Immanuel Wallerstein
understood this very well and offered the world-system concept as
a new approach in analyzing human development. In The Modern
World-System (1974), he offered a tool on how to recognize the
most useful interpretation of what happened historically. In his
interpretation, “units of analysis” are “world-systems,” which
mean something other than the modern nation-state, something
larger than the nation-state, and something that was defined
by the boundaries of an effective, ongoing division of labor