By utilizing world systems analysis and dependency theory in world history, ways that students can raise questions and integrate ideas at the high school and undergraduate level are identified. A discussion of the origins and design of the 14th century world system demonstrates how it is set apart from the modern world and how conveying that difference to students offers a sense of cultural variation in the face of global integration. Through the use of sources, students can contrast European exploitation of the Americas to European exploitation of Asia. By the deconstruction of the entrenched historical assumption that a world system is positive and desirable, students begin to understand the formulation of more meaningful questions. As an example, Egypt provides a micro level test case as to the necessity or desirability of a world system. In the case of Egypt as a regional microcosm, the evidence illuminates that it was not the existence of a world system of foreign trade that was crucial to Egypt's prosperity, but it was the control of an adequate, revenue-producing, agrarian base that was essential. On the macro level, it was not European control of the world network of long-distance trade that contributed to the rise of power in the west, but it was the European disruption, diversion, and control of the agrarian tax bases of first the Americas and then the Eastern hemisphere that gave rise to a western-dominated world system. (CK)