In this volume, complementary to Immanuel Wallerstein's "The Modern World-System", the author addresses theoretical questions raised in the analysis of the capitalist world-economy and reviews recent research which bears on these questions. He formulates a structuralist approach, reframing Marx's theory of capitalist accumulation to incorporate the processes of class formation and state building. The author also reviews recent literature about states and capitalism as well as the core/periphery relationship. The book includes a discussion of methodological difficulties encountered in the empirical study of world-system processes. It is an effort to take the world-system perspective beyond historical interpretation to an explicitly structuralist theorization which can be evaluated by comparative research.