The historic long term economic interconnections of the world are now universally accepted. The idea of the economic "world system" advanced by Immanual Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period, but Andre Gunder Frank thinks that this date is much too late and denies the much longer run of interconnection going back as much as 5000 years. In "The World System", the authors argue through this issue, in a debate contributed to by William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein, among others.