ABSTRACT
What is missing from the world history perspective is the semi-peripheral – in this particular case, Polish – contribution. Polish historian Marian Małowist (1909–1988) was cited by Immanuel Wallerstein as his main inspiration and a founding father (aside from Fernand Braudel) of world-system theory (Modern World-System XI). In a preface to Małowist’s collection of articles Wallerstein writes that the Polish historian was “one of the most fertile and cultivated minds who have written on the central issue of our times – the wide and widening gulf between the core and the periphery, the North and the South, western and eastern Europe” (vii). For Wallerstein, Małowist was “a pioneer of world-system analysis” (ix). 1
