Notes Toward a World Systems Theory of Platforms: Made in China and India on Amazon.com

This article examines the key role that Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs have played in the growth of Amazon and the varied ways in which they interact with its marketplace platform. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, I highlight differences in how Amazon addresses such entrepreneurs, in how they produce for Amazon, and how they brand their goods for global markets. These differences do not simply reflect distinct national cultures. Rather, they emerge from how Amazon crosses national borders, bringing actors from different political and regulatory contexts, with different levels of development and symbolic resources, into direct contact and competition with one another. I propose that to make sense of these configurations, we must conceptualize global platform capitalism not only as a collection of national cases but as a world system—a differentiated unity that reproduces inequality at the same time it drives innovation.