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11
RETHINKING CORE AND
PERIPHERY IN HISTORICAL
CAPITALISM
‘World-Magnates’ and the Shifting
Centers of Wealth Accumulation
Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz
and Corey R. Payne
Rather than empirically investigating the processes underlying the differentiation
of core, semiperipheral, and peripheral zones of the world-economy (and their
transformations over time), there has been a pervasive tendency within the world-
systems perspective to portray these zones – and the activities that define them –
as historically static and territorially fixed. As a result, “core” and “periphery” are
often assumed to always have entailed the same kinds of processes, activities, and/
or spaces throughout the longue durée of historical capitalism (such that the pro-
duction of industrial goods equates with “core” and that of raw materials with
“periphery,” or that core-like activities always involve “freer” labor than the more
coercive systems of the periphery).
In this chapter, we use preliminary results from a dataset on shifting epicenters1
of wealth accumulation to highlight and challenge some persistent assumptions
and ambiguities in the use of core, semiperiphery, and periphery as world-system
categories. In the longue durée of historical capitalism, we argue, core and periph-
eral activities only gradually came to be as spatially bounded or entrenched in
nations as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead,
throughout this longue durée, there has been a constant process of spatial differen-
tiation, a manifestation of the uneven ability of relevant actors (e.g., workers, cap-
italists, rulers) to protect and enhance their relative command over resources and
well-being. Such spatial reconfigurations are not generally acknowledged in the
relevant literature, hence the main argument of this contribution: the processes,
activities, and spaces of differentiation in the world-system have always been in
flux, and thereby should be established through empirical research rather than
reifying categorical assumptions.
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156 Korzeniewicz and Payne
What Has World-Systems Analysis Meant
by “Core” and “Periphery”?
In the 1970s, world-systems scholars critically engaged both modernization and
dependency theories by respectively arguing that the world-economy featured a
growing gap between those at the top (core) and at the bottom (periphery) of a
world division of labor and a stable third cluster (the semiperiphery) permanently
situated between core and periphery (Wallerstein 1974b, 1979; Hopkins and
Wallerstein 1977; Chase-Dunn and Rubinson 1977). But there has been an ana-
lytical bifurcation in the exploration of the attendant concepts. At times, authors
have emphasized that each cluster of countries in this tripartite structure results
from the mix of changing economic activities contained within territorial bound-
aries. Along these lines, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein argued that through
various mechanisms, some economic activities (core-like) produced compara-
tively high profits and thereby derived the greater share of the wealth generated
by the world division of labor. Other economic activities (peripheral) featured
low-profits and derived the least benefits from the world division of labor. Semi-
peripheral areas are characterized by a more or less even mix of core and periph-
eral activities. Such a depiction, emphasizing world-historical specificities, tends to
emphasize change over time in the economic activities providing access to greater
or lesser shares of wealth (e.g., textile manufacturing had been a “core” activity at
one point in time but eventually became “peripheralized”), in the geographical
location of these activities (e.g., countries and areas may “move” between zones),
and in the specific mechanisms producing unequal distributional outcomes (e.g.,
colonialism may have played a role at one point in time, but eventually became
less relevant).2
But alongside this understanding of core, semiperiphery, and periphery as
involving ever-changing and connected processes of production and accumula-
tion, there has been a parallel tendency to use these categories as entailing three
persistent attributes. First, the zones contain national states that over time became
permanently specialized in the production of either raw materials (periphery) or
more sophisticated manufactures (core). Second, labor forces are relatively free/
better-paid in the core and coerced/poorly-paid in the periphery. Third, states are
strong in the core and weak in the periphery. This approach tends to assume tele-
ological continuities in the spatial location of the “core” and “periphery” – with
the imperial centers of the early capitalist world-economy evolving into wealthy,
strong national states, and colonial outposts becoming weak, poor national states.
Moreover, certain production processes (e.g., sixteenth century Dutch textile pro-
duction) are classified as core because they are located within what evidently
appear to be wealthy/powerful areas (e.g., the Netherlands as an imperial power);
while other production processes (e.g., twentieth-century Polish textile produc-
tion) are classified as peripheral because they take place in countries that seem to
be poor and not very powerful (e.g., Poland).
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Rethinking Core and Periphery 157
While this “categorical” approach nominally endorses the idea that core and
peripheral refer to processes and activities rather than fixed spaces or states, it
tends to portray the attributes of core, semiperipheral, and peripheral zones as
constant through time: there is always an exploitative relationship between core
and periphery that is manifested simultaneously by spatial location and economic
specialization, forms of labor control, and state power differentials. Besides its nor-
mative appeal, this “categorical” approach has been compelling because it helps
simplify research tasks. It lends itself to the classification of “cases” into the relevant
categories by drawing on easily available indicators (for example, share of agricul-
ture in GNP or exports becomes an easily available proxy for peripheral status).3
Yet, building from Terence K. Hopkins, one must view such classifications as
constituting a very preliminary step in the research process. Categorical methods
should “serve, not to govern the structure of design as it [conventionally] does,
but instead, in preliminary work, to help isolate subjects for detailed inquiry or, in
summarizing work, to help collate the result of several detailed inquires” (Hopkins,
1982a, 32). Moreover,
[p]ut sharply, the cases necessary for the statistical [categorical] portion
of inquiry must be presumed essentially homogenous (members of a
sample of a universe); the instances necessary for the historical portion
must be presumed essentially heterogenous (members respectively of
universes of one).
(Hopkins, 1982a, 43)
In fact, this is similar to Abbott’s (1991, 2001) various contributions suggesting
that narrative accounts are better suited than quantitative causal models to map
the singularities of social change, and to Baronov’s (2018) more recent distinction
between “analytical” (what we term categorical) and “holistic” (what we term
world-historical) approaches.
Using a “world-historical” approach, with its greater emphasis on global, rela-
tional processes, is more difficult: for example, no activity can be presumed to be
core-like or peripheral universally across time. It is highly problematic to a priori or
retrospectively assume which economic activities and spaces have been “core”
or “peripheral” – from a more world-historical perspective, whether activities
are core or peripheral (i.e., the profits they yield), is contingent upon constantly
changing forces of production and competition (Arrighi 1990; Arrighi and
Drangel 1986; Karatasli 2017).4 This is why Giovanni Arrighi (1999, 125) indicates
that world-system analysts
must be prepared to unthink what many … have come to regard as the
quintessence of world-systems theory. This is the idea that, in spite of
their extraordinary geographical expansion, the structures of the world
capitalist system have remained more or less the same ever since they first
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158 Korzeniewicz and Payne
came into existence in the ‘long’ sixteenth century … [This] hypothesis
does not stand up to historico-empirical scrutiny, and even worse, it
prevents us from getting at the heart of the capitalist dynamics, both past
and present.
Arrighi and Drangel (1986) attempted to overcome this limitation by operation-
alizing not economic activities themselves, but the relative yield of those activities.
Because core-like activities yield greater profits than peripheral activities,
residents of the [core] must command a large share of the total surplus
produced in the world-economy while residents of the [periphery] must
command little or no such surplus. […] [T]his difference must be
reflected in a […] differential between the per capita GNP of residents
in the two types of states.
(Arrighi, 1985, 244)
Arrighi and Drangel (1986) found that this was, in fact, the case: for the
mid-twentieth century, nation-states clustered into three income zones, corre-
sponding to the core, periphery, and semiperiphery. In fact, Karatasli (2017) has
found that this structure is far more subject to change than originally assumed.
He has identified transformations in the world-wealth hierarchy that correspond
with crises of the capitalist system – crises that yield a transformation in the forces
of production and a subsequent rearrangement of not only core and peripheral
locales, but also core and peripheral activities (see also Karatasli and Kumral, 2018).
These transformations guide our argument: core and peripheral activities are
constantly transforming and rearranging in a process of Schumpeterian “Cre-
ative Destruction.” Of course, the research task of identifying core and peripheral
activities in the global longue durée is challenging, because it requires taking into
consideration the interrelationship between myriad commodity chains over time.
Following the logic of Arrighi and Drangel (1986), however, we seek to uncover
core-like activities and spaces – and their transformations – by identifying the
shifting epicenters of wealth accumulation in the world-economy over time. Our
data, as we argue in more detail below, allow for productive insights into these
research questions by moving the unit of observation away from the nation-state
and to what we call world-magnates – a shift that yields a more productive assess-
ment of the processes of the world-system as unit of analysis.
How Can World-Magnates Help Us Better Identify
“Core” and “Peripheral” Activities?
This intervention is part of a larger project that uses what we call world-magnates –
the historical equivalents of today’s billionaires – as an indicator of epicenters of
wealth accumulation (Albrecht and Korzeniewicz 2017; Korzeniewicz and Payne 2018).
Mielants, E., & Bardos, K. S. (Eds.). (2020). Economic cycles and social movements : Past, present and future. ProQuest Ebook
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Rethinking Core and Periphery 159
This project has identified and collected information on the wealthiest individu-
als in the world – those operating in Fernand Braudel’s (1984) “top layer” of the
world-economy. Owing to the extraordinary wealth of these individuals, they left
behind an imprint in the historical record that is accessible through appropriate
bibliographical and data searches.5 From these searches, we have currently com-
piled data on approximately 700 world-magnates operating between 1500 and
1930. This is not an encompassing and definitive list of world-magnates – nor is it
intended to be. Just as maps of the physical universe are always incomplete, so too
are maps of historical capitalism.6
How does such a dataset assist us in identifying core and peripheral activities?
In the most obvious way, uncovering these magnates offers insight because these
individuals are the primary beneficiaries of the creation of new centers of wealth
accumulation. In the Schumpeterian sense, these magnates represent the cutting
edge of “creation,” providing “early warning of new fortunes into the evolu-
tion of industries and markets” (Potts, 2006, 348). In the world-systems sense, the
economic activities that are generating the wealth of world-magnates can serve
as an operationalization of core-like activities. By tracing the rise and fall of the
wealth-generating economic activities of these individuals, we are also able to
identify how the most profitable enterprises are clustered temporally, spatially and
in specific production, trade, and investment networks. Such an operationalization
builds from Arrighi (1985), Arrighi and Drangel (1986), and Karatasli (2017) in
that it utilizes the economic impacts of core-like activities to map world-systemic
processes.
Proceeding in this way, our data allow us to overcome a priori assumptions
about time, space, and activities (e.g. that manufacturing is more profitable than
raw materials production or that production for domestic consumption is more
core-like than production for export). Rather than assuming either the spatial-
temporal location or the type of activities involved in the most profitable eco-
nomic centers, our data allow us to proceed in the opposite direction, using
world-magnates to identify major shifts in the centers of wealth accumulation – in
both the specific activities involved, and in their spatial and temporal clustering.
Thus, for each world-magnate in our dataset, we identify the primary source(s)
of their wealth. By aggregating these sources, we create a timeline of the activ-
ities which generated the wealth of magnates. For any given historical period,
we can thus take a snapshot of the most profitable (core-like) activities in the
world-economy. Moreover, in a longue durée perspective, we can identify the “cre-
ation” and “destruction” of the profitability and innovativeness of each of these
activities. In essence, we can trace the rise and fall of the economic activities at the
‘core of the core’ over time: Figure 11.1 shows this timeline from the turn of the
sixteenth century through 1800.7
Among the earliest activities in the dataset are well-known examples: banking,
aristocratic landholding, shipping, and precious metals. But also present among
the earliest activities are the production of sugar and the slave trade – activities
Mielants, E., & Bardos, K. S. (Eds.). (2020). Economic cycles and social movements : Past, present and future. ProQuest Ebook
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160 Korzeniewicz and Payne
FIGURE 11.1 Stylized timeline of wealth-generating activities of world-magnates, 1500–1800.
Source: World-Magnates Database (2019).
Mielants, E., & Bardos, K. S. (Eds.). (2020). Economic cycles and social movements : Past, present and future. ProQuest Ebook
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Rethinking Core and Periphery 161
not classically understood to be “core-like.” Our data show that, as early as the
sixteenth, but particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sugar
increasingly grounds both financial and material wealth accumulation. The ear-
liest merchants and financiers in the mid-to-late 1500s invested liquid capital
in sugar (and other colonial) trade at a time when many riches were invested
in illiquid landholdings. Then, in the mid-1600s, we start to see magnates who
are invested not in the trade of sugar, but sugar production itself – owners and
operators of sugar plantations in the New World. These world-magnates become
prominent in the dataset through the mid-1700s.
This dataset allows us to identify not only the broad trends, but the spe-
cific world-magnates engaged in these activities. Let us provide some examples.
World-magnates in our database include Bartolomeo Marchionni (1449–1523),
a Florentine banker and merchant who operated primarily from Portugal; he
eventually became known as the “richest banker in Lisbon,” but got his start as
the chief merchant in sugar from the Madeira Islands. Juan de Herrera y Santo
Domingo (1510–1585) had lowly beginnings as a floor sweeper for a minor
Andalucian merchant, but by the 1540s began to engage in the trade of cloth,
sugar, musk, and steel, largely from the Indies. Later in the century, the Rodriguez
d’Evora family, of Jewish-Portuguese origins, established themselves as powerful
merchant-bankers in Antwerp.
Our database shows, by the mid-1600s, the emergence of world-magnates
engaged in plantation ownership and direct exploitation of enslaved labor. James
Drax (1615–1662) is one example. Drax was an English colonizer in Barbados
who owned a substantial portion of the land on the island. William Beckford
(1709–1770) was similarly engaged in plantation ownership, though was based
primarily in England. He was mayor of London twice, but his wealth came
nearly exclusively from the ownership of numerous sugar plantations (worked by
enslaved Africans) in Jamaica. Simon Taylor (1739–1813) also earned his wealth
from ownership of sugar plantations in Jamaica, where he was based. Taylor was
born in Kingston and purchased his first sugar plantations on the island following
the death of his father in 1739. Upon his death in 1813, he owned over 2000
enslaved Africans and was considered one of the wealthiest men in the British
Empire. Henry Hope (1735–1811) established a strong mercantile family and
became a major financier of the Dutch East India Company, profiting especially
from trade with Brazil in diamonds and sugar. John Parish (1742–1829) was a
Scottish merchant operating out of England who was mostly involved in the
grain trade but later expanded into tobacco, coffee, and sugar trans-Atlantic trade
between the West Indies, the United States, and England (though he suffered
greatly during the stock collapse of 1793). William Jardine (1784–1843) similarly
was a Scottish merchant who eventually was considered one of the richest men in
Britain, specializing in opium, spices, and sugar trade from the Philippines.
Since the magnates engaged in these activities were reaping extraordinary
profits, our data leads us to determine that sugar production and the slave trade
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162 Korzeniewicz and Payne
in the 1600s and 1700s can be considered core-like activities. But our research
procedures allow us to go beyond simply labelling these activities or assuming
the reasons why they yielded extraordinary riches – they provide a path for more
precisely identifying which were the characteristics and transformations of these
activities that produced core-like profitability in a particular space-times. For
example, observing that there was near-constant technological, political, and
market-based innovation throughout sugar production’s centuries-long run as a
core-like activity.8 These included shifts between protectionist strategies and free
market strategies, transformations in the labor process from field production to
the eventual refinery of sugar, the opening up of new markets, and the modifi-
cation of strategies of colonial expansion over time – innovations which allowed
slave-based sugar production to be characterized by “virtually uninterrupted eco-
nomic success for more than 200 years” (Fogel, 1989, 10).
Classic accounts often overlook sugar and slavery as centers of core-like wealth
accumulation because of contemporary assumptions about these activities and
their locations. Using these data as our guide, we can begin to understand the
spatial unevenness and fluidity of wealth-generating activities. While the greatest
rewards were overwhelmingly going to Europeans involved in sugar production
and trade, the majority of the production itself was undertaken in the colonial
world and by a hyper-exploited coerced labor force. In short, for much of the
period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, a coercive form of labor
exploitation (slavery) was in fact the defining characteristic of some of the most
innovative and profitable (core-like) areas of production at the time. This finding
would seem to corroborate Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974b) long-standing asser-
tion that the historical development of capitalism entailed not only the prevalence
of wage-labor in some places, but the expansion of coercive labor exploitation
(such as slavery or serfdom) in much of the world.
Our method thus allows us to identify activities and locales in the world
commodity map that may otherwise have been overlooked. For example, in the
mid-nineteenth century, the identification of factory manufacturing of textiles and
capital goods in Western Europe is complemented by the identification of the cot-
ton trade in Baghdad, cattle ranching in Mexico and Argentina, and the production
of tea and rubber in China and Brazil. In this way, the data allow a productive per-
spective for identifying which activities are “creating” wealth for world-magnates
and, combined with historical analysis, can also shed some light on the activities and
modes of organization that became less profitable over time (such as the disappear-
ance of aristocratic landholding and titles by the early eighteenth century).
Where does the identification of these activities leave us in terms of under-
standing the “who” and “where” of the core? By investigating the linkages formed
by each core-like economic activity, we can uncover who is benefitting from
these core-like activities (beyond the magnates in our data) and where (in terms
of both geographical location and politico-territorial entities) the rewards are
being reaped.
Mielants, E., & Bardos, K. S. (Eds.). (2020). Economic cycles and social movements : Past, present and future. ProQuest Ebook
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Rethinking Core and Periphery 163
The Limits of the Nation-State as Datum
Our data suggest that the nation-state only became the most salient ‘container’
for capitalist accumulation in the late nineteenth century. Prior to the advent of
the modern nation-state, international networks of trade and colonial empires
were the “containers” in which core-like activities emerged and operated. Such
a process began in the sixteenth century with merchant networks and bankers
but reached its high point during the early nineteenth century British “free trade
imperialism” (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Arrighi 1994).
The discussion of sugar and slavery above offers an example of the early net-
works in which core-like activities were contained. While the financiers and mer-
chants were often based in European capitalist enclaves, such as Portugal and
the Italian city-states, the production of sugar in colonial territories yielded high
profits to plantation owners, refiners, and merchants based in the supposedly
‘peripheral’ areas. Thus, the early capitalist organizations that mattered most for
the development and operation of profit-making activities were networks of trade
organized specifically around such activities. This organization would soon be
replaced by a more concrete political entity – empire – and its free-trade variety.
The free-trade imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
established the principle that the laws operating within and between
states were subject to the higher authority of a new, metaphysical
entity – a world market ruled by its own ‘laws’ – allegedly endowed with
supernatural powers greater than anything pope and emperor had ever
mastered in the medieval system of rule.
(Arrighi, 1994, 56)
The most profitable activities were not contained within the boundaries of
European states but involved strong “links of complementarity with the econo-
mies of colonial and foreign countries” (Arrighi, 1994, 281).
It was only with the disintegration of the British-led world-economic order
that nation-states emerged as the primary container of capitalist accumulation
(Arrighi, 1994; cf. Tilly, 1992 [1990]). As national self-determination became the
watchword of a new world order, the importance of “national development” –
and thus, of nation-state position in the world-economy – became paramount
(Arrighi, 1990). Core-like activities were now, perhaps for the first time, becom-
ing confined within national territorial boundaries. By the collapse of British
hegemony in the early-mid-twentieth century, international empires were no
longer the most salient political “container.”
Such an historical trajectory is evident in our data on world-magnates. If we
were to map the networks on which world-magnates were enmeshed circa 1550,
we would find that there were relatively few centers concentrated in Europe, most
often as part of the commercial and political linkages being established across
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164 Korzeniewicz and Payne
FIGURE 11.2 Stylized representation of key networks of world-magnates.
Source: World-Magnates Database (2019).
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Rethinking Core and Periphery 165
continents by European colonial expansion. In this period, merchant capital and
the sale of sugar, enslaved Africans, and spices constituted core-like economic
activities – with linkages flowing through urban centers. By the early nineteenth
century, our map would show a massive expansion in both the number of centers
as well as the amount of trans-national linkages – with centers of wealth accu-
mulation involving manufactures (e.g., textiles, steel and armaments) but also raw
materials (e.g., tobacco, opium, cotton, tea). Over the nineteenth century, and
most clearly by the mid-twentieth century, on the other hand, our hypothetical
map would show a dramatic change: while the centers of wealth accumulation
would remain wider-spread across the globe, the global linkages between these
centers underwent a most significant decline. Over this latter period, the amor-
phous and porous “containers” of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries
become replaced by the more bounded “container” of the nation-state.
At its peak, during the height of British world-hegemony, global linkages meant
core-like activities were not as bounded geographically by what would become
twentieth century national territories. As nation-states emerged and became domi-
nant (fairly gradually, then more precipitously during and after the nineteenth cen-
tury), a starker differentiation occurred between core and peripheral areas than had
existed before. This process is presented in Figure 11.2, a stylized representation of
the rise of the nation-state as a container of economic activities.
By the twentieth century, this process reached an apex under US hegemony.
The United States rose with a combination of raw-materials production and
manufacturing production driving economic expansion. This became a model for
national development, where an integrated economic system could thrive within
the boundaries of individual nation-state. In this sense, the rise of the nation-state
as a container of economic activities was solidified through (and itself solidified)
US hegemony in the mid-twentieth century.
This argument alters a narrative that would privilege continuities in the differ-
entiation between the core and periphery over the development of the modern
world-system – a continuity held to have evolved from simpler to complex, but
nonetheless with few changes since the early emergence of historical capitalism.
Instead, we offer an alternative mapping of the changing political constellations
that have sought to contain economic activities – international networks, city-
states, empires, and nation-states. The evolution of these constellations reflects
not a linear trajectory of modernization, but rather a dialectical transformation
in political innovation that only occasionally has matched the fluidity of capital
accumulation in the longue durée.
Conclusion
Thus, our data on world-magnates privileges a methodology to the study of core
and periphery that avoids the “categorical” assumptions of many recent studies
and is closer to the “world-historical” theoretical orientation undergirding the
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166 Korzeniewicz and Payne
best of a world-systems approach. Such a perspective, we think, offers a productive
pathway for addressing long-standing questions about processes and categories
in the modern world-system – most directly, the changing character of inequal-
ity on a global scale. Our data suggest that, in the first centuries of the capital-
ist world-system, core and peripheral activities were not as clearly bounded or
entrenched geographically as they would become in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Instead, there was a gradual process of differentiation, resulting from the
uneven ability of relevant actors to protect and enhance their relative command
over resources and well-being. Our data also suggest that such activities can be
mapped spatially and temporally by identifying the distributional outcome of those
activities – for our purposes here, in the form of the world-magnates reaping
the rewards. By using these activities as a starting point to uncover the social and
political arrangements used to foster wealth accumulation in given spaces and
times – instead of using such arrangements to identify the activities – we may
overcome the limits of many assumptions currently entrenched in world-systems
scholarship and gain a better understanding of the capitalist world-economy, past
and present.
Notes
1. In geological terms, the “center” of an earthquake is beneath the surface of the Earth,
while the “epicenter” is the point closest to the center on the surface of the Earth. We
approach these world-magnates in a similar way. The actual centers of accumulation in
historical capitalism – the labor and capital that produce, extract, circulate, and so forth – are
often obscured, requiring digging to uncover. On the other hand, the world-magnates
who reaped the greatest rewards from these activities sit clearly atop these centers, a
useful indicator that something incredibly profitable is happening directly below. Thus,
these world-magnates are epicenters of wealth accumulation, in that they indicate the
need to uncover the true centers propelling them to extraordinary riches.
2. Thus, Wallerstein (1979, 71) notes: “[i]f in the sixteenth century, peripheral Poland
traded its wheat for core Holland’s textiles, in the mid-twentieth-century world,
peripheral countries are often textile producers whereas core countries export wheat
as well as electronic equipment.”
3. From such points of view, the entrenched tendency to portray core and peripheral areas
as national territories is understandable. The exercise of classifying nations as core, semi-
periphery, or periphery based on a country’s mix of core-like and peripheral activities
might in itself hold value – particularly for those interested in questions of state power
in the world-system. Moreover, even when scholars are aware of the importance of
moving towards more world-historical research strategies, they have to contend with
many methodological difficulties, including a lack of appropriate data. This might jus-
tify a reliance on more conventional indicators and classificatory schemes as unavoid-
able.
4. Of course, Marx (1867) and Schumpeter (1942) themselves emphasize that a defining
characteristic of historical capitalism has been the continuous transformation of prod-
ucts and production techniques.
5. Such an effort has become feasible only recently: a project such as this would have
required an extraordinary number of research hours even a decade ago, as collecting
the relevant data requires detailed surveys of a vast field of secondary and primary
Mielants, E., & Bardos, K. S. (Eds.). (2020). Economic cycles and social movements : Past, present and future. ProQuest Ebook
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Rethinking Core and Periphery 167
literatures in multiple languages. New technologies, however, have simplified many
of the tasks at hand. Research engines now allow us to individually review extensive
bibliographies (in English and other languages) in a shorter timeframe. For more infor-
mation on our data and collection procedures, see our online appendices available at:
www.world-magnatesdatabase.com.
6. While we eventually aim to capture as many world-magnates as possible, these prelimi-
nary findings provide a useful (if incomplete) sketch – a sketch that must be subject to
verification, expansion, and greater detail by ourselves and other scholars.
7. This method does not presume to capture all core-like activities, only the most profit-
able of those activities (“the core of the core”).
8. Schumpeter (1942) purposefully did not restrict his notion of innovation to tech-
nological change or manufacturing. He emphasized that centers of wealth shifted
constantly and are not associated with any single particular array of products, market
networks or institutional arrangements. New forms of raw material production, the
capacity to engage in innovative forms of deploying territorial or political power, or
even rent-seeking behaviors, are just as likely to be a source of creation and destruction
as any other innovation labeled by some as more “productive.”
Mielants, E., & Bardos, K. S. (Eds.). (2020). Economic cycles and social movements : Past, present and future. ProQuest Ebook
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