Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist who shook up the field with his ideas about Western domination of the modern world and the very nature of sociological inquiry, died on Aug. 31 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 88.
His daughter Katharine Wallerstein said the cause was an infection.
Dr. Wallerstein had written several books on Africa, where he had traveled extensively, when he published “The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century,” the first of four landmark volumes, in 1974.
