Andre Gunder Frank was a path-breaking scholar in several disciplines over an illustrious and contentious 50-year career. First amongst his many important works is the book ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, which sought to correct a Euro-centric world view of the development of the global political economy. Frank passed away in April 2005 while working on this new book, a sequel to ReORIENT. In this book Frank shows many of the myths of European industrialisation, hegemony and capitalism which have hidden the fact that Asia remained a serious power not just into the 18th century, as Frank himself argued in 1998, but well into the 19th century as well. When Frank passed away his colleagues rallied to finish this book and it is presented here as his final major statement.

Andre Gunder Frank was a path-breaking scholar in several disciplines over an illustrious and contentious 50-year career. Premier among his many important works is the book, "ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age," which sought to correct a Eurocentric worldview of the development of the global political economy. As Gunder Frank continued his research, he realized that many of the myths of European industrialization, hegemony, and capitalism hid the fact that Asia remained a serious power not just into the 18th century, as he argued in 1998, but well into the 19th century as well. Gunder Frank passed away in April 2005 while working on this new book, a sequel to "ReORIENT." His colleagues rallied to finish it and it is presented here as Andre Gunder Frank s final major statement. His prescience is remarkable today as we see the continuation of Asian influences and ascendancy."

In the quarter century since Wallerstein first developed world systems theory (WST), scholars in a variety of disciplines have adopted the approach to explain intersocietal interaction on a grand scale. These essays bring to light archaeological data and analysis to show that many historic and prehistoric states lacked the mechanisms to dominate the distant (and in some cases, nearby) societies with which they interacted. Core/periphery exploitation needs to be demonstrated, not simply assumed, as the interdisciplinary dialogue which occurs in this volume demonstrates. World-Systems Theory in Practice will appeal to individuals with an interest in the application of WST in both the Old World and the New World. The papers in this volume reflect the vitality of the debate concerning the use of such generalizing theories and will be of interest to archeologists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and those involved in the study of civilizations.

The historic long-term economic interconnections of the world are now universally accepted. The idea of the 'world system' advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period. But some academics think this date is much too late and denies a much longer interconnection going back as much as five thousand years.
Reframing the chronology of the world system exercises powerful influences on the writing of history. It integrates the areas of Asia and the East which were marginalized by Wallerstein into the heart of the debate and provides a much more convincing account of developments which cannot otherwise be explained. It undermines the primacy claimed for Europe as the major agent of economic change, an issue with implications far beyond the realm of history.

The historic long term economic interconnections of the world are now universally accepted. The idea of the economic "world system" advanced by Immanual Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period, but Andre Gunder Frank thinks that this date is much too late and denies the much longer run of interconnection going back as much as 5000 years. In "The World System", the authors argue through this issue, in a debate contributed to by William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others.

The conquerors wanted Indian labour, the crown Indian subjects, the friars Indian souls.' Thus the importance of the natives of Mexico to their Spanish conquerors has been described. In this book Andre Gunder Frank examines the dramatic impact of Spanish rule on Mexican society and agriculture, in terms of the demands of world capitalist development. Mr Frank traces the rapid transformation of the dominant institutions of Mexican labour organization which occurred after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521: from a form of slavery, which lasted until 1533, through various forms of forced labour (the encomienda and the catequil or mica), to the establishment, after 1575, of the hacienda, with large-scale latifundia lands worked by serf-like ganan labour.

Why, while Europe, North America, and Australia have developed, have Africa, much of Asia, and Latin America remained underdeveloped? Andre Gunder Frank sets out to answer this basic question by showing how world capital accumulation has led to the differentiation of these regions within the single world-embracing economic system. Unequal exchange between regions, combined with the differential transformation of productive, social, and political relations within regions, has led to the capitalist development of some areas and to the underdevelopment of others.

Most of Andre Gunder Frank's early work on the nature of underdevelopment focused on one continent: Latin America. Here he broadened his canvas and traced the world-wide effects of the process of capital accumulation from the period just prior to the discovery of America to the industrial and French revolutions. It is Frank's thesis that "the world has experienced a single all-embracing, albeit unequal and uneven, process of capital accumulation centered in Western Europe," which has been capitalist for at least two centuries.

In his second book, Andre Gunder Frank expands on the theme presented in his influential study Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. It is the colonial structure of world capitalism, in his view, which produced and maintains the underdevelopment characteristic of Latin America and the rest of the Third World. This colonial structure penetrates everywhere in Latin America, forming and transforming all its features in obedience to its own imperatives and thereby imposing upon the region those characteristic features of poverty and backwardness which are not primarily the remnants of an ancient "feudal" past but the direct products of capitalism. This development of underdevelopment will persist, Frank argues, until the people of Latin America free themselves from world capitalism by means of revolution.

The four essays in this book offer a sweeping reinterpretation of Latin American history as an aspect of the world-wide spread of capitalism in its commercial and industrial phases. Dr. Frank lays to rest the myth of Latin American feudalism, demonstrating in the process the impossibility of a bourgeois revolution in a part of the world which is already part and parcel of the capitalist system.

Andre Gunder Frank asks us to re-orient our views away from Eurocentrism - to see the rise of the West as a mere blip in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world. In a bold challenge to received historiography and social theory he turns on its head the world according to Marx, Weber, and other theorists, including Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel, and Wallerstein. Frank explains the Rise of the West in world economic and demographic terms that relate it in a single historical sweep to the decline of the East around 1800. European states, he says, used the silver extracted from the American colonies to buy entry into an expanding Asian market that already flourished in the global economy. Resorting to import substitution and export promotion in the world market, they became Newly Industrializing Economies and tipped the global economic balance to the West. That is precisely what East Asia is doing today, Frank points out, to recover its traditional dominance. As a result, the 'center' of the world economy is once again moving to the 'Middle Kingdom' of China. Anyone interested in Asia, in world systems and world economic and social history, in international relations, and in comparative area studies, will have to take into account Frank's exciting reassessment of our global economic past and future.