Wallerstein takes the century usually credited with inventing the modern world and demotes it. Britain's industrial revolution and France's bourgeois revolution, he argues, were episodes inside a capitalist world-economy already established during the long sixteenth century, and treating them as the origin makes the interstate system and core-periphery exchange vanish from the account. The opening chapter works through the historiography of sudden change, from Toynbee to Hobsbawm and Landes, to show how much rests on the word revolution. What the volume does credit to the years between the 1730s and the 1840s is expansion: renewed struggle for dominance among core states through the era of the French wars, the pulling of India, the Ottoman lands, Russia and West Africa from an external arena into the periphery, and the settler decolonisations of the Americas, Haiti among them. Capitalism is defined throughout by a structural drive toward the endless accumulation of capital.