Review of Social Macroevolution: Genesis and Transformation of the World System

The monograph by Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev is de-voted to the study of social macroevolution that is understood by the authors as a special dimension of social evolution that includes a series of major evolutionary transformations that have resulted in the formation and development of the World System. It appears appropriate to recollect here how the authors define the notion of ‘the World System’ (ascending to Andre Gunder Frank [1990, 1993]), and how they distinguish it from the one of the ‘world-system’ (ascending in its turn to Immanuel Wallerstein [1974, 1987, 2004]). The notion of ‘world-system’ is defined by Grinin and Koro-tayev