It is virtually timeless, extending back to 3000 B.C. Self-constituted by commerce, it is exclusively economic in character, monochrome in a bullionist hue. Frank's universe might be described as a mercantilist panenhenism. Uncaused, it is the cause of everything else. Frank so pushes Fletcher's call for horizontally integrative history as almost to eliminate vertically separate history. Consequently, events, such as the rise of the West, do not have deep roots.
Conjuncture is always more important than structure.
All forms of exceptionalism are rejected as violations of this canon of holism. Like the Absolute, Frank's global economy has little history and less contingency. It has only pulsations, governed by fifty and 500-year Kondratieff cycles, each with an expansive and contractive phase, though over time the world increases in wealth. It is the contractive phase of the most recent super-Kondratieff that accounts for the temporary ascendancy of the West. Today, this is being reversed by the onset of a new expansive cycle, which, like all the rest, will be centered on Asia, with China, as always, in a position of particular privilege.