The current construction of World-Systems analysis holds that core countries, including America, Europe's thriving economies, and developed nations in Africa and Asia, derive enormous economic and political power from "the axial division of labor of a capitalist world-economy (that) divides production into core-like products and peripheral products" (Wallerstein 28). Madagascar's relative abundance of untapped natural resources, in the form of massive "old-growth" tropical rainforests, and deposits of minerals like chromite and titanium ore which are now used in the construction of cellular telephones and laptop computing devices, represent peripheral products that can be exploited for the ongoing manufacture and distribution of the core products driving the engine of globalized commerce. Pictograph:

Periphery Countries

(Madagascar)

Goods

ods

Resources

Core Countries

(America, globalization since 1795: Waves of integration in the world-system." American Sociological Review (2000): 77-95.

Duiker, William J. Contemporary World History. Wadsworth Publishing Company, 2009.

Friedman, Thomas L. The world is flat [updated and expanded]: A brief history of the twenty- first century. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2006.

Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the olive tree: Understanding globalization. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Harper, Grady J., et al. "Fifty years of deforestation and forest fragmentation in Madagascar." Environmental Conservation 34.4 (2007): 325-333.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip. "Window on humanity." Urban Anthropology 11 (2011): 11

Newman, Arnold. (2002). Tropical rainforest: Our most valuable and endangered habitat with a blueprint for its survival into the third millennium. (2nd ed.). New York. NY: Checkmark Books.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. World-systems analysis: An introduction.…