The seventeenth century has long been described as a crisis, a depression, or a slide back into feudalism. Wallerstein accepts the price and production evidence for a long contraction and disputes what has been made of it, holding that a downturn phase leaves a capitalist world-economy capitalist. Sifting the debate among Hobsbawm, Mousnier, Abel, Slicher van Bath and Chaunu over whether the word crisis means anything, he reads 1600 to 1750 as the phase in which the system consolidated. The volume's other contribution is hegemony, which he defines narrowly: a state significantly stronger than the other strong states, able to impose its rules on the interstate system, a condition the Dutch held only from 1648 to the 1660s before England and France began a long contest for the succession. Chapters on peripheries and semiperipheries examine how slow growth reshuffled positions, with Venice eating stored capital while Amsterdam reaped unequal exchange.