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These impoverished peasants often moved to the cities, providing cheap labor essential for the growth in urban manufacturing

Eastern Europe (especially Poland) and Latin America, exhibited characteristics of peripheral regions.

In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests destroyed indigenous authority structures and replaced them with weak bureaucracies under the control of these European states.

served as buffers between the core and the peripheries

According to Wallerstein, the semi-peripheries were exploited by the core but, as in the case of the American empires of Spain and Portugal, often were exploiters of peripheries themselves. Spain, for example, imported silver and gold from its American colonies, obtained largely through coercive labor practices, but most of this specie went to paying for manufactured goods from core countries such as England and France rather than encouraging the formation of a domestic manufacturing sector.

Similarly, Protestants, who were often the merchants in Catholic countries, found they were targets of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, a trans-national institution, found the development of capitalism and the strengthening of the state threatening.

During this period, workers in Europe experienced a dramatic fall in wages.

This powerful merchant class provided the capital necessary for the industrialization of European core states.

European states participated in active exploration for the exploitation of new markets.

With the independence of the Latin American countries, these areas as well as previously isolated zones in the interior of the American continent entered as peripheral zones in the world economy. Asia and Africa entered the system in the nineteenth century as peripheral zones.

the core enriched itself at the expense of the peripheral economies. This, of course, did not mean either that everybody in the periphery became poorer or that all citizens of the core regions became wealthier as a result.

Wallerstein asserts that an analysis of the history of the capitalist world system shows that it has brought about a skewed development in which economic and social disparities between sections of the world economy have increased rather than provided prosperity for all.

This was the first time that an economic system encompassed much of the world with links that superseded national or other political boundaries