World Accumulation 1492-1789

World Accumulation 1492–1789 offers a sweeping reinterpretation of early modern history through the lens of global capitalism. Andre Gunder Frank traces how capital was built up across continents over three centuries, arguing that from the “discovery” of the Americas onward, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World were bound into a single, unevenly structured system.

Frank moves chronologically from the sixteenth‑century expansion—silver mining in Mexico and Peru, sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean, and new trade routes around Africa and across the Atlantic—through the seventeenth‑century crisis, the rise and decline of Iberian power, the brief commercial supremacy of Holland, and the emergence of England as a manufacturing and naval leader. He shows how shifts in trade, war, and state policy redistributed the “center” of accumulation from Italy to Spain and Portugal, then to Holland, Britain, and eventually North America.

A distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the “peripheries”: the transformation of indigenous societies in the Americas, the rise of plantation slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, the changing role of India in British imperial strategy, and the limited but growing integration of parts of Asia and Africa into a world economy centered in Western Europe. Frank insists that so‑called “underdevelopment” is not a prior condition but a historical outcome of this global process.

This book will appeal to readers interested in world‑systems analysis, critical development studies, Marxist and dependency theory, global economic history, and colonial and imperial history. It is particularly valuable for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in history, sociology, political economy, and Latin American, African, and Asian studies who want a long‑range, internationally connected account of how capitalism took shape before the Industrial Revolution.