Capital as world-economy: Dale Tomich’s distinctive contribution to the world-historical method

The concept of “the world-economy” has been a central conceptual constituent of the world-system/world-historical studies. Methodological debates within the world-historical studies have engaged in conceptually specifying and historically locating the world-economy by understanding and tracing the relationship between “the parts of the capitalist world-system” that are conceived as the objects of analysis at the national-local levels and “the whole” that is conceived as the world-historical unit of analysis. Dale Tomich’s contribution to these debates has produced a distinct methodological plane that questions and re-comprehends the relationship between theory and history. Tomich brings light a new conception of world-economy based in Marx’s theory of capital that both demonstrates the limits of Marx’s “historical theory” and enables the differentiated complexity of locally specific “theoretical histories” unfolding within the world-historical context of the formation and development of the world-economy as a historical process. Tomich’s perspective questions a conceptually and empirically singular history of capitalist development as a history prefigured by theory. Instead, it calls for exploring socially and materially multiple and diverse histories of commodities, (re)production and exchange as unified histories interlinked through the world-historical relation of capital, i.e. the world-economy., in ways that informs and reconstructs “the theory” as historical theory.