This article discusses the position of the Habsburg Monarchy within the capitalist world-system. The Empire is interpreted as a semiperiphery of a world-system emerging northwest Europe, and also conceived as a distinctive world-economy. The focus here is on internal borders as a means of analyzing different regions and the disparities between them. The internal borders within the Habsburg Monarchy were the objects of much public discussion in the period under consideration. May analysis is that a border's most important function is not that of closure and exclusion, but its capacity to establish interrelationships between one region and another, and to combine resources, without removing inequalities between regions.

[No Keywords available]

labor migration economic history capitalism global economy world system