Asia and the Transformation of the World-System (Political Economy of the World-System Annuals)

In this collaboratively authored book scholars engage with middle-run structures and trends through which Asia is transforming the capitalist world-system into a multipolar world order. The authors explain Asian centrality in the new millennium through the sustained concentration of world-scale processes of capital accumulation in the region during and after the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century. Asian centrality is related both to the rise of China as well as the remarkable resilience of the region in the aftermath of devastating financial crises. These crises have intensified imperatives for greater intraregional integration and collaboration. The re-emergence of Asia as the workshop of the world-system has far-reaching implications for the end of the last thirty years of financial globalization which punctuated the demise of the U.S.-dominated Cold War world order. If a new Asian world order appears to be emerging, the interregnum remains saturated with morbid symptoms and contradictory signals. Divisions between the strong Asian nation-states continue despite the geopolitical salience of Northeast Asia and a resurgent Eurasianism. Robust growth and accumulation in China contain contradictory sociocultural implications for global North-South divides and for the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre. Proliferating class struggles suggest a need for revisiting the question of unit of analysis and grappling with ecological, class, and gender implications of the centrality of semiproletarian households in the world-scale expanded reproduction spearheaded by the region.