach of his debut, The Politics of Unity leaned into deeper analysis and exhibited a distinct change in tone. Written in the aftermath of the suppression of more radical movements for African self-assertion and unity, following the intensification of opposition to decolonisation after the second Congo Crisis in 1965, Wallerstein’s perspective in this book was considerably less optimistic than his earlier writings.
In contrast to The Politics of Independence, The Politics of Unity exhibits a more profound understanding of the economic and class dynamics within Africa. In this work, Wallerstein shows a deeper recognition of how political movements are aligned with and cater to distinct economic strata, each with their own unique interests. He further invokes the concept of a ‘world system of exchange’ and references the ‘economic dependence of African economies’ (Wallerstein 1967a, 20–21).12 Additionally, he frequently uses the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, but in a context quite distinct from his later works. In this instance, he applies these terms to differentiate parts of political movements, defining the ‘core’ as the revolutionary faction and the ‘periphery’ as the more accommodating faction of a movement (Wallerstein 1967a, 19). Utilising this framework, Wallerstein reaches a sobering conclusion, stating: ‘For the revolutionary core of the African unity movement, the immediate future is rather dim’ (Wallerstein 1967a, 249–250).
Wallerstein’s heightened focus on economic factors in his analysis of Africa becomes particularly clear in the chapter titled ‘The Political Implications of Economic Analysis’. Here he somewhat cautiously introduces some key economic factors contributing to African underdevelopment. Wallerstein’s discussion suggests his awareness of dependency theory arguments, such as the ‘deteriorating terms of trade’ and ‘inequitable exchanges’ faced by African nations (Wallerstein 1967a, 130, 138). Although he refrains from openly endorsing dependency theory’s view on imperialism, he presents its arguments in a manner that suggests sympathy (Wallerstein 1967a, 131). Notably, he cites Raúl Prebisch, the founding Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), whom he would later credit as a significant influence on his world-systems analysis (Wallerstein 1967a, 148).
Wallerstein’s adherence to the modernisation paradigm, albeit diminished, is still noticeable in The Politics of Unity. For example, he refers to the African revolutionary movement as an essential part of ‘the modernisation of the world’ (Wallerstein 1967a, 22). This perspective is particularly prominent in the penultimate chapter, where he discusses modernisation as essential for African societies to attain parity with the developed world, suggesting that continental unity is a prerequisite for this goal. He does, however, cogently identify the contradictions of this process:
if the present world political and economic structure is disadvantageous to Africans and advantageous to others (say, collectively the Western developed nations or influential elements within them), it is natural that the former will work to change the structure and that the latter will oppose such attempts. (Wallerstein 1967a, 223)
In essence, at this stage, Wallerstein still seems to believe in the feasibility of equal development within the existing world-system. The primary question he poses is not how to achieve systemic change, but how to achieve modernisation in spite of the strong countervailing forces. Wallerstein also appears to tacitly accept the thesis of the early dependency theorists, that for underdeveloped societies to achieve true industrial advancement, they must do so in an autarchic manner, effectively ‘delinking’ from the world-economy (Wallerstein 1967a, 224). Thus, the remedy to dependent development becomes independent development – a stance he would later entirely reject.
In The Politics of Unity he also acknowledges the considerable influence of the Bolshevik revolution and Vladimir Lenin on the anticolonial movement, stating that ‘of the spokesmen for the European left, the one who came nearest to appreciating the problem as seen from the perspective of Africa (or of the Third World) was perhaps Lenin’ (Wallerstein 1967a, 16). He further describes the Russian Revolution of 1917 as a ‘rejection of orthodox Marxist strategy’ and highlights the particular significance of the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, where Lenin embraced the idea of ‘oppressed nations and oppressor nations’, thus paving the way for cooperation between the Communist movement and ‘nationalist-revolutionary’ movements (Wallerstein 1967a, 16–17). This partnership was clearly evident in parts of the African continent at the time of Wallerstein’s writing. Later, he would note that, to his understanding, Lenin’s Imperialism exerted a greater influence on the twentieth century than did Marx’s Manifesto (Wallerstein 1992, 519).
Wallerstein articulates a largely favourable view of the then-active, predominantly Marxist-led African liberation movements, including the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO), African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). He shows a clear admiration for Nkrumah, who emerges as the most frequently quoted figure in the book, consistently so in an approving or sympathetic manner. Elsewhere, Wallerstein would express specific interest in Nkrumah’s ‘particular’ view of the class struggle, which is conceptualised ‘in terms of a world-wide conflict’ (Wallerstein 1967b, 519–520). He observes that Nkrumah’s downfall in early 1966 marked the ‘effective end’ of the movement towards African unity (Wallerstein 1967a, 237).13
Following Nkrumah, Wallerstein held in high esteem another key personality in the African anti-colonial struggle: Amílcar Cabral, the Marxist theorist and guiding force behind the PAIGC in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Wallerstein’s great admiration for Cabral is particularly evident in his 1971 article, ‘The Lessons of the PAIGC’, where he argues that the PAIGC’s struggle in West Africa offers instructive insights relevant for most of the the world’s population (Wallerstein 1971b, 68). The article also tacitly endorses the Black Panther Party by drawing parallels between Cabral’s understanding of the revolutionary potential of déclassés and Huey P. Newton’s theorisation of the lumpenproletariat in the American context, portraying both as groups that have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’ (Wallerstein 1971b, 65–66). The concepts embraced by both Cabral and Newton find a resonance with Fanon’s thought, which identifies the lumpenproletariat as ‘one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people’ (Fanon [1961] 2004, 81).
Wallerstein’s choice to highlight certain elements of Cabral’s thought reveals much about his own political strategy. For instance, in the following excerpt where he quotes Cabral, his focus is evident:
But Cabral is not making one more ‘make-the-white-liberals-even-the-white-radicals-feel-guilty’ speech. The revolution cannot be built by Africans alone … The European ‘progressive democrats’ are thus called upon to work on all fronts: to ‘study the concrete conditions’ in Guinea and elsewhere for that is a ‘major contribution’, to work on their own mentalities, and to organize politically at home ‘to support the really revolutionary national liberation movements by all possible means’. (Wallerstein 1971b, 67)14
Wallerstein’s commitment to African liberation movements took an even more direct form when he co-edited the three-volume African Liberation Reader (1982) with Mozambican physicist and social scientist Aquino de Bragança. First published in Portuguese in 1974, coinciding with Portugal’s Carnation Revolution that ended the long-standing Estado Novo regime together with the country’s 470-year-old colonial rule, this compilation featured a diverse range of papers authored by African liberation organisations or their leaders. Focusing primarily on liberation movements in Portuguese colonies, a plurality of these writings were contributions from Cabral, who had been assassinated the year before (de Bragança and Wallerstein [1974] 1982).15
Wallerstein’s engagement with Africa was marked by the cultivation of numerous friendships and scholarly relationships, although many of them met with untimely and unfortunate fates. According to his daughter Katharine Wallerstein, it is speculated that around half the people who attended Immanuel’s 1964 wedding were at some future point assassinated (Martinez 2023). Among them were Rodney, whose life was tragically cut short by a car bomb in 1980, and de Bragança, who perished in the same plane crash that claimed the life of Mozambique’s president Samora Machel in 1986.16 In his heartfelt eulogy to de Bragança he would write:
Aquino de Bragança was my friend, my brother… Aquino came with no arrogance to his questioning, only with an ‘optimism of the will’… The day that Cabral was assassinated, we spoke. He cried to me: ‘They have killed our Amílcar.’… They have killed our Aquino. (Wallerstein 1986)
Another significant insight can be gleaned from this text. In his eulogy to de Bragança, Wallerstein also commends his ‘remarkable choice’ to create and direct a research institute shortly after FRELIMO’s triumph in the Mozambican War of Independence in 1975, rather than taking up a government post (Wallerstein 1986). The significance Wallerstein attributed to this phase of de Bragança’s life can be seen as a subtle allusion to his own decision to establish the Fernand Braudel Center the subsequent year, and to dedicate his primary focus to it. The following praise for de Bragança might therefore offer a potential glimpse into the conscious political motives behind the inception of the Fernand Braudel Center. It may also hint at the wider strategic rationale for Wallerstein’s scholarly trajectory:
If Aquino wanted to create a university center of research, it was not because he was in love with scholarship or archives. He certainly sought no ivory tower. If he made this choice, it was because he wanted to be more than a militant facing the enemy or a diplomat facing the interlocutor. He wanted to be a revolutionary, and he knew that revolutionaries face their comrades, struggling with them in the search for how really to transform the world… For him, the Centro could offer an analysis that would be honest and sober, and therefore revolutionary. (Wallerstein 1986)
Although Wallerstein’s academic interest in Africa initially revolved around the context of decolonisation, focusing on contemporary events and trends, he soon grew dissatisfied with this approach, as it required him to constantly keep up with current events, making him feel as though he was always chasing the latest headlines (Aguirre Rojas [2005] 2016, 13). In pursuit of a deeper and more expansive understanding, Wallerstein began to broaden his analytical scope, both spatially and temporally. This journey eventually led him to question and ultimately reject methodological nationalism. Later, he would refer to this phase of his scholarship as being ‘en route to world-systems analysis’ (Wallerstein 2000a, vii).
The influence of Fanon on Wallerstein became much more evident around this time. Wallerstein’s first published reference to Fanon dates to 1965. However, it was in his 1967 work, ‘Violence Versus Persuasion as Agents of Social Change’, that Fanon’s impact on his thinking was first clearly discernible (Wallerstein 1965, [1967] 1968).17 This text, originally written in French, delves into the historical and ideological dynamics of privilege, reform and revolution. Contrasting the roles of reformists, who advocate for change through persuasion and incremental improvement, with revolutionaries, who see force and solidarity among the oppressed as necessary for significant societal change, the work subtly suggests a preference for the latter group. Fittingly, this was Wallerstein’s last published scholarly work before the outbreak of the global uprisings of 1968.
The year of revolt
The student rebellions that came to define 1968 were catalysed by major demonstrations at Columbia University, which arose from a convergence of factors, including the university’s ties to Department of Defense research and its controversial expansion into Morningside Park, a key space for the neighbouring Harlem community. On 23 April, a significant protest erupted on campus, led by the university’s chapters of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Afro-American Society (SAS). This led to the occupation of five buildings, including Hamilton Hall, which was exclusively occupied by black students under the leadership of the SAS (Avorn et al. 1969, 135). These students, like their white counterparts, sought to sever the university’s ties with the Department of Defense amid the ongoing Vietnam war. However, their primary focus was Columbia’s proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park, which they saw as a tangible symbol of racial injustice and exploitation (Bradley 2009, 81). As the demonstrations evolved, prominent figures like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) joined the students in Hamilton Hall (Bradley 2009, 88). While the SDS’s actions received considerable attention in the United States, the protest by black students piqued international interest, notably from the Communist Party of China, which sent a congratulatory telegram from Chairman Mao (Brown 2018, 16).
Being a junior professor at Columbia University during the tumultuous events of that year, Wallerstein was more than a mere observer; he found himself actively involved at the heart of the upheavals. Shortly after the student occupations began, he joined the Ad Hoc Faculty Group (AHFG) as part of its steering committee – a group whose primary goal was to avert police intervention on the campus (Hurwitz 2018, 121). Wallerstein’s reputation as an Africanist had helped him establish a strong connection with Columbia’s black student community (Bradley 2009, 200). His previous leadership of the university’s Faculty Civil Rights Group also contributed to his credibility (Avorn et al. 1969, 74). Consequently, Wallerstein was designated as the sole liaison for Hamilton Hall (Bradley 2009, 91). From early on, his sympathy towards the SAS was evident; he believed they mirrored the broader views of Harlem residents concerning the proposed gymnasium in Morningside Park (Bradley 2009, 12).18
Following unsuccessful negotiation efforts, on 30 April, the university administration escalated the situation by summoning the New York City Police Department to forcefully remove protesters from the campus buildings. This intervention resulted in over 700 arrests and close to 150 protesters sustaining injuries (Avorn et al. 1969, 181). Despite these immediate outcomes, the protesters’ core objectives were ultimately achieved. Columbia halted and later abandoned construction of the gym and disengaged from the Institute for Defense Analyses before the end of that year.
During the following summer, escalating protests resulted in numerous student arrests and the dismissal of supportive faculty members. In response, the newly formed Radical Faculty Group, with Wallerstein as a participant, publicly condemned the administration’s severe actions and insincere conciliatory statements (Williams 2020, 59). They insisted on the removal of criminal charges against students and the reappointment of dismissed faculty members, highlighting the legitimate grievances of the protesting students.
In October 1968, reflecting on the situation at Columbia, Wallerstein noted:
These events forced me, as they did most persons caught up in them, to give more careful and concentrated consideration to questions that had long since been of concern but that were easier to leave in abeyance. (Wallerstein 1969, vii)
Wallerstein dedicated considerable time to analysing the significance of the Columbia revolt and similar occurrences at various campuses, leading to the publication of University in Turmoil in 1969 and his collaboration with Paul Starr, a Columbia undergraduate during the occupations, on the two-volume anthology The University Crisis Reader in 1971 (Wallerstein and Starr 1971).
In University in Turmoil, Wallerstein moved noticeably towards a more structural perspective, echoing the theories of Marxist contemporaries like Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, who famously described the school as ‘the dominant Ideological State Apparatus’ (Althusser [1969] 1971,157). Wallerstein’s opening statement somewhat reflects this view: ‘Societies create educational institutions in order that they may form and thus control their young’ (Wallerstein 1969, 3). He does, however, move beyond a purely functionalist view, positioning academic institutions as active participants in societal evolution, rather than passive enforcers of the status quo. Drawing on his experiences at Columbia and his evolving understanding of the centrality of class struggle, he observes: ‘the university has always been and will always be a terrain of conflict. The work of the university is not peace but combat – intellectual combat and, in one form or another, social combat’ (Wallerstein 1969, 8).19
Conclusion
In 1972, two years before the publication of his seminal work, The Modern World-System ([1974] 2011), Immanuel Wallerstein assumed the presidency of the ASA, a position he used as a platform to present his newly developed world-systems approach. It was during his presidential address to the ASA the following year that Wallerstein first publicly articulated his perspective, asserting that Africa can only be understood within the framework of the capitalist world-system (Wallerstein 1973, 10). His term as president, ending in 1973, alongside the publication of The Modern World-System in 1974, symbolised the conclusion of his career as an Africanist.
In the years that followed, Wallerstein occasionally revisited topics concerning Africa (see, for instance, Wallerstein 2017). However, his departure from methodological nationalism – abandoning the nation state as the primary unit of analysis – led him to situate his analyses consistently within the world-economy as a whole.
Wallerstein’s decade as an Africanist undoubtedly represented a period of great intellectual evolution for him. While his writings from the early 1960s were very much committed to the assumptions of modernisation theory, this commitment was starting to wane by the middle of the decade. His writings from the mid to late 1960s stand out as transitional in terms of his thinking, especially in relation to Marxism. As outlined, Wallerstein began engaging more deeply with Marxist scholarship and gradually adopted a more Marxist idiom during the 1960s. Yet, while his conceptual framework had taken on a distinctly Marxist orientation by decade’s end, his methodological assumptions largely remained anchored in his earlier paradigm. This is exemplified in his approach to imperialism in his 1967 book Africa, the Politics of Unity, which did not substantively differ from Mills’ perspective, as it was not yet grounded on the analysis of ‘capitalism as a system’, as the sociologist Oliver C. Cox termed it (Cox 1964). This work did, however, signal a newfound pessimism of the intellect; but it was the events of the following year that would begin to instil him with its dialectical counterpart – an optimism of the will.
Wallerstein clearly moved closer to Marxism around 1968, but the impact of 1968 itself should not be overstated. To use his own terminology, the period following 1968 was characterised by ‘a thousand Marxisms’, among which his world-systems analysis emerged as just one variant. On a theoretical level, Wallerstein acknowledged that 1968 decisively dispelled any belief he held in modernisation theory (Wallerstein and Lemert 2016, 104). On a political level, ever since 1968, Wallerstein was left with the conviction that there was no way for someone to be apolitical, as anyone claiming such a label would in practice be in support of the status quo (GUS 2016, 5:30). Consequently, one might be tempted to view 1968 as a fundamental turning point in Wallerstein’s intellectual evolution, establishing a clear demarcation between the young Wallerstein and the mature Wallerstein.
Although the events of that year pushed him closer to Marxism theoretically and politically, upon closer examination of his body of work, it becomes evident that this moment, although significant, did not represent a clear-cut division between the Wallerstein of before and after 1968. Rather, it seems to represent an important stage in the ongoing intellectual development that characterised Wallerstein’s work throughout the 1960s. As the preceding overview of his life and work indicates, while there are indeed substantive differences between his works before and after the conception of his world-systems analysis, it would be inaccurate to describe this transition as an epistemological break.20
Continuing on from an early fascination with the revolutionary ideas of Fanon, Wallerstein’s focus gradually shifted during the 1960s toward the role of historical development, economic structures and class conflicts within Africa. Although these themes were still in a nascent stage in his work from the late 1960s, they are readily evident in Africa, the Politics of Unity, published just a year before the Columbia University protests. But Wallerstein’s shift towards Marxism becomes most apparent in his 1971 epilogue to his first book, Africa, The Politics of Independence. Here, he presents three highly indicative criticisms of his initial work: neglecting intrastate class conflict and interstate class collusion and overestimating the role of ‘great men’. By the time this epilogue was written, Wallerstein was already at work on The Modern World-System.
From this point forward, Wallerstein was a Marxist. Influenced by his experiences in Africa and his engagement with various Third World intellectuals, Wallerstein progressively integrated Marxist ideas and concepts into his work during the 1960s. By the early 1970s, he had embraced Marx’s historical materialism as a methodological base, combining it with Fernand Braudel’s insights on historical analysis to develop a novel perspective on the history of capitalism. Over subsequent decades, he consistently deployed these methodological and conceptual tools to address three areas he saw as inadequately covered by traditional Marxist analysis: uneven development, systemic transitions and superstructural asynchrony – all of which had their genesis in his encounter with the conditions of the African continent.