CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Real
World History vs.
Eurocentric Social Theory
The really important lesson to be learned from Marx and Weber is the importance of history for the understanding of society. Though they were certainly interested in grasping the general and universal, they concerned themselves with the concrete circumstances of specific periods, and the similarities and contrasts of diverse geographical areas. They clearly recognized that an adequate explanation of social facts requires a historical account of how the facts came to be; they recognized that comparative-historical analysis is indispensable for the study of stability and change. In a word, it is these two extraordinary thinkers in particular, who stand out as the architects of a historical sociology well worth emulating; for both of them subscribed to an open, historically grounded theory and method.
Irving Zeitlin (1994: 220)
The expectation of universality, however sincerely pursued, has not been fulfilled thus far in the historical development of the social sciences…. It is hardly surprising that the social sciences that were constructed in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century were Eurocentric. The European world of the time felt itself culturally triumphant…. Every universalism sets off responses to itself, and these responses are in some sense determined by the nature of the reigning universalism(s)…. Submitting our theoretical premises to inspection for hidden unjustified a priori assumptions is apriority for the social sciences today.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1996b: 49, 51, 60, 56)
Holistic Methodology and Objectives
My thesis is that there is “unity in diversity.” However, we can neither understand not appreciate the world's diversity without perceiving how unity itself generates and continually changes diversity. We all have to live in this one world in which diversity must be tolerated and could be appreciated in unity. Of course, I refer to toleration and appreciation of diversity in ethnicity, gender, culture, taste, politics, and color or “race.” I do not advocate acceptance of inequality in gender, wealth, income, and power without struggle. Therefore, we could all benefit from a world perspective that illuminates not only the subjective immorality but also the objective absurdity of “ethnic cleansing” and “clash of civilizations,” which once again have become popular in some circles today. This book proposes to offer at least some basis in early modern world economic history for a more “humanocentric” perspective and understanding.
The European but exceptionally worldly historian Fernand Braudel remarked that “Europe invented historians and then made good use of them” to promote their own interests at home and elsewhere in the world (Braudel 1992: 134). This statement is revealing in several important ways. First, it is not really true that the writing of history was invented by Europeans, not even by Herodotus and Thucydides. History had also been written by the Chinese, Persians, and others. Moreover, Herodotus himself insisted that “Europe” has no independent existence, since it is only a part of Eurasia, which has no real internal boundaries of its own. Perhaps Braudel had in mind a generation of historians who wrote long after Herodotus. Yet even they invented Eurocentric history long after Arab historians, chroniclers, and world travelers of such fame as Ibn Batuta, Ibn Khaldun, and Rashid-al-Din, who had already written Afro-Eurasian world history which was much less Arab- or Islamocentric.
Indeed, Europeans seem to have invented geography as well, for “Eurasia” itself is a Eurocentric denomination, albeit one invented on a distant marginal peninsula of that land mass. Before his untimely death in 1968, Marshall Hodgson (1993) denounced maps drawn according to the Mercator projection, which makes little Britain appear about as large as India; and J. M. Blaut (1993b) has shown how Eurocentric the mapping of the “march of history” has been. Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen (1997) refer to The Myth of Continents. One example is that against all geographical reality Europeans insist on elevating their peninsula to a “continent” while the much more numerous Indians have but a “subcontinent” and the Chinese at best a “country.” The relevant geographical and historical unit is really Afro-Eurasia. However, that could more appropriately be called “Afrasia,” as Arnold Toynbee suggested and the former president of the World History Association Ross Dunn recently recalled. Even this syllabic order still fails to reflect the real orders of geographical and demographic magnitude and historical importance of these two continents. Europe, of course, is none of the above.
Latter-day historians, it is true, have preponderantly gazed at their own European navel. That might be excused or at least explained by the social, cultural, political, and economic support they have received to do so. After all, historians received much support to write “national” histories in ideological support of European and American “nationstates” and to serve the ideological, political, and economic interests of their ruling classes. However, these historians also went beyond the confines of their own “nations,” to claim that “Europe” or “the West” was and is the “navel” (indeed also the heart and soul) of the rest of the world. If they gave any credit to anyone else, it was only grudgingly with a “history” that, like the Orient Express on the westward bound track only, ran through a sort of tunnel of time from the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, to the classical Greeks and Romans, through medieval (western) Europe, to modern times. Persians, Turks, Arabs, Indians, and Chinese received at best polite, and often not so polite, bows. Other peoples like Africans, Japanese, Southeast Asians, and Central Asians received no mention as contributors to or even participants in history at all, except as “barbarian” nomadic hordes who periodically emerged out of Central Asia to make war on “civilized” settled peoples. From among literally countless examples, I will cite the preface of one: “The Foundations of the West is an historical study of the West from its beginnings in the ancient Near East to the world [sic!] of the mid-seventeenth century” (Fishwick, Wilkinson, and Cairns 1963: ix).
Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who “built a world around Europe,” as historians “know,” according to Braudel. That is indeed the “knowledge” of the European historians who themselves “invented” history and then put it to good use. There is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the world that made Europe. Yet that is what I propose to demonstrate, or at least to begin to show, in this book.
This book sets itself a number of tasks. They are at once far-reaching and still very limited. The tasks are far-reaching in that I seek to challenge the Eurocentric historiography on which much of received “classical” and “modern” social theory is based. The intentionally set limits are even greater: I—and I hope the reader—will be satisfied with the bare outlines of an alternative rendition of the world economy between 1400 and 1800. It offers a basis for a now only very preliminary—but later hopefully deeper and wider—structural, functional, dynamic, and transformational global analysis and theory of the single world political economy and social system in which we all (have to) live together.
Quite possibly the limitations of this book are even greater than the ones I have set intentionally and so will prevent me from reaching even this limited goal. However, it is already exceptional even to attempt a review of the early modern global world economy and its structural characteristics in order to inquire how they impinge on its sectoral and regional parts. Most of the historical development of this world economy and its parts may receive shorter shrift than it requires and deserves. The attempt is not so much to write a world history of this period, nor even an economic history, which is beyond my present capabilities, as to offer a global perspective on early modern economic history. Although historical evidence is important, I seek less to challenge received evidence with new evidence than to confront the received Eurocentric paradigms with a more humanocentric global paradigm.
The principal intent is to show why we need a global perspective and approach, which we require not only on the history of the world economy itself, but also so that we can locate its subordinate and participant sectors, regions, countries, or whatever segments and processes within the global whole of which they are only parts. Concretely, we need a global perspective to appreciate, understand, account for, explain—in a word, perceive—“the Rise of the West,” “the development of capitalism,” “the hegemony of Europe,” “the rise and fall of great powers,” including formerly “Great” Britain, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, “the Third-worldization of Los Angeles,” “the East Asian miracle,” and any other such process and event. None of these were caused only or even primarily through the structure or interaction of forces “internal” to any of the above. All of them were part and parcel of the structure and development of a single world economic system.
A derivative observation is that Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European “exceptionalism” of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word—of race. We will see that Europe also did not do so primarily through its participation and use of the Atlantic economy per se, not even through the direct exploitation of its American and Caribbean colonies and its African slave trade. This book shows how instead Europe used its American money to muscle in on and benefit from Asian production, markets, trade—in a word, to profit from the predominant position of Asia in the world economy. Europe climbed up on the back of Asia, then stood on Asian shoulders—temporarily. This book also tries to explain in world economic terms how “the West” got there—and by implication, why and how it is likely soon again to lose that position.
Another derivative thesis is that early modern Europe was neither more important in the world economy nor more advanced in any way than other regions of the world. This was not the case even counting all of its Atlantic outliers. Nor was Europe in any way “central” to or a “core” of any world-embracing economy or system. The “world-economy and system” of which Europe was the “core” in the sense of Braudel (1992), Wallerstein (1974), and others including Frank (1967, 1978a, b), was itself only a minor and for a long time still quite marginal part of the real world economy as a whole. We will see that the only real means that Europe had for participating in this world economy was its American money. If any regions were predominant in the world economy before 1800, they were in Asia. If any economy had a “central” position and role in the world economy and its possible hierarchy of “centers,” it was China.
However, the very search for “hegemony” in the early modern world economy or system is misplaced. Europe was certainly not central to the world economy before 1800. Europe was not hegemonic structurally, nor functionally, nor in terms of economic weight, or of production, technology or productivity, nor in per capita consumption, nor in any way in its development of allegedly more “advanced” “capitalist” institutions. In no way were sixteenth-century Portugal, the seventeenth-century Netherlands, or eighteenth-century Britain “hegemonic” in world economic terms. Nor in political ones. None of the above! In all these respects, the economies of Asia were far more “advanced,” and its Chinese Ming/Qing, Indian Mughal, and even Persian Safavid and Turkish Ottoman empires carried much greater political and even military weight than any or all of Europe.
This observation also has relevance to the contemporary and future world development problematique. The recent economic “development” of East Asia is receiving much attention around the world these days, but it generates equally much bewilderment about how to fit the observed developments into the Western scheme of things. The problem is easily illustrated by considering the absurdity of reclassifying Japan as part of “the West” or of having called the Japanese “honorary whites” in South Africa during apartheid. Beyond Japan, the focus shifted especially to the Four Tigers or Dragons of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. However, increasing notice is now also being taken of the other little dragons countries in Southeast Asia and of the big Chinese dragon looming on the horizon. Even the press sees that
in large ways and small, subde and heavy-handed…China is making itself felt across Asia with a weight not seen since the 18th century…. Now that the dragon has stirred, it is altering issues from regional trade patterns to manufacturing, from the decisions Asian governments make…. [which] confirms a shift in the geopolitics of a region stretching from Japan and South Korea to the Southeast Asian belt. (Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post Service in the International Herald Tribune, 18 March 1996)
To drive still further home the relevance of this point to the present argument, it may be apt to quote from the same paper on two successive days. Under the headline “America Must Learn to Respect Asia's Way of Doing Things,” we learn that
Westerners have been accustomed to telling Asians what to do. That period is now coming to an end. Asian countries are becoming strong enough to assert their autonomy and maintain it…. Any further attempt to remake Asian countries on Western lines is not likely to succeed. It would carry the risk of bringing about another in the long series of conflicts between Asians and the West…. Westerners need to accept the equality of Asians, and their right to do things their own way…and asserting the validity of “Asian” values. (Bryce Harland, International Herald Tribune, 3 May 1996)
Under the subtitle “At Issue Is the Nature of the International System,” this same newspaper reported on the following day that
The conflict over China is a conflict about the nature of the international system, and its political, financial and trade agencies. By design or otherwise, China is aggressively pushing to shape an alternative international system friendlier to Beijing's aims [which is] evident in the Chinese struggle to remake the WTO [World Trade Organization] rules for admission. (Jim Hoagland, International Herald Tribune, 4–5 May 1996)
Why is this so? Hill Gates (1996: 6) argues that it is because in the world only China has been exceptional in successfully resisting being “reshaped by the pressures of capitalism originating in western Europe…[and] to have survived the Western imperialist remaking of the world in the past few centuries.” Others have sought and offered all manner of “explanations” for this Asian awakening, from “Confucianism” to “the magic of the market without state intervention.” Alas, the contemporary East Asian experience does not seem to fit very well into any received Western theoretical or ideological scheme of things. On the contrary, what is happening in East Asia seems to violate all sorts of Western canons of how things “should” be done, which is to copy how “we” did it the “Western way.” Too bad!
The implications of this book are that the “Rise” of East Asia need come as no surprise just because it does not fit into the Western scheme of things. This book suggests a rather different scheme of things instead, into which the contemporary and possible future events in East Asia, and maybe also elsewhere in Asia, can and do fit. This is a global economic development scheme of things, in which Asia, and especially East Asia, was already dominant and remained so until—in historical terms—very recently, that is less than two centuries ago. Only then, for reasons to be explored below, did Asian economies lose their positions of predominance in the world economy, while that position came to be occupied by the West—apparently only temporarily.
The Western interpretation of its own “Rise of the West” has suffered from a case of “misplaced concreteness.” What should become increasingly apparent is that “development” was not so much “of the West” as it was of and in the world economy. “Leadership” of the world system—more than “hegemony”—has been temporarily “centered” in one sector and region (or a few), only to shift again to one or more others. That happened in the nineteenth century, and it appears to be happening again at the beginning of the twenty-first, as the “center” of the world economy seems to be shifting back to the “East.”
This idea is also cropping up elsewhere, but in rather dubious form. The book Coming Eull Circle: An Economic History of the Pacific Rim (Jones, Frost, and White 1993) begins a millennium ago with a description of the economic growth in Song China. Yet Ming and Qing China and Japan are described as essentially isolated and largely stagnant, while the Pacific becomes first “a Spanish lake,” and then subject to “Pax Britannica” and “the American Century”; only after an alleged interval of five to seven hundred years and substantial intervening Western incursions are the Pacific Rim and its eastern shores rising again. On the other hand, Western incursions in Asia remain only superficial and marginal until the past two centuries, and the ascendancy of the West is termed brief and fleeting in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's 1995 study of the last millennium of world history. Nonetheless in his account, the present and possible future rise to dominance of China and other parts of Asia in the world only resurrects the Chinese economic and cultural predominance of the Song dynasty from nearly a thousand years ago. In my book, in contrast, I argue that that lapse in dominance lasted less than two centuries. Moreover, I seek to show how these shifts have also been part and parcel of a long cyclical process of global “development.” This introductory chapter—and the concluding one—explore the implications of these historical observations for social theory.
Globalism, not Eurocentrism
“The West” has for some time now perceived much of the rest of the world under the tide “Orientalism” (the pairing of the terms “West” and “Rest” comes from Huntington 1993, 1994). The Western world is replete with “Oriental” studies, institutes, and what not. This Western ideological stance was magnificendy analyzed and denounced by the Palestinian American Edward Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism. He shows how Orientalism operates in the Western attempt to mark off the rest of the world in order to distinguish the West's own alleged exceptionalism. This procedure has also been denounced by Samir Amin in his 1989 work, Eurocentrism. Martin Bernai, in Black Athena (1987), has shown how, as part and parcel of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, Europeans invented a historical myth about their allegedly purely European roots in “democratic” but also slave-holding and sexist Greece. The Bernal thesis, apparently against the original intentions of its author, has been used in turn to support the idea of Afrocentrism (Asante 1987). In fact, the roots of Athens were much more in Asia Minor, Persia, Central Asia, and other parts of Asia than in Egypt and Nubia. To compromise and conciliate, we could say that they were and are primarily Afro-Asian. However, European “roots” were of course by no means confined to Greece and Rome (nor to Egypt and Mesopotamia before them). The roots of Europe extended into all of Afro-Eurasia since time immemorial. Moreover, as will be shown in this book, Europe was still dependent on Asia during early modern times, before the nineteenth-century invention and propagation of the “Eurocentric idea.”
This Eurocentric idea consists of several strands, some of which are privileged by political economists like Karl Marx and Werner Sombart, and others by sociologists like Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. The last named did the most deliberately to assemble, combine, and embellish these features of Eurocentrism. All of them allegedly serve to explain The European Miracle, which is the telling title of the book by Eric L. Jones (1981). However, Jones's book is only a particularly visible tip of the iceberg of almost all Western social science and history from Marx and Weber, through Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, to the spate of defenses of supposed Western exceptionalism since World War II, particularly in the United States.
The use and abuse of this kind of Eurocentric “theory” has been critically summarized with regard to Islam, although the same applies equally to other parts of “the Orient”:
The syndrome consists of a number of basic arguments: (i) social development is caused by characteristics which are internal to society; (ii) the historical development of society is either an evolutionary process or a gradual decline. These arguments allow Orientalists to establish their dichotomous ideal types of Western society whose inner essence unfolds in a dynamic process towards democratic industrialism…. (Turner 1986: 81)
However, as the Islamicist and world historian Marshall Hodgson wrote,
All attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre-Modern seminal traits in the Occident can be shown to fail under close historical analysis, once other societies begin to be known as intimately as the Occident. This also applies to the great master, Max Weber, who tried to show that the Occident inherited a unique combination of rationality and activism. (Hodgson 1993: 86)
Hodgson (1993) and Blaut (1992, 1993a, 1997) derisorally call this a “tunnel history,” derived from a tunnel vision, which sees only “exceptional” intra-European causes and consequences and is blind to all extra-European contributions to modern European and world history. Yet as Blaut points out, in 1492 or 1500 Europe still had no advantages of any kind over Asia and Africa, nor did they have any distinctively different “modes of production.” In 1500 and even later, there would have been no reason to anticipate the triumph of Europe or its “capitalism” three and more centuries later. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century development of economic, scientific, rational “technicalism” that Hodgson regards as the basis of the subsequent major “transmutation” occurred, as he insists, on a worldwide basis and not exclusively or even especially in Europe.
Europeans and Arabs at least had a much more global perspective before it was suppressed by the rise of Eurocentric historiography and social theory in the nineteenth century. For instance, the Tunisian statesman and historian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) evaluated and compared the “wealth of nations” before and during his time:
This may be exemplified by the eastern regions, such as Egypt, Syria, India, China, and the whole northern regions, beyond the Mediterranean. When their civilization increased, the property of the inhabitants increased, and their dynasties became great. Their towns and setdements became numerous, and their commerce and conditions improved. At this time, we can observe the condition of the merchants of the Christian nations who come to the Muslims in the Maghreb. Their prosperity and affluence cannot be fully described because it is so great. The same applies to the merchants from the East and what we hear about their conditions, and even more so to the far eastern merchants from the countries of the non-Arab Iraq, India, and China. We hear remarkable stories reported by travellers about their wealth and prosperity. These stories are usually received with skepticism. (Ibn Khaldun 1967: 279)
Even in the eighteenth century Father Du Halde, the most learned French publicist of matters Chinese (who never left Paris and used Jesuit and other travelers and translators as sources) wrote that in China
the particular riches of every province, and the ability of transporting merchandise by means of rivers and canals, have rendered the empire always very flourishing…. The trade carried on within China is so great, that all of Europe is not to be compared therewith, (quoted by Chaudhuri 1991: 430; for a longer version also see Ho Ping-ti 1959:199)
In a discussion of Du Halde's work, Theodore Foss (1986: 91) insists that not only philosophical but also technological and other practical texts from China were translated and studied in the West with utilitarian interest. Indeed, Donald Lach and Edwin van Kley (1965—) have written volumes under the title, Asia in the Making of Europe (seven volumes so far have been published, with others promised). For a summary of this work, see the review article by M. N. Pearson (1996) or the “Composite Picture” at the end of Lach and van Kley (1993: vol. 3, book 4). They observe for instance that “sixteenth-century Europeans had considered Japan and China to be the great hopes of the future”; by the end of the seventeenth century, they continue, “few literate Europeans could have been completely untouched [by the image of Asia], and it would have been surprising indeed if its effects could not be seen in contemporary European literature, art, learning, and culture.” Lach and van Kley support this observation with the fact that hundreds of books about Asia had been written, reprinted, and translated in the these two centuries in all major European languages by European missionaries, merchants, sea captains, physicians, sailors, soldiers, and other travelers. These included at least twenty-five major works about South Asia, fifteen about Southeast Asia, twenty on the archipelagoes, and sixty about East Asia, not to mention countless shorter works (Lach and van Kley 1993: 1890). The Indian empire was considered to be among the world's richest and most powerful, but China remained its most impressive and the Europeans' ultimate goal (Lach and van Kley 1993: 1897, 1904). Asian philosophy was admired, but arts and sciences less so; medicine, crafts and industry, and their respective practitioners were highly respected and oft imitated (Lach and van Kley 1993:1914,1593 ff.).
A revealing historical sidelight is that the seventeenth-century German philosopher Leibniz was retained by a West German ruler who was rightly suspicious of the ambitions of his neighbor Louis XIV. So Leibniz wrote Louis to offer a piece of advice: rather than pursuing any possible ambitions across the Rhine, it would be much more politically economic for France to turn southeastward to challenge the Ottomans:
In fact, everything exquisite and admirable comes from the East Indies…. Learned people have remarked that in the whole world there is no commerce comparable to that of China. (Leibniz 1969: vol. 5, 206; the quotation was kindly supplied by Gregory Blue)
The French did not pursue this advice until the time of Napoleon, who probably not by accident also took the trouble to recover a copy of Leibniz's letter when he invaded Germany. As observers like Lach and Said have noted, this European high regard for Asia did not really change until the nineteenth century, after the inception of European industrialization and colonialism, which then profoundly altered European perceptions and pronouncements, including their historiography and social science. Even today, Paul Bairoch acknowledges the greater economic and cultural development in early modern times of many parts of Asia compared to Europe. This testimony is all the more significant because along with Patrick O'Brien (1982,1990,1997), Bairoch (1974) is one of the principal explicit disputants of the Wallerstein/Frank thesis that the relations of Europe with the rest of the world had an important impact on European development itself. Although this denial continues today—like O'Brien's (1997)—Bairoch (1997: vol. 2, 528, his dots) nonetheless acknowledges that “Riches and power…in fact we can consider that around the beginning of the sixteenth century the principal civilizations of Asia had attained a level of technical and economic development superior to that of Europe.”
Indeed, Bairoch also points to the superiority specifically of China, India, Japan, Korea, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Ottomans; he calls Istanbul, at 700,000 inhabitants, the largest city in the world, with Beijing the second largest at only slightly fewer inhabitants. He also notes that Muslim North Africa was more urbanized than Europe: Paris had 125,000 inhabitants around 1500, whereas Cairo had 450,000 inhabitants and Fez had already declined from 250,000. Moreover, Calicut in India had 500,000 and even Pegu in Burma and Angkor in Cambodia had already declined from 180,000 and 150,000 inhabitants respectively (Bairoch 1997: vol. 2, 517–37). Curiously, Bairoch also asserts (on p. 509 of the same volume) that “with the sixteenth century began the European domination over other continents.” That of course is the European gospel, which really began in the mid-nineteenth century as per Marx and company. This worldview is still so pervasive that when LIFE magazine employed two dozen editors, consulted scores of experts, and devoted months of stormy meetings to the compilation of a list of the 100 most important people and events of the millennium for its September 1997 issue, it came up with the following results:
Westerners…have done a disproportionate amount of the global moving and shaking…. All but 17 [of the 100] are of European extraction; only 10 are women. This reflects not the biases of LIFE's editors and expert advisers but the sociopolitical realities of the past thousand years, (p. 135)
SMITH, MARX, AND WEBER
So it is not surprising that, among European observers of special interest for us, Adam Smith and Karl Marx also regarded these matters of great importance and interest. However, they did so from the differing perspectives of their respective times. Smith and Marx both agreed and disagreed about early modern history and the place of Asia in it. Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776:
The discovery of America, and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest events recorded in the history of mankind. (Smith [1776] 1937: 557)
Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto follows with this observation:
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development…. (Marx and Engels 1848)
Smith however—writing before the industrial revolution in Europe but echoing the philosopher David Hume, who wrote a quarter century earlier—was the last major (Western) social theorist to appreciate that Europe was a johnny-come-lately in the development of the wealth of nations: “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe,” Smith remarked in 1776. Smith did not anticipate any change in this comparison and showed no awareness that he was writing at the beginning of what has come to be called the “industrial revolution.” Moreover, as E. A. Wrigley (1994: 27 ff.) notes, neither did the English economists Thomas Malthus or David Ricardo one and two generations later, and even John Stuart Mill writing in the mid-nineteenth century still had his doubts.
However, Smith also did not regard the “greatest events in the history” to have been a European gift to mankind—of civilization, capitalism, or anything else. On the contrary, he noted with alarm that
to the natives, however, both of the East and the West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned…. What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from these great events, no human wisdom can foresee. (Smith [1776] 1937: 189)
But by the mid-nineteenth century, European views of Asia and China in particular had changed drastically. Raymond Dawson (1967) documents and analyzes this change under the revealing tide The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization. Europeans changed from regarding China as “an example and model” to calling the Chinese “a people of eternal standstill.” Why this rather abrupt change? The coming of the industrial revolution and the beginnings of European colonialism in Asia had intervened to reshape European minds, and if not to “invent” all history, then at least to invent a false universalism under European initiation and guidance. Then in the second half of the nineteenth century, not only was world history rewritten wholesale, but “universal” social “science” was (new) born, not just as a European discipline, but as a Eurocentric invention.
In so doing, “classical” historians and social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took a huge step backward even from European, not to mention Islamic, perspectives that had been much more realistically world embracing up through the eighteenth century. Among those who saw things from this narrower (Eurocentric) new perspective were Marx and Weber. According to them and all of their many disciples to this day, the essentials of the “capitalist mode of production” that allegedly developed in and out of Europe were missing in the rest of the world and could be and were supplied only through European help and diffusion. That is where the “Orientalist” assumptions by Marx, and many more studies by Weber, and the fallacious assertions of both about the rest of the world come in. To briefly review them, we may here follow not only my own reading but also, to pick one among many, that of so authoritative a reader as Irving Zeidin (1994).
Marx seems to have been selective in the sources he drew on to characterize “Asia,” not to mention Africa. Among the classical political economists that influenced Marx, Smith ([1776] 1937: 348) had given “credit to the wonderful accounts of the wealth and cultivation of China, of those of antient [ancient] Egypt and…Indostan.” In this regard however, Marx preferred to follow Montesquieu and the Philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as James Mill, who had instead “discovered” “despotism” as the “natural” condition and “model of government” in Asia and “the Orient.” Marx also remarked on “the cruellest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia.” He also attributed this form of state to the Ottomans, Persia, and China, indeed to the whole “Orient.” In all of these, Marx alleged the existence of an age-old “Asiatic Mode of Production.” He alleged that in all of Asia the forces of production remained “traditional, backward, and stagnant” until the incursion of “the West” and its capitalism woke it out of its otherwise eternal slumber.
Although Marx noted that the Indian and Chinese purchasing power gave impulse to European markets, England was allegedly showing India the mirror of its future and the United States was bringing progress to Mexico thanks to its 1846 war against that country. Furthermore, Marx alleged that the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” and the “rising bourgeoisie” in Europe had transformed the world, supposedly since the genesis of capital (if not capitalism) in the sixteenth century—also in Europe.
For Marx, Asia remained even more backward than Europe, where “feudalism” at least had the seeds of a “transition to capitalism” within itself. In alleged contrast, “the Asiatic Mode of Production” would require the progressive benefits of this “transition” in Europe to jolt and pull it out of its built-in stagnation—even though he said that it was the Asian markets that gave impetus to those of Europe. The supposed reason for this alleged stagnation was the imagined lack of “capitalist relations of production,” which kept all of Asia “divided into villages, each of which possessed a completely separate organization and formed a little world to itself.”
But this division of Asia into separate little worlds had already been contradicted by Marx's simultaneous claims, as well as those of other European writers, that Asia was also characterized by “Oriental despotism.” That was regarded as a form of sociopolitical organization necessary for managing these societies' large-scale irrigation projects, which were of course themselves incompatible with the allegedly isolated villages. Karl Wittfogel (1957) would later popularize this “theory,” but then ironically as a cold-war ideological weapon against communism and Marxism. But never mind all these internal contradictions! As we will see throughout this book, all of these characterizations by Marx were no more than a figment of his and other Eurocentric thinkers' imagination anyway, and had no foundation in historical reality whatsoever. This fallacy also extends to the obverse—the “capitalist mode of production”—which was allegedly invented by Europeans and has ever since been held to be responsible for European, Western, and then global development.
Indeed, in his excellent critique of Marxists such as Perry Anderson and others, Teshale Tibebu (1990: 83–85) argues persuasively that much of their analysis of feudalism, absolutism and the bourgeois revolution and “their obsession with the specificity…[and] supposed superiority of Europe” is Western “civilizational arrogance,” “ideology dressed up as history,” and “Orientalism painted red,” that is, the “continuation of orientalism by other means.”
Other social theorists may have risen to dispute Marx (and supposedly to agree with Smith), but they all agreed with each other and with Marx that 1492 and 1498 were the two greatest events in the history of mankind, because that is when Europe discovered the world. Never mind that the world had been there all along and that at least the Afro-Asiatic part of it had long since shaped Europe itself. Indeed, the eminent historian of medieval Europe Henri Pirenne (1992) stressed Europe external dependence when he pointed out in 1935 that there could have been “no Charlemagne without Mohammed.” Nevertheless, history and social theory have been marked ever since by the alleged uniqueness of (Western) Europeans, which supposedly generated “the Rise of the West.” What is worse, they allegedly also had to assume the civilizing mission of the white man's burden, bestowing “the development and spread of capitalism” on the world as Europe's and the West's gift to mankind. (Lately, some feminists have denied that this process has been a gift also to womankind).
Weber of course agreed with Marx about all these European origins and characteristics of “capitalism,” and with Sombart too. Weber only wanted to go them one better. Sombart had already singled out European rationality, and its alleged roots in Judaism, as the sine qua non of “capitalism” and its “birth” in Europe. Weber accepted that too. He further embellished the argument about irrigation-based “Oriental despotism” to allege that Asia had an inherent inability to generate economic, not to mention “capitalist,” development on its own. However, Weber actually went to a lot of trouble to study “the city,” “religion,” and other aspects of different civilizations in Asia. The great student of bureaucracies, Weber had to recognize that the Chinese knew how to manage them and the country at large. Moreover, he had more time than Marx to observe how Western money made its way to and around various parts of Asia.
That additional acquaintance of Weber with Asian realities also complicated his argument and made it more sophisticated than the crude Marxian version. For instance, Weber recognized that Asia had big cities. So they had to be somehow “fundamentally different” from European ones, both in structure and in function. Weber's mistake in this regard emerges clearly from William Rowe's (1984,1989) careful examination of this argument in his study of the Chinese city Hankow.
To continue the critique of the Eurocentric idea and the use and abuse of Weberian theory, I return to Turner's argument: that
Islamic society is either timelessly stagnant or declines from its inception. The societies are consequently defined by reference to a cluster of absences [that allegedly] define the West—the missing middle class, the missing city, the absence of political rights, the absence of revolutions. These missing features…serve to explain why Islamic civilization failed to produce capitalism. (Turner 1986: 81)
So what was the essential difference, the missing ingredient that “the West” allegedly had and “the Rest” did not have if Weber himself could not find all these factors to be missing in the Oriental societies he studied? For Marx, what was missing was “the capitalist mode of production”; Weber added also as a missing element the proper religion and how it interfaces with the other factors to generate that “capitalist mode.” Weber went to the trouble to study various major world religions and concluded that all of them had an essential mythical, mystic, magical, in a word antirational component, which “necessarily” handicapped all their true believers in coming to grip with reality rationally, unlike the Europeans. Only the latter were beneficiaries of “the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.” No more than Marx did Weber argue that this ethic and spirit were the be all and end all of capitalism, and the Weberian argument has been even harder to understand than the Marxian one.
This rational spirit is supposedly the missing secret yeast that, when combined with all the others, makes “the West” rise, but not “the Rest.” Without it, the Asians could not possibly develop capitalism and therefore could not really “develop” at all, or even use their cities, production, and commerce. Never mind that Catholics in Venice and other Italian cities had already managed quite well, thank you, without this special gift of yeast long before Calvin and others gave it to Northern Europeans. Also never mind that not all those gifted with the Protestant ethic manage so well either, whether in Eastern Europe or in the European colonies early on in the South of the United States and still in the Caribbean, and elsewhere—as I have already argued (Frank 1978b). Nonetheless, David Landes explicitly claims empirical support for the Weberian thesis in his The Unbound Prometheus (1969) and categorically denies that Muslim “culture” can permit any technological initiative.
Yet, the Japanese took up “the Chrysanthemum and the Sword” (Benedict 1954) and produced and prospered without Western colonialism or foreign investment, not to mention the Protestant ethic, even after their defeat in World War II. So James Abbeglen (1958) and Robert Bellah (1957) sought to explain these developments by arguing that the Japanese have the “functional equivalent of the Protestant ethic,” while, too bad for them, the Confucian Chinese do not. Now that both are surging ahead economically, the argument has been turned around again: it is East Asian “Confucianism” that is now spurring them onward and upward. In the real world economy of course, none of this is neither here nor there.
This Eurocentrism had nineteenth-century sociological greatgrandfathers in the “father of sociology” Auguste Comte and in Sir Henry Maine, who distinguished between supposedly new forms of thinking and of social organization based on “science” and “contract,” which allegedly replaced age-old “traditional” ones. One grandfather was Émile Durkheim, who idealized “organic” vs. “mechanical” forms of social organization; another was Ferdinand Toennis, who alleged a transition from traditional “Gemeinschaft” to modern “Gesellschaft.” In a later generation, Talcott Parsons idealized “universalist” vs. “particularist” social forms, and Robert Redfield claimed to have found a contrast and transition or at least a “continuum” between traditional “folk” and modern “urban” society and a certain symbiosis between “low” and “high civilization.” Even Toynbee (1946), although he studied twenty other civilizations, heralded the uniqueness of the “Western” one; and Spengler warned of its “decline.”
Critics of Western capitalist development who wanted to reform or replace it nonetheless also subscribed to the same fundamental thesis. The Marxist and contemporary neo-Marxist version is the alleged fundamental difference between “Asiatic,” “feudal” or other forms of “tributary modes of production” and the “capitalist mode of production” (Wolf 1982, Amin 1991, 1993, 1996). Lenin alleged that “imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism” also was an outgrowth of a development that was initiated in and spread by Europe. More recently, Karl Polanyi alleged that there were no market relations, to say nothing of trade and a division of labor over long distances, anywhere in the world before what he called the “Great Transformation” took place in Europe during the nineteenth century. Archaeological findings have time and again disconfirmed Polanyi's (1957) denial of trade and markets in early empires, and I have already added my own theoretical and empirical critiques elsewhere (Gills and Frank 1990/91, Frank and Gills 1992, 1993, Frank 1993a). At issue here is that the spread and dominance of the market allegedly started only recently in (Western) Europe and spread out over the world from there. Robert Mclver opens his foreword to the first Polanyi book with the claim that it makes most other books in its field obsolete or outworn. If so, it does so only inasmuch as it renders “obsolete” the many previous acknowledgments of the real importance of market, including the world market, relations, and influences. Polanyi replaces this age-old reality by myths about the alleged primacy of noneconomic social relations of “reciprocity” and “redistribution.” My book will show that, on the evidence, such “great transformation” as there was began long before the eighteenth century and certainly was not initiated in or by Europe.
All of these “ideal type” dyadic and other distinctions have in common that first they posit essentialist sociocultural features and differences that are far more imaginary than real, and then they allege that the differences distinguish “us” from “them.” In the terminology of Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996), they separate “the West” from “the Rest.” Indeed, allegedly these features also distinguish modern (Western) society from its own past as well as from other societies' often still lingering present. Moreover, these “ideal” types attribute some kind of pristine self-development to some peoples—mostly to “us”—but not to others, and their subsequent diffusion (when positive) or imposition (if negative) from here to there. The quintessential culmination of this “tradition” was Daniel Lerner's (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society. In the real world, the only practical holistic choice has been “none of the above.” This “underdevelopment of sociology” was challenged by me thirty years ago (Frank 1967). However successful, that challenge was nonetheless insufficiently holistic. The present book is my attempt to do better.
Here, the evidence and argument is that almost all of the above cited received social science theory is vitiated by Eurocentric bias and arrogance. We will observe that the historical evidence effectively negates the alleged European origin, let alone superior exceptionalism, of modern social development—and thereby pulls the historical rug out from under social science theory as we know it. I will readily agree that we should try to salvage as much of it as we can still use; but all of this received wisdom is nonetheless in serious need of review and questioning.
Witness that even a world historian and social theorist with the erudition of Braudel (1993) still claims that
China's economic achievements were modest and, to be frank, backward compared with those of the West…. Her inferiority lay in her economic structure [which was] less developed than that of Islam or the West…. Nor were their entrepreneurs eager to make profits…. They only half-heartedly shared the capitalist mentality of the West…. The Chinese economy was not yet mature…. Nor was there any credit system until the eighteenth (and in some places) until the nineteenth century…. The Tokugawa revolution isolated Japan from the rest of the world, and tightened the grip of feudal habits and institutions. (Braudel 1993: 194–5, 285)
We will observe throughout this book how historically inaccurate—and also contradicted by his own observations elsewhere—is this estimation by the master historian and critical student of capitalism.
CONTEMPORARY EUROCENTRISM
AND ITS CRITICS
Now we are all—knowingly or not—disciples of this completely Eurocentric social science and history, all the more so since Parsons enshrined Weberianism in sociology and political science when the United States became economically and culturally dominant in the world after World War II. His mistitled Structure of Social Action and The Social System, as well as the derived “modernization theory,” and the economist W. W. Rostow's (1962) Stages of Economic Growth are all cut from the same Eurocentric cloth and follow the same theoretical pattern. Well may we ask, what was the point? Rostow's “stages” are little more than a “bourgeois” version of Marx's stage-by-stage development from feudalism to capitalism to socialism—all starting in Europe. Like Marx, Rostow claims that the United States, following England, would show the rest of the world the mirror of its future. Rostow (1975), also explains the “origins of the modern economy” in How It All Began, by the scientific revolution that allegedly distinguished modern Europe. In his Unbound Prometheus, Landes (1969) finds the cultural conditions for “technological change and industrial development” during the last two centuries only in Western Europe itself. Cipolla (1976: 276) observes “that the Industrial Revolution was essentially and primarily a socio-cultural phenomenon and not a purely technical one, [which] becomes patently obvious when one notices that the first countries to industrialize were those which had the greatest cultural and social similarities to England.”
Other authors also have offered only “internal” explanations to account for the alleged superiority and ascendance of the West over the rest of the world. For these writers, the rise of Europe was also a “miracle,” which was due to allegedly unique qualities that Europeans had and all others lacked. Thus, Lynn White Jr. (1962), John Hall (1985), and Jean Baechler, Hall and Michael Mann (1988) find the rest of the world deficient or defective in some crucial historical, economic, social, political, ideological, or cultural respect in comparison to the West. The claim is that the presence in “the West” of what was allegedly lacking in “the Rest” gave “us” an initial internal developmental advantage, which “we” then diffused outward over the rest of the world as the “civilizing mission” of “the white man's burden.”
This myth has been well examined by Blaut (1993a) under the apt tide The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Dijfusionism and Eurocentric History. Blaut microscopically examines, exposes, and demolishes the myth of “the European miracle” in its myriad forms of biology (racial superiority and demographic continence); environment (nasty, tropical Africa; arid, despotic Asia; temperate Europe); exceptional rationality and freedom (as against “Oriental despotism,” the centerpiece of the Weberian doctrine and part of the Marxian one); alleged European historical superiority in technology (despite its borrowings from and dependence on earlier Chinese, Indian, and Islamic advances); and society (development of the state, significance of the Church and “the Protestant ethic,” the role of the bourgeoisie in class formation, the nuclear family, etc.).
Blaut (1997) goes over these arguments in even greater detail in his line-by-line dissection of the writings of eight Eurocentric historians, among them the usual suspects: Weber, White (1962), Jones (1981), Robert Brenner in Aston and Philpin (1985), Mann (1986), Hall (1985) and Baechler, Hall and Mann (1988), who therefore require much less examination here. Blaut effectively establishes the theoretical, intellectual, and ideological Eurocentric family relations among all of these writers; and his examination of their arguments against the canons of scientific evidence and elementary logic literally demolishes each and every one of them.
Thus, Blaut effectively demonstrates what Hodgson already said, that each of the alleged European exceptionalisms and the whole European miracle are no more than myths firmly based only in Eurocentric ideology. Therefore, its derived social “science” is empirically and theoretically untenable as well. Blaut also compares feudalism and protocapitalism in Europe, Asia, and Africa before 1492 to argue that in the late Middle Ages and early modern times Europe had no advantage over Asia and Africa on any of these fronts. Therefore, Blaut correctly argues, it is wrong to attribute the subsequent development of Europe and the West to any of these supposedly internal European exceptionalisms. The same and especially the Weberian allegations of “specific and peculiar achievements of Western rationalism” have more recently also been disputed by the anthropologist Jack Goody (1996), who surveys analogous ones in West, South, and East Asia. Alas, even Molefi Kete As ante's (1987: 4) stinging critique of Eurocentric critical theorists is all too apt:
They are, in essence, captives of a peculiar arrogance of not knowing that they do not know what it is that they do not know, yet they speak as if they know what all of us need to know…. [So] my work has increasingly constituted a radical critique of Eurocentric ideology that masquerades as a universal view. (Asante 1987: 4)
Another recent lonely critic, Frank Perlin, observes:
The creation of the “scientific fact” frequently, and even systematically, turns out to have been its opposite, the establishment of myth, marking “our” general complicity in the very facts beyond science that “we” “scientists” and “intellectuals” alike (justly) abhor…. How can it be that the sciences of society have permitted so little of contrary substance to be said to the peddlers of myth that, instead, so much that we purvey has simply re enforced, even fed their industry, mostly in spite of ourselves? (Perlin 1994: xi, 15)
Indeed! The present book is my attempt to confront the peddlers of myth with contrary evidence, including much assembled by Perlin. The importance of giving Afro-Eurasian peoples and regions outside of Europe their historical due is further underscored by the recent compilation of some scattered articles and unpublished manuscripts by Hodgson in Rethinking World History:
A Westernist image of world history, if not disciplined by a more adequate perspective, can do untold harm; in fact it is now doing untold harm. That is why I lay so much stress on not assuming “decadence” in Islamic society before the eighteenth century unless one has really good evidence…. One of the most important tasks of world history, as I see it, is to give people a sense of the pattern of time periods and geographical areas which is free of the multifarious Westernist presuppositions…. We must force ourselves to realize what it means to say that the West is not the modern world, gradually assimilating backward areas to itself; but rather a catalyst, creating new conditions for other forces to work under…. The great modern Transmutation presupposed numerous inventions and discoveries originating in all the several citied people of the Eastern Hemisphere, discoveries of which many of the earlier basic ones were not made in Europe…. At least as important was the very existence of the vast world market, constituted by the Afro-Eurasian commercial network, which had cumulatively come into being, largely under Muslim auspices, by the middle of the second millennium…. Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene, of which the Occident had been an integral part, the Western Transmutation would be almost unthinkable…[for only therein] European fortunes could be made and European imaginations exercised. (Hodgson 1993: 94, 290, 68,47)
I entirely agree with Blaut, Perlin, and Hodgson, whose theses are amply confirmed by the evidence in the chapters that follow. Moreover, I want to give credit where credit is due. In a more recent book than the one cited above, Jones (1988) himself expresses doubts about his former book (1981): he quotes another author to the effect that “possibly the most exciting thing to do next would be to prove die theory wrong,” and then goes on himself to say that “as a title The European Miracle was just a little too seductive”:
Growth Recurring is a doubling back too, but more from the implications of the title of The European Miracle than from its account of Europe's performance…. On the other hand, I no longer see it as miraculous in the sense of “the natural law of a unique event”…. I began to ponder whether I had been right to hunt for special positive features that may have enabled Europe to become the first continent to achieve sustained growth. The trap seemed to lie in assuming that because Europe is different, the difference must tell us about the inception of growth…. (Jones 1988: 5, 6)
Jones makes two further revealing confessions: One is that he read and was influenced by the same Marshall Hodgson as I, but too late for Jones's previous book. The other is that nonetheless even in his later book his main “disadvantage…relates to ingrained point of view, and not to political or religious attitudes, but something deeper. I was born and brought up an Englishman…” (Jones 1988: 183–4). So his new attempt to be “non-racist, non-sexist, and so forth…ought to be heartwarming” (Jones 1988: 186). That it is. Yet Jones still labors under so many self-confessed disadvantages that after again reviewing China and adding Japan he is still hard put to “prove the theory wrong,” and his “summary and conclusion” is that “formulated this way, Japanese and European history seem to be matters of accidentally contrived balances of forces. Indeed, why not?” (Jones 1988: 190) In this book, I try to do more to prove his theory wrong and hope to do better than to appeal only to accident as an alternative explanation.
ECONOMIC HISTORIANS
One might naively think that for the study of economic history as it really was, the place to turn is to economic historians. Yet they have been the worst offenders of all. The vast majority of self-styled “economic historians” totally neglect the history of most of the world, and the remaining minority distort it altogether. Most economic historians seem to have no perspective—not even a European one—of the world at all. Instead, their “economic history” is almost altogether confined to the West. The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures 1893–1970, edited by N. B. Harte (1971), is a collection of twenty-one such lectures by the most eminent English-speaking economic historians. They in turn review and comment on the “economic history” written by their colleagues in the profession over most of the preceding century: almost every word is about Europe and the United States and their “Adantic economy,” which hardly includes even Africa. The rest of the world does not exist for them.
Going through the International Congress of Economic History's recent conference proceedings reveals that some 90 percent of the “international” contributions are about the West. Lately, a couple of the congresses and/or volumes of proceedings have had tides like The Emergence of the World Economy isoo-1914 (Fisher, McInnis, and Schneider 1986). Yet the preponderance of the contributions are still about the West.
The author of one of the most noteworthy examples of this kind of Eurocentric economic history recently won the Nobel Prize for economics. The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History was written by the 1993 Nobel laureate in economics Douglass C. North with Robert Paul Thomas (1973). It merits special note not only for the recognition given to one of its authors, but also because of the explicitness of its tide, its emphasis on “new,” and the revision of received theory. Yet under their subtitles “Theory and Overview: 1. The Issue” and on the very first page, they clearly state “the development of an efficient economic organization in Western Europe accounts for the rise of the West” (North and Thomas 1973:1; my emphasis). They then trace this institutional change, and especially the development of property rights, to increased economic scarcity, which was generated in turn by a demographic upturn in Western Europe. The rest of the world and its demographic upturn as well was not there for them. Moreover, as North and Thomas (1973: vii) emphasize in their preface, their economic history is also “consistent with and complementary to standard neo-classical economic theory,” which we may suppose influenced the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
North and Thomas's book illustrates at least three related problems and my objections: First, Eurocentrists refuse to make and are reluctant even to accept comparison with other parts of the world, which reveal similarities not only in institutions and technological but also in the structural and demographic forces that generated them. Second as we will see in chapter 4, these comparisons show that the alleged European exceptionalism was not exceptional at all. Third, the real issue is not so much what happened here or there, but what the global structure and forces were that occasioned these happenings anywhere, which are analyzed in chapter 6.
What is even more serious is that the small minority of economic historians who do refer to “the Rest” very seriously distort both “the East” and its economic relations with “the West.” Their perspective on the “world economy” is that it emerged out of Europe and that Europe built a world economy around itself, as Braudel said that historians “knew” had happened. Take for instance a recent review article on “Maritime Asia, 1500–1800” written by John Wills (1993) for the American Historical Review. Wills revealingly subtitles it “The Interactive Emergence of European Domination.” He reviews over a dozen books and cites perhaps a hundred others that deal with some “interaction” between East and West. However, most of the action reviewed remains directed from Europe toward Asia, and almost none the other way around. Moreover, the claim in the review's title that European “domination emerged” from 1500 onward to 1800 is not at all substantiated. Indeed, it is disconfirmed even by the evidence supplied by the authors that Wills himself reviews and cites. So the very title of his article still reflects Eurocentric bias far more than it describes reality.
Another current example of Eurocentrism is the series by the innovative publisher Variorum reprinting many of the best but otherwise much less accessible articles on economic history, especially about and from outside the West; its newest series is being published under the umbrella title “An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450–1800.” To promote the series the publisher cites endorsements by the “dean” of world historians, William McNeill, and by the former professor of Economic History at Oxford University, Peter Mathias, who promises that “this series will widen and deepen our understanding of the world stage.” On the contrary, it deepens our misunderstanding of the world stage, for even this series carries no hint of what really happened on the world stage from 1450 to 1800: true, the world economy expanded, but primarily in Asia; and the world economic Expansión impacted on Europe much more than Europe had any “impact” on “world history” before 1800. Although the title of one of the books is The European Opportunitythe series concentrates on what Europe did, rather than on its opportunities in the world economy and especially in Asia, of which Europe only took advantage.
Marxist economic history may seem different, but it is equally, indeed even more, Eurocentric. Thus, Marxist economic historians also look for the sources of “the Rise of the West” and “the development of capitalism” within Europe. Examples are the famous debate in the 1950s on “the transition from feudalism to capitalism” among Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahashi, Rodney Hilton and others (reprinted in Hilton 1976) and the Brenner debate on “European feudalism” (Aston and Philpin 1985). G. E. M. de Ste. Croix (1981) on the class struggles in the ancient “Greco-Roman” civilization and Perry Anderson (1974) on “Japanese feudalism” also considered each of these as a particular “society.” Marxists may claim to devote more attention to how the economic “infrastructure” shapes society; but they show no awareness of how one “society” is shaped by its relations with another “society” ' and still less of how all societies were shaped by their common participation in a single world economy. The very existence of a world economic system was explicitly denied by Marx and only belatedly acknowledged by Lenin. However, Lenin's “imperialism” also was of recent European origin. In Rosa Luxemburg's version, the “world” capitalist economy had to rely on “external non-capitalist” space and markets outside of the capitalist system into which to expand.
LIMITATIONS OF RECENT SOCIAL THEORY
The issue may be rephrased in terms of how deep in time and how wide in space to search for the roots of “the Rise of the West.” For instance, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall (1997) write that the roots of the rise of the West and the emergence of the modern world-system go back at least two millennia. But the question comes, where and how widespread were these roots? The entire body of Eurocentric historiography and social theory looks for these roots only under the European street light. For some it shines as far back in time as the Renaissance; for others longer, perhaps through the entire Christian era back to Judaism. Prominent among theorists of the latter viewpoint is Michael Mann (1986,1993), who searches for the “sources of social power” and finds them in ideological, economic, military, and political power (in that order). He observes that “Europe has been an ideological [Christian] community for a millennium” (Mann 1993: 35). There is the rub: however deep in time, the roots are still allegedly European! In Blaut's (1997: 51) apt characterization, Mann and others visualize no more than a technological Orient Express traveling on the westbound track from the ancient Middle East, through ancient Greece, to medieval and modern Western Europe.
However, McNeill (1963), who entided his pathbreaking book The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, showed that its roots extend far beyond Europe through the entire Afro-Eurasian ecumene. That was of course also the message of Hodgson's (1993) Rethinking World History (written at the same time as McNeill's book). Afro-Eurasia also is the basis of Chase-Dunn and Hall's (1997) analysis of the “rise and demise” of the “modern world-system,” as it was of Frank and Gills's (1993) The World System: Five Hundred Tears or Five Thousand? The question remains, however. What are the implications of this temporally deeper and spatially wider perspective for the (interpretation of early modern world history? The remainder of this book is written to begin to answer this question from a more global perspective.
The theoretical, analytical, empirical, and—in a word—”perspective” limitations of contemporary received theory are the heritage and reflection of our “classical” social theory and the equally (or even more so) Eurocentric historiography on which it is based. This social theory was vitiated by its colonialist Eurocentrism when it was conceived in the nineteenth century. The same theory itself became even more vitiating while being further developed in the West and propagated around the world in the twentieth century. Now at the end of this century, this theory and the entire Eurocentric historiography on which it is based is wholly inadequate to address the coming twenty-first century in which Asia promises to rise—again.
Apart from the absurdity of much of the alleged historical basis of received social theory, it still has another theoretical flaw, which is indeed the major theoretical shortcoming of all this theory. That flaw is that, however “universalist” its pretensions, none of this social theory is globally holistic.
To find the really germane factors in economic, social, and cultural “development,” we must look holistically at the whole global sociocultural, ecological-economic, and cultural system, which itself both offers and limits the “possibilities” of all of us. Since the whole is more than the sum of its parts and itself shapes its constituent parts, no amount of study and/or assemblage of the parts can ever lay bare the structure, functioning, and transformation of the whole world economy/system.
My argument is that we now need an entirely differently based world history and global political economy. Received classical social theory from “Marx Weber” and their disciples is vitiated by its ingrained Eurocentrism, a bias that is not usually admitted or, perhaps, self-perceived. That bias distorts all perception of, indeed even blinds us from seeing, the reality of the world outside the West. Moreover, the same Eurocentrism also prevents or distorts any realistic perception even of Europe and the West itself. Eurocentric social theory is innately incapable of coming to any terms with the (economic/systemic) reality of one single world, which itself has shaped the very different but not separate “realities” of both the “East” and the “West,” the “South” and the “North,” and all other parts of the one whole world. So the real issue is not really whether Marx or Weber or anybody else, are right or wrong about this or that part of the of the world system. The real theoretical issue is that none of them have so far even sought holistically to address the systemic global whole, and the real theoretical challenge is to do so.
The reader may well question this affirmation and challenge by reference to what historiography and social theory have already done or claimed. For instance, William McNeill has fathered world history. Not only did he entitle his major work The Rise of the West (1963). He also criticized Toynbee for treating world history in terms of twenty-one different civilizations, when McNeill suggested that there were only three major contributory “civilizational” streams to world history and to the rise of the West. So far so good. However, looking back twenty-five years after the publication of his book, McNeill (1990: 9) recognized that “the central methodological weakness of my book is that while it emphasizes interactions across civilizational boundaries, it pays inadequate attention to the emergence of the ecumenical world system within which we live today”; he now sees that his “three regions and their people remained in close and uninterrupted contact throughout the classical era” since 1500 B.C., and therefore a fortiori since A.D. 1500!
For this good reason, my book will show that we live in one world, and have done so for a long time. Therefore, we need a holistic global world perspective to grasp the past, present, and future history of the world—and of any part of it. The difficulties in adopting a world perspective and in overcoming a Eurocentric perspective of, or on, the world seem, nonetheless, still to be considerable. For instance, they were insuperable for Braudel and still are so for Wallerstein. Both of their books were written from a European perspective of the world, as I have argued elsewhere (Frank 1994,1995) and propose to demonstrate even more so in the present book.
Braudel's “perspective of the world”since 1500 is broader than most. Yet he too divided the world into a “European world-economy” and several other and separate external “world-economies” outside the same. Braudel did, of course, also study and describe at least parts of these “other” world economies, especially in vol. 3 of his trilogy on civilization and capitalism. Indeed, so did Marx in his own vol. 3 of Capital. Yet both neglected to incorporate the findings of their third volumes into the model and theory of their first volumes. Moreover, their neglect was quite conscious, intentional, and deliberate: their Eurocentrism convinced both that any and all historical model and social theory, be it universal or not, must be based on the experience of Europe alone. Their only concession was that Europe and its model did have consequences for the rest of the world.
It was Wallerstein's (1974) The Modern World-System—and if I may say so also my own contemporaneously written (vide the Preface) World Accumulation and the companion Dependent Accumulation (Frank 1978a, b)—that sought to systematize these consequences of European Expansión and “capitalist”development for both Europe and the rest of the world. Both writers emphasized the negative “underdeveloping” impact of European Expansión in many other parts of the world and their contribution in turn to capital accumulation and development in Europe and then also in North America. Wallerstein focused more on the core-periphery structure of the system, which of course I also recognized under the term “metropolis-satellite”; and I focused more than he on the structurally related cyclical dynamic in the system.
Both of us however, Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989) and Frank (1978a,b), limited our modeling and theoretical analysis to the structure and process in the modern “world” economy/system. I saw and Wallerstein still sees this system as centered in Europe and expanding from there to incorporate more and more of the rest of the world in its own European-based “world” economy. That is the limitation of this Wallersteinian/Frankian theory: it cannot adequately encompass the whole world economy/system, as long as it remains still Eurocentrically confined to only a part, and not even the major part, of the whole world economy. It may be of some empirical or historical use to show how “our” system incorporated the Americas and parts of Africa into itself “early” on in the sixteenth century and other parts of the world only after 1750.
However, this European-based model of a “world” system is theoretically not only insufficient but downright contrary to the whole real world economic/systemic theory that we really need. Alas, that does not yet exist, and one of the reasons it does not is precisely because we have all, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, and still Braudel, Wallerstein, and Frank, looked under the European street light. However worldly we sought to be, our own still latent if not recognized Eurocentrism made us think that that is where we ought to look for evidence with which to construct our theory. Many other students may not have thought about it at all and only look there because—thanks to us, as well as others—the (European and North American) theoretical and empirical light shines brighter there.
In my view, little is gained, and much better opportunities at reformulation are needlessly squandered, by inventing new latter-day variations on this old theme, which are little more than euphemistic. Thus Eric Wolf (1982) and Samir Amin (1991) stand by a so-called “tributary mode of production,” which supposedly characterized the whole world before 1500, according to the former, and much of it until 1800 according to the latter. Or take the case of Gates (1996), who builds her analysis of a thousand years of “China's motor” on “the tributary and petty-capitalist modes of production” and is hard put to show, though she tries, how and why they support and promote patriarchy in China. In contrast, my book will show that, regardless of the variety of their domestic relations—never mind “mode” or “modes”—of production, far more important is participation in a single world economy, which is only obscured by this undue or even misplaced emphasis on “modes of production.”
The latest misplaced and therefore irrelevantly misleading discussion by van Zanden (1997) is summarized by its very tide: “Do We Need a Theory of Merchant Capitalism?” The entire Spring 1997 issue of Review is devoted to this “issue,” to which the editor, Wallerstein, also contributes. On the basis of his analysis of labor markets in the Dutch seventeenth-century “Golden Age,” van Zanden argues for the affirmative: “merchant capitalism is in a sense ‘capitalism in the process of construction'…for this growing world market…concentrated in relatively small urbanized commercial islands in a noncapitalist sea.” Therefore also it is an heretofore insufficiently recognized but necessary “stage” between pre-or protocapitalism and industrial capitalism. To his credit, Wallerstein (1997) denies this thesis by showing that merchant and Dutch capitalism then and now were no more than part and parcel of “historical capitalism.” Thus, “entrepreneurs or companies who make large profits do so…by being simultaneously producers, merchants, and financiers, or moving back and forth between these roles as economic circumstances make one or another of them more lucrative” (Wallerstein 1997: 252). Of course, but Wallerstein and the others fail to observe that the same was and is equally true throughout the world economy and not only in the small European “capitalist” part.
Several other authors (Ad Knotter, Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly) draw on recent works about “industrialization before industrialization” in the Netherlands, Flanders, and elsewhere in Europe. It is enough to make only these comparisons to show that “van Zanden's terms do not enable analysis of the process: the articulation of merchant capitalism and precapitalist modes of production was not at issue, and the protoindustry was not the most dynamic element in the transition to industrial capitalism” (Lis and Soly 1997: 237). All the more so would these “modes of production” cease to be the issue if, instead of limiting their purview only to parts of the marginal peninsular Europe, the examination is extended to the rest of the world—let alone analyzing them as part and parcel of the whole global economy, as this book does.
A (very) few other students, perhaps not surprisingly especially from Afro-Asian backgrounds, have decided that we must expand or change our theoretical perspective and orientation. Among them are Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), who inquired into what happened “before European hegemony,” and K. N. Chaudhuri (1990a), who looked at “Asia before Europe.” Of course, they are also handicapped by having to place so much reliance on the already existing European and other Western light posts, which cast very dim light if any on the more distant evidence.
Fortunately, these more world-visionary scholars are increasingly joined by mostly non-“Western” (if often still Western-trained or influenced) researchers, who dig up their own regional and local archival and archaeological pasts with little more than a torchlight or a candle to help them. The evidence they uncover is a treasure—some literally so thanks to underwater archaeology that brings to the surface the contents of long-sunk merchant ships and treasure. These findings can and should offer a wider and deeper basis for inductive synthesis by more far-reaching historiography and the construction of a truly holistic world economic/systemic model and theory.
However, evidence alone is still not enough and no substitute for a holistic whole world-encompassing theoretical model. That is what we need but still lack to help organize and interpret the existing evidence—and guide the search for more and better evidence from the farthest reaches of the world, well beyond the reach of the old Western theoretical street light. This book can take no more than a few hesitating initial steps in that direction. My hope is however that my very shortcomings will encourage others who are far more capable than I am to take giant new steps in that direction.
It would seem to be much easier to do so for the early modern world economy and system that is under investigation here than for earlier times. Indeed, when I was researching the extent of the Bronze Age world economy and system by pursuing the range of its long cycles, I used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle. I noted that the difference from assembling such an ordinary puzzle is that it is not possible to follow the easy course of starting at the already given straight outer edges and work inward. Instead, I had to start from the presumed center and work outward to search out the boundary edges of the world system jigsaw puzzle. Moreover these boundaries were not even stable but were themselves moving outward over time as well. The task was to establish where and when that was happening.
Assembling the jigsaw puzzle of the early modern world economy would seem to be much easier. The need to establish its outer edges would seem to be obviated by the hard evidence itself, first of its Afro-Eurasian dimensions and then of the only belated incorporation of the Americas after 1492 and of Oceania after 1760. Once we look at this whole world economy, it is easy to start at the “outward” edges of the jigsaw puzzle, even though they are not straight but round. Indeed, an early title of this book was “The World Is Round.” All we need to do is to go around it, pick up the pieces, and fit them in where they belong in relation to their neighbors. Then, the picture should emerge almost by itself, unless we get the relationships among the pieces wrong. But then, the historical, geographical, and sociopolitical economic evidence itself permits us to check out our placement of each piece in its relation to the next. All we really need, is a (little more?) holistic vision of the whole. Yet most historians and social theorists accept and do none of the above. Not only do they have no holistic perspective, but they do not even miss it. Even worse, they remain adamant in rejecting the whole altogether.
Nonetheless without looking at the global jigsaw puzzle map, we cannot find the rightful place or comprehend the real functional relations of any of its pieces. What was the place and role of that red piece over there whose shape resembles the outiines of the British Isles? We also cannot know what to make of the many other pieces that are also colored red, one of which is shaped like a big vertical terrestrial wedge and another like a big horizontal kidney surrounded by water. And near the first red piece, we have to place some blue, yellow, and green pieces, each of which in turn has is own same-colored oudiers. We need the whole global context to place these other colored jigsaw pieces in their rightful places on the map, especially those with several straight edges that look like someone had drawn them as lines on a table (as in fact the European colonial powers did carve up Africa in 1884 in Berlin). Indeed without holistically analyzing the whole jigsaw puzzle and its creation, we will never comprehend why and how its “designers” assigned which colors, shapes, and places to what pieces, let alone what relation they have to each other and to the whole.
What is still most amiss among contemporary historians and social theorists is a holistic perspective. Historians mostly like to employ a microscope to look at and puzzle over only one piece of the whole at—and only over a short—time. My historian son inscribed a history book to me “from one who studies the trees to one who studies the forest.” Even “world” historians, not to mention “civilizationists,” are very wont to confine their attention to some big trees and only to compare some big pieces. Indeed, many like to focus particularly on their civilizational specificities or cultural similarities and differences. Some defend their procedure with the argument that “scientific” standards oblige us to study no more than partial pieces of the whole so that we can employ the comparative method to analyze their differences. They do not seem to realize that if the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that whole itself may also contribute to differentiating these parts and pieces of the whole jigsaw puzzle among each other. So they shy away from looking at the whole picture either because they will not see the whole, or because they just cannot see it. Therefore, they also fail to comprehend even some essentials of the piece at which they are looking or the two or more pieces that they wish to compare. Indeed, hardly any “world” historians even note that the real world out there is a whole global jigsaw puzzle, which they might assemble, not to mention seek to comprehend.
Outline of a Global Economic Perspective
Following is the outline of how chapters 2 through 7 begin assembling the jigsaw puzzle of the early modern world economy from 1400 to 1800.
Chapter 2 examines the structure and flow of trade, starting in the Americas and going eastward literally around the globe. It examines the pattern of trade imbalances, and their settlement through payment in money, which also flowed predominantly eastward. About a dozen regions and their relations with each other are examined, going from the Americas, via Africa and Europe, to and through West, South, and Southeast Asia, to Japan and China and from there both across the Pacific and also back across Central Asia and Russia. This review demonstrates the strength and growth of these “regional” economies and their trade and monetary relations with each other. It also shows, at least implicitly, what kind of a world economic division of labor existed, expanded, and changed in the early modern period from about 1400 to 1800. At the very least, this chapter shows that there was such a worldwide division of labor. It identifies many of the different products and services, sectors and regions, and of course enterprises and “countries” that effectively competed with each other in a single global economy. Thus, we will see that all received economic and social theory based on the neglect or outright denial of this worldwide division of labor is without historical foundation.
Chapter 3 examines the role of money in the world economy as a whole and in shaping the relations among its regional parts. There is a large literature on the flow of money from the silver mines in the Americas to Europe, and there has been some concern also with its onward remittance to Asia. However, insufficient attention has been devoted to macro- and microeconomic analysis of why the specie was produced, transported, minted, reminted, exchanged, etc. Beyond macro- and microeconomic analysis of this production and exchange of silver and other species as commodities, one section of this chapter examines the circulatory system through which the monetary blood flowed and how it connected, lubricated, and expanded the word economy.
Another section of chapter 3 examines why and how this capillary monetary system, as well as the oxygen-carrying monetary blood that flowed through it, penetrated and fueled the economic body of the world economy. We examine how some of these monetary veins and arteries were bigger than others, and how smaller ones reached farther into, and even served to extend and stimulate production on, the outward reaches of the world economic body at this and that, but not every, frontier. The hoary myth about Asiatic “hoarding” of money is shown to be without foundation, especially in the “sinks” of the world monetary supply in India, and even more so in China.
Chapter 4 examines some quantitative global economic dimensions. Although hard data are hard to come by, one section devotes some effort to assembling and comparing at least some worldwide and regional dimensions of population, production, trade, and consumption, as well as their respective rates of growth, especially in Asia and Europe. We will see that not only were various parts of Asia economically far more important in and to the world economy than all of Europe but also, as the historical evidence demonstrates unequivocally, that Asia grew faster and more than Europe and maintained its economic lead over Europe in all these respects until at least 1750. If several parts of Asia were richer and more productive than Europe and moreover their economies were expanding and growing during this early modern period, how is it possible that the “Asiatic mode of production” under any of its European designations could have been as traditional, stationary, stagnant, and generally uneconomic as Marx, Weber, Sombart and others alleged? It was not, and so this Eurocentric myth is simply absurd.
Other sections of chapter 4 bring evidence and the judgments of authorities to bear on comparisons of productivity and technology as well as of economic and financial institutions in Europe and Asia, especially with India and China. These comparisons show that the European put-down of Asia is unfounded in fact; for Asia was not only economically and in many ways technologically ahead of Europe at the beginning but also at the end of this period. However, this chapter also launches the argument that production, trade, and their institutions and technology should not only be internationally compared but must also be seen as being mutually related and generated on a world economic level.
Chapter 5 proposes and pursues a “horizontally integrative macrohistory” of the world, in which simultaneity of events and processes is no coincidence. Nor are simultaneous events here and there seen as differently caused by diverse local “internal” circumstances. Instead, one section after another inquires into common and connected causes of simultaneous occurrences around the world. Demographic/structural, monetary, Kondratieff, and longer-cycle analysis is brought to bear in different but complementary attempts to account for and explain what was happening here and there. Such cyclical and monetary analysis is used to help account in the 1640s for the simultaneous fall of the Ming in China and revolution in England, rebellion in Spain and Japan, and other problems in Manila and elsewhere. The French, Dutch Batavian, American, and industrial revolutions in the late eighteenth century are also briefly examined in cyclical and related terms. Another section of chapter 5 inquires whether the so-called “seventeenth-century crisis” of Europe was world wide and included Asia; and I explore the important significance of a negative answer for world economic history. Observation that the “long sixteenth century” expansion continued through the seventeenth and into part of the eighteenth century in much of Asia is used also to pose the question of whether there was an about five-hundred-year-long world economic and political cycle.
This question about the long cycle opens chapter 6 on how and why the West “won” in the nineteenth century, and whether this “victory” is likely to endure or to be only temporary. In previous works (Gills and Frank 1992, Frank and Gills 1993, Frank 1993a), I claim to have identified a half-millennium-long world economic system-wide cycle of alternate expansive “A” and contractive “B” phases, which were some two to three hundred years long each. I traced these back to 3000 B.C. and up to about A.D. 1450. Three separate test attempts by other scholars offer some confirmatory evidence of the existence and my dating of this alleged cycle and phases. Did this long-cycle pattern continue into early modern times? That is the first question posed in this section. The second one is that, if it did, does it reflect and help account for the continued dominance of Asia in the world economy through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, as well as for its decline and Europe's rise thereafter?
Chapter 6 also culminates the book's historical account and theoretical analysis of and argument for how “the Decline of the East” and “the Rise of the West” may have been systemically related and mutually promoted. To do so, one part examines the unequal regional and sectoral structure and the uneven temporal or cyclical dynamic that fueled the growth of production and of population in the single global economy. The argument is that it was not Asia's alleged weakness and Europe's alleged strength in the period of early modern world history but rather the effects of Asia's strength that led to its decline after 1750. Analogously, it was Europe's previously marginal position and weakness in the world economy that permitted its ascendance after 1800. This development also took advantage of “the Decline of Asia” after 1750, whose roots and timing are also examined in a separate section of the chapter. Moreover, I suggest that in this same continuing process of global development, the balance of economic, political, and cultural power may already have begun again to revert to Asia.
“The Rise of the West” is examined more concretely in the final part of chapter 6. My thesis—echoing but extending that of Blaut—is that the West first bought itself a third-class seat on the Asian economic train, then leased a whole railway carriage, and only in the nineteenth century managed to displace Asians from the locomotive. One section examines and cites the analysis of Adam Smith about how the Europeans managed to do so with the use of American money. They used it not only to expand their own economies, but also or even especially to buy themselves into the expanding market in Asia. Thus, the industrial revolution and its eventual use by the Europeans to achieve a position of dominance in the world economy cannot be adequately explained on the basis only of factors “internal” to Europe, not even supplemented by its accumulation of capital extracted from its colonies. We need a world economic accounting for and explanation of this global process. To do so, this section then proposes and examines a hypothesis based on worldwide and subsidiary regional demand-and-supply relations for labor-saving and power-producing technological innovation.
Since the whole is more than the sum of its parts, each part is not only influenced by other parts, but also by what happens in the whole world (system). There is no way we can understand and account for what happened in Europe or the Americas without taking account of what happened in Asia and Africa—and vice versa—nor what happened anywhere without identifying the influences that emanated from everywhere, that is from the structure and dynamic of the whole world (system) itself. In a word, we need a holistic analysis to explain any part of the system. The concluding chapter 7 reexamines the implications of this need for holistic analysis and our derivative findings and hypotheses for further research about historiography, received theory, and the possible and necessary reconstruction of both. The first part summarizes the historiographie conclusions of what not to do. The second part of this final chapter goes on to suggest better alternative theoretical directions.
Anticipating and Confronting Resistance
and Obstacles
To begin with, we are badly equipped to confront our global reality when we are misguided into thinking that our world is only just now undergoing a belated process of “globalization.” Our very language and its categories reflect and in turn misguide our thinking when they lead us to suppose that the parts came first and then only combined to make a whole: examples are our society, my country, the German word Nationaloek onomie, or international relations with or without international trade. They all sound as though we long lived—and some of us would still like to live—in some social, political, economic “units” which have had some allegedly pristine existence ever since (their) Creation. It is simply not true that they only became interrelated later or even now. That allegation and terminology is just about the most literally nonsensical “perspective of the world” and rendition of its reality imaginable. But short of inventing an entirely new vocabulary that would be unfamiliar to the reader, I am obliged to make do with received terminology and try to stretch it to encompass a more global reality. However, we need more than global terminology. We also need global analysis and theory.
Yet even proposing global analysis, let alone theory, of and for the world is a hazardous task. It meets with strong resistance and can evoke ferocious counterattacks. We may anticipate and address, if not remove, at least the iceberg tips of some of the obstacles that we may encounter in the stormy analytic seas ahead. Since the present proposal is only now being launched, I will base my anticipations on some of the previous experience of both Immanuel Wallerstein and myself. His experience is relevant because the scope of my present proposal is at the same time broader, if more superficial, than his was.
The most numerous obstacles are likely to be picayune nitpickings. Other, more theoretical objections may be fewer, but larger. A particularly big obstacle is posed by Wallerstein himself.
One nitpicking objection is that I do not use (or even have the ability to use) primary sources. I reject that objection for several reasons. In 1966,1 sent the manuscript of an innovative critique of received theses about Mexican history to one of the authors of the same. He kindly wrote back but said my manuscript was not worth publishing, because it was not based on primary sources. So I left it in my desk drawer until, thirteen years later, Wallerstein invited me to publish it in a series he was editing at Cambridge University Press (Frank 1979). Then the same author wrote a review, saying my book should not have been published because by now what I was saying was old hat, further research and analysis by others having converted my earlier, oudandish-seeming world economic thesis into accepted received theory.
This experience illustrates what kind of sources are necessary and legitimate to make a historical statement, particularly a paradigmatic one. One of the problems of using a microscope to do archival research is, of course, that it affords historians no wider view, unless they bring one with them from outside the archives. Moreover, if historians wish to exit from the received paradigm and/or even to challenge the one based on microscopic analysis, they all the more require a wider perspective. Of course if historians take too big a step back to examine the material with a telescope, they are bound to miss some of the details. That leads us on to the next objection.
It might be objected that, especially for lack of sufficient or even any primary sources, I do not know enough to tackle the whole world, or even several parts of it. Even Braudel (1992: 468) doubted that it is “wise for one historian to try to bring together in a single analysis fragments of a history still insufficiently explored by research.” Others will say, “Oh, but what you suggest was not quite that way in my back yard in the one-, ten-, or hundred-year period to whose study I have devoted twenty years of my life.” Yet as the world historian William McNeill pointed out in his foreword to a previous book of mine (Frank and Gills 1993), it is impossible to know everything, or even “enough,” about anything, no matter how narrowly the topic may be defined. Elsewhere, he argues that
macrohistorians ruthlessly by-pass most details of the available literary record…. This does not make macrohistory less exact or well attested…. Each scale of inquiry creates its own landscape of significant meanings. Smaller is not closer to reality—as minutely specialized historians sometimes assume. It is just different…. Good history results from a process of selection and criticism, picking out information from available sources that is relevant to whatever questions the historian asks—no more, no less. (McNeill 1996: 21)
Therefore, dearth of knowledge, to which I readily admit, is not really a function of the narrowness or breadth of the topic selected for study. On the contrary as chapter 5 will argue citing Joseph Fletcher, it is the all-too-common failure to do “horizontally integrative macrohistory” that results in the narrowness if not the very dearth of historical knowledge.
Some readers may object that I am looking at only one “economic” part or feature. At a combined 1996 meeting of the World History Association and the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, one member told me privately that “you are doing good economic history; that is why I am not interested”; another said publicly that “you are culturally blind.” Advocates of political, social, cultural, religious, national, ethnic, and other kinds of analysis will complain that mine does not favor, appreciate, or kowtow to their particular/ist desires. Partisans will lament that this analysis is of little or no use to the struggle of “my people.” They seek support instead from this or that ethnocentrism or from the new Afrocentrism, the old Islamocentrism, the even older Sinocentrism, Russian exceptionalism, and so on, none of which receive their oft-demanded support from the present analysis. My perspective also combats the Eurocentric Western exceptionalism now peddled in new garb by that old cold-warrior Samuel Huntington (1993,1996) as “The Clash of Civilizations?” (Credit where credit is due, the author also put a question mark behind the title of his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, but his all too eager public has already left it off. However by 1996, there was no more question mark in the title of his book.) Instead, as chapter 7 emphasizes, this book develops a perspective to support “unity in diversity.”
Feminists may charge, and rightly so, that this perspective and analysis does not sufficiently rattle at the cage of the patriarchal gender structure of society, which disadvantages women to say the least. That is true, although this approach is no less amenable to genderization than received theory is; except that it does not deal with women per se, nor with men for that matter. Indeed, this structural analysis does not seem to deal with any people at all. Chapter 2 on the division of labor and trade, chapter 3 on how money goes around the world and makes the world go round, and chapters 5 and 6 on the world economic system's structure and dynamic just inquire into the political economic and social relations among people. In a sense in my book, history makes people more than people make history.
That will be enough to make many rail against some economic and/ or other structural “determinism” that allegedly negates any and all voluntarist free-will political “agency.” Of course, it is useless to point out to them that whatever constraints there are in the real world were not put there by any systematic observers. Moreover, no systematic observer I know has ever alleged that the objectively studied “system” leaves no room for individual, community, cultural, political, or other “bottom up” (indeed also “top down”) subjective action and reactions. Yet good—or even bad—intentions are often not realized; and which intentions are and are not realized is subject to systemically generated opportunities and constraints, as examined in chapters 5 and 6.
However, there will also be more “concrete” complaints and demands by social theorists similar to the complaints Wallerstein has already encountered in response to his “modern world-system.” A special Eurocentric charge is that the evidence does not support his, much less my, contention that Europeans benefited from something other than their own good efforts. Years ago, Paul Bairoch (1969, 1974), Patrick O'Brien (1982) and others explicitly countered the earlier theses of Frank (1967,1978a, b) and Wallerstein (1974) that colonial and neocolonial trade contributed to European investment and development. Bairoch (1969) denied that commercial capital made any significant contribution thereto. O'Brien (1982,1990) has on several occasions dismissed overseas trade and colonial exploitation as contributors to capital accumulation and industrialization in Europe, since by his calculations this trade, not to mention profits therefrom, amounted to no more than 2 percent of European gross national product (GNP) in the late eighteenth century. O'Brien (1982: 18) contends that “for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral.” Now O'Brien goes even further and categorically contends, under the head “The Formation of a Global Economy, 1846–1914,” that
interconnections across continents and countries down to the middle of the nineteenth century seem limited…. Producers and traders the world over remained not merely insulated from foreign rivals but also protected…from competition even within national boundaries…. Integration occurred first on a local and regional, then on a national, basis, and increasingly as the [nineteenth] century went on, it took place on a global scale. (O'Brien 1997: 76–77)
The present book demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt how wrong O'Brien is in fact, never mind in theory. Yet he has also argued that “neither quantification nor more historical scholarship will settle debates about the significance of oceanic trade for the Industrial Revolution” (O'Brien 1990: 177).
We must agree with O'Brien that the evidence will never settle this issue. Not that evidence is of no importance, but it does not bear so much on the real dispute between us, which is paradigmatic. O'Brien (1982,1990) rejects even Wallerstein's only partially world-systemic perspective. Indeed, O'Brien (1997: 86–89) again alleges that “European dependence…remained negligible,” that the “economic significance of Asia, Africa, and South America…remained at a low and stable level” (he cites Bairoch 1974 and 1993 in support); and that, though the “facts and gains” of colonialism and imperialism are beyond dispute “colonialism did not necessarily pay” and “imperialism turned out to be of limited benefit.” Therefore, O'Brien (1997: 86) writes that the “suggestion” by Frank, Wallerstein, and Amin that European economic growth “occurred somehow at the expense” of others “remains contestable.” Instead, O'Brien contends that for the history of European (and even British) industrialization “the ‘perspective of the world’ [the reference is to Braudel's title] for Europe emerges as less significant than the ‘perspective of Europe’ for the world” (O'Brien 1990: 177). To people with so ingrained and recalcitrant a Eurocentric perspective, no amount of evidence, such as that marshaled in chapters 4 and 6, can make any difference. They will simply persist in their Eurocentric claim that Europe's relations with the world made no difference to Europe but all the difference to the world.
Behind this denial of significance of world-economic/systemic factors lies a methodological postulate, which in this case is another aspect of the Eurocentric perspective: explanations should be sought “internal” to the explanandum. Yes, but “internal” to what? Thus, Cipolla (1976: 61) summarizes his own argument by saying “the idea of trade as an ‘engine of growth' is a gross oversimplification.” Marxists have their own version of this same contention. Robert Brenner (in Aston and Philpin 1985) contends that only internal class relations everywhere account for the development of capitalism anywhere. Mao Zedong generalized die same idea in his famous “On Contradiction” aphorism about eggs and stones. The application of external heat will produce a chicken only from “internal contradiction” within an egg and not from a stone. That may or may not be so for “any given society in question.” The point is, however, that the real question is not about any “given society,” but about the world economy and global system as a whole, and that everything is “internal” to that.
This debate about “internal vs. external” turns even the analysis of the European-based “modern world-economy/system” itself into yet another obstacle and resistance to be overcome. The argument is also that something “internal” to the European “modern world-system” generated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, which then spread to the rest of the world “outside.” I contend that instead Europe and its “world-economy” were part and parcel of a long-preexisting Afro-Eurasian economy whose own systemic structure and dynamic became global—and itself generated many developments in Europe as well. Therefore, it is the “internal” operation of the global world economy—and not just of the European “world-economy”—that requires analysis.
What about class and class struggle? Bring the state back in! Allow more room for culture! My answers in short are that there is class in the world economy, but the class struggles between ruling and ruled classes have never had the motor force that Marx attributed to them—when he took off his historical materialist hat. The state and culture, and indeed class struggle itself, require much more analysis as being themselves dependent on the structure and dynamic of the world economy and system.
Others will argue that surely 99–99 percent of the people then living did not perceive what I attribute to the world economy/system, so it could not have made any impact on their consciousness. Yes and no. First of all, objective circumstances impact—indeed shape—subjective consciousness, especially in the absence of the subject's conscious awareness thereof. Second, consciousness is not everything; and one set of objective circumstances also affects other objective circumstances as well as the consciousness of the subject, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6.
Postmodernists will object as well. They may appreciate my “deconstruction” of manifest and latent terminological and conceptual Eurocentrism. Postcolonialists may also like the demonstration that the colonial idea is only recent and probably temporary in and about Asia. But those who think that there is no reality beyond its perception by the mind or its communication through language will dispute my insistence that it is the historical evidence itself which disconfirms received historiography and social theory. Moreover, they will themselves insist that only my imagination permits me to contend that there is a real global world economy and system out there and that its rendering here is no more than a figment of my imagination. They will be persuaded by no amount of argument or even evidence, unless they themselves drive their own rhetorical car into an imaginary tree and live to tell about it.
Here it will be more useful to confront those who admit the reality of the trees and even of a world economic and systemic forest. For instance, Wallerstein (1974,1980,1989), Frank (1978a,b), Braudel (1979, 1992), Wolf (1982), Blaut (1993a), Stephen Sanderson (1995), George Modelski and William Thompson (1996), and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) have offered a more helpful “perspective of the world” and its impact on local economic and social trees. Moreover, all of them have self-consciously already tried to offer broader perspectives to counter parochial Eurocentrism. Yet, although their scheme of things has not been sufficiently global and holistic to encompass the whole world economic forest, their analysis has nonetheless provoked strong resistance and counterattacks from the defenders of earlier social theory. How much more resistance and counterattack then will an even more holistically global analysis provoke, which turns the tables not only on most received theory but also on these theorists' own revisionism thereof?
Several instances of such resistance readily come to mind. Eric Wolf (1982) is rightly critical of others' neglect of the impact that Europe had on “the people without history.” He shows that people outside Europe did have histories of their own and that the expansion of Europe impacted on them. However, he still underestimates their mutual impact on each other; and he does not ask how the one world in which all participate together impacts on each of them. Moreover he retains, indeed even resurrects, the primacy of “modes of production,” from kinship, to tributary, to capitalist-based ones. That, I contend, still diverts attention from where it is most needed—on the world system as a whole.
Wallerstein (1974) did even more to incorporate the mutual relations of the European core and its periphery elsewhere in the world, in that he addressed the structure and transformation of a single political economic division of labor and its impact on core and periphery alike. However until 1750, most of the world still remains beyond his “modern world-system” and outside the Braudelian/Wallersteinian “European world-economy” on which it rests. In Wallerstein's perspective, Europe's expansion did incorporate parts of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas into the world-economy/system. However, he explicitly explains that this economy was only world-like and not at all world-encompassing. In his view, West, South, and East Asia, and indeed Russia, were only incorporated into this European world-economy/system after 1750. So Wallerstein's “world-system” perspective, theory, and analysis not only does not encompass most of the world before 1750; but he also claims explicitly that most of the world, including all of Eurasia east of the Mediterranean and of Eastern Europe, had played no significant part in the making and early history of his “modern world-system.”
Therefore of course, Wallerstein's very limited history and theory of the modern “world” economy and system also precludes coming to grips with the global economy and real world system, which remained outside his purview until 1750. Nonetheless, what happened there was highly determinant of developments inside the Braudel/Wallerstein “European world-economy/system,” as this book seeks to demonstrate especially in chapters 3, 4, and 6. To get even the remotest chance to study and understand any genesis, structure, and function, not to mention transformation and development, in this real world economy and system, we need an altogether more holistic theory and analysis, such as that presented in Chapter 6. However, Wallerstein (1991,1992,1993) has already several times demurred to any such amendment of world-system analysis; More recently, his “Hold the Tiller Firm” (1995) inveighs against any and all “nomothetic,” “idiographic,” and “reifying” revisionism, specifically including mine.
Even Blaut (1992, 1993a) resists holistic analysis of world economic development and its continuity despite debunking the myth of “the European miracle” and insisting that Europeans had no innate advantages over Asians in 1500. Others resist as well despite their long-term Eurasian historical perspectives, which include Sanderson's (1995) comparison between Japan and Britain, Modelski and Thompson's (1996) discovery of Kondratieff cycles going back to Song China (discussed in chapter 5), and Chase-Dunn and Hall's (1997) analysis of different “world system” modalities during the past ten thousand and more years. Nonetheless, all of them still insist that a sharp “break” occurred in world history around 1500, not only because Europeans found the Americas and a new way to the Orient in 1492 and 1498, but primarily because that initiated the development of capitalism in Europe and its dissemination from there. The abundant evidence in chapters 2 and 4 now questions the very basis of this position, which I used to share.
Other colleagues and friends in the social “sciences” also shy away from looking at the whole, even when they do avow holism. The most avowedly holistic are Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi, with whom Wallerstein and I have co-authored two books (Amin et al. 1982,1990). Like Wallerstein, Amin and Arrighi also start to assemble their modern world jigsaw puzzles at the center and work outward; and they also continue to chose their “center” in Europe. They reject Eurocentrism; and Amin (1989) even entitled a book Eurocentrism to denounce it, while Arrighi is devoting increasing attention to East Asia. Yet both still start their own reviews of early modern history in Europe, because that is where “capitalism” started. Like Wallerstein (1991), Amin (1991,1993, 1996) also wrote critiques of my thesis, defending instead the orthodox contention that a sharp break occurred in world history around the year 1500—in Europe. Before that, “world-empires” (says Wallerstein) only produced and distributed on the basis of a “tributary mode of production” (says Amin, but also Wolf 1982). Then came the development in, and spread of, the “capitalist mode of production” from Europe. Arrighi does attribute more importance to China and East Asia (Arrighi 1996, Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden 1996). Nonetheless, Arrighi's (1994) Long Twentieth Century still traces the development of the “capitalist world economy” and its innovation of financial institutions from their alleged beginnings in the Italian city states.
Thus Eurocentrism marks and limits even the severest critics of received Eurocentric social theory, including those who argue persuasively that the wider world played a much greater role in “the rise of the West” than this theory allows. Another vivid example comes from Alan Smith (1991). His Creating a World Economy begins with charges that Weber and the usual recent suspects from North and Thomas, Rostow, and Jones to Wolf, Wallerstein, and Frank ignore, truncate, or abuse the role of “the wider world” outside Europe. But Smith takes only a brief look at the history of this wider world in his second chapter and then immediately turns around in his third chapter to begin his own analysis, once again, with medieval Europe. He arrives at A.D. 1500 with “lineal trends” in society and polity that led to “steady progress,” thanks to “technology that made continuing growth possible” (Smith 1991: 67, 5)—all in and from Europe. The entire remainder of the book is dedicated to Europe and its transition to capitalism, its overseas expansion, and the “peripheries and dependencies” in the world economy. Since Smith still seeks the “creation of the world economy” and the birth and spread of “capitalism” in and from Europe, he must also claim that
many of the areas of the world still remained external to the new system. Eastern Africa, India, Ceylon, Indonesia, southeast Asia, China, Japan and the Middle East are all included in this category…[because] participation in commercial relations was discretionary and…seems to have had little lasting impact on the structures of the respective social formations…. One should not overestimate the role of international trade in forging linkages of substance between distant lands…. Only in Europe were…[social processes of integration] carried to fruition. (Smith 1991: 7,n)
With this same old Eurocentric litany of course, we will never find any of the structures, processes, or forces that were “creating a world economy” (to use Smith's apt tide). Just as with all those he criticized for their shortcomings, Smith in 1991 still looks no further than what the dim European street light illuminates when it was put up in the nineteenth century. By contrast, Adam Smith in 1776 had taken his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations very much further afield and, as we will see especially in chapters 3 and 6, showed us vastly more of “wie es eigendich gewesen ist”—”as it really was,” as Leopold von Ranke put it.
Thus it seems this gospel about the European development of the modern world capitalist economy and system since 1500 or whenever forms a Maginot line of defense behind which one and all remain resistant to seeing the real world. My book proposes an end run around that line of defense. When I launched my thesis that the present world system began long before 1500, Wallerstein was gracious enough to publish it (Frank 1990a) and a follow-up article (Gills and Frank 1992) in the journal he edits, even though he himself always holds to the sacrosanct 1500 dividing line (Wallerstein 1993, 1995, 1996a). Yet according to Wolf (1982), the line is in 1800; to Marx and many others, sometime between 1600 and 1800; and according to Braudel (1992), all the time between 1100 and 1600. Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) do insist that the rise of Europe and the West must be understood as part and parcel of more than two thousand years of Eurasian development; nonetheless, they too still regard the modern period since 1500 as a new departure into capitalism, which was initiated in and by Europe. The Gulbenkian Commission report Open the Social Sciences, written mostly by Wallerstein (1996b), denounces the Eurocentric, false “universalism” of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western social science (see the second epigraph for this chapter). Yet even this urgent call to reconsider the bases of the social sciences in preparation for the twenty-first century also does not rattle the apparently sacrosanct cage of a European origin and center for capitalism and all that allegedly follows.
However, if we see that the world is round, Europe turns out to be the wrong place to locate the center; and the significance of the beginnings of “capitalism” there or anywhere appear increasingly dubious, to say the least. All the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theorists reviewed above as well as many historians start their examination of early modern history in the wrong place. They only look under the European street light, whose illumination is ever dimmer as they work from Europe outward to examine its “expansion” as it “incorporated” the rest of the world. The farther they depart from their European lamppost, the less they can see. That is why for Wallerstein and many others Asia remained outside the “world-economy/system” until 1750 and was only “incorporated” after that.
This whole book and especially its chapters 4 and 7 insist that the reinterpretation by Frank and Gills (1993) of the period before 1500 also casts a long shadow over the received interpretations of the period since then. This modern world history is in dire need of reinterpretation. The Asian and world economic evidence, when examined under a non—or at least less—Eurocentric light, will reveal a wholly different picture. Chapter 4 will demonstrate that Asia already shone in the global economy long before 1750 and even then still continued to outshine Europe. In fact, Asia provided far more economic, not to mention cultural, illumination to Europe, than this then-still-marginal outpost (not lamppost!) brought to any part of Asia.
Beyond all these practical obstacles, theoretical resistance, and ideological counterattacks to any holistic analysis that encompasses more than just the European “world-economy” and the “modern world-system,” we can also find outright theoretical principled rejection of any kind of holism. That is the position of John R. Hall, among others.
Hall rightly observes that “Frank consistently traces lines of determination in one direction only, from the whole to the part” and that “the modern world system, then, is to be understood via an assumption of holism, whereby the totality defines the nature of the parts as well as their relation to that totality” (Hall 1984: 46, 60).
In a later work, Hall applies his theoretical principles and his rejection of holism is praxis still more concretely. Hall first writes that
my own critique has been that the assumption of holism promotes a misreading of the emergence of the capitalist world economy…. One alternative is to abandon the search for an encompassing theory of history in favor of a neo-Weberian approach that encourages analytic historiography, but without privileging any particular explanation in advance…. The neo-Weberian approach counters theories based in holism and necessitism, which force events into the matrix of a universal history founded on some prime mover—materialist, idealist, or otherwise. (Hall 1991: 58, 59, 60)
Then Hall falsely alleges that
the present analysis…shows that an assumption of holism within the world-system perspective is inadequate to an explanation of historical change…. [The appeal of] world-system theory as a master theory of history…is unfounded for several reasons. In the first place, universalist histories rarely are adequate…. Second, they unnecessarily narrow the agenda of historiography. Third, they fail to contend with the methodological problems of historical inquiry. (Hall 1991: 83, 82)
While Hall's empirical observations about my holistic procedure do me honor, none of his critiques of “world-system” have the slightest foundation. In fact of course, universalism, holism, and real world system theory do contend with the methodological problems of broadening the agenda of historiography, as we must. That is because, as I argued above in theory and will demonstrate below empirically through historical analysis, received historiography and social theory have not been nearly holistic enough in that they have largely evaded, not to mention denied, the “totality” of the globe and its history. The only thing in Hall's rejection of holism that we must assent to is that “once holism is abandoned, the warrant of world-system theory as a master theory of history no longer has force” (Hall 1991: 83). Herein Hall does indeed put his finger on the de facto limits of the theory he critiques, but that is no reason to throw out the historical baby along with the theoretical bathwater. On the contrary, his in this respect correct observation is precisely the reason why we need to make our historiography and social theory still more holistic and enough so in order to encompass the global whole, because as Hall himself rightly observed, “the totality defines the nature of the parts as well as their relation to that totality.” So, it is the very neglect of this holism by so many others in practice as well as its principled recalcitrant theoretical rejection by Hall which show that holistic theory is as necessary as it is difficult in praxis. That is so not the least because the opposition ranges from Bairoch's, O'Brien's, and Hall's critiques of Wallerstein and Frank even to Wallerstein and his “world-system” followers themselves.
Some recent and current efforts by several other authors deserve special mention for addressing and illuminating this problématique. Though arrived at in partly different ways, our joint conclusions reinforce each other. Among these are several Asian authors including George Asiniero in the Philippines, who is working on the global place of Asia, and K. N. Chaudhuri, whose early work on India and the Indian Ocean (1978,1985) is often cited below and is also used in his own Asia Before Europe (1990a). Bin Wong (1997) examines the industrial revolution through a new comparison of Europe and China. Takeshi Hamashita and Satoshi Ikeda in Japan see a China-centered regional economy in East Asia; both authors are extensively cited in chapter 2. Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden (1996) propose to study this East Asian development during the past five hundred years. Nonetheless, none of them tackle the entire world economy. Dennis Flynn and his co-author Arturo Giraldez do make a world economic analysis, but they confine themselves to an analysis of the global market for silver (which I cite often in chapter 3); however, they also do signal the world economic significance of China.
A world economic perspective also marks the work of two other authors. Frank Perlin, on whose work I draw repeatedly in my chapter 2 on trade, chapter 3 on money, and chapter 4 on market institutions, applies his truly global perspective in his analysis of the economy of India. Nonetheless, he seems to shy away from bringing the same analytic perspective to bear on the world economy as a whole. Finally, Ken Pomeranz deserves special mention as the only other scholar who to my knowledge also brings a global perspective to bear on the development and industrial transformation of the world economy before 1800 and within it of the significance of China. After I had prepared this entire text, including this introductory chapter, he kindly supplied me his own manuscript in progress in which he makes technological, institutional, economic, and ecological comparisons that favor China over Europe, some of which I have belatedly also cited in my own manuscript. Pomeranz and I use parallel procedures and arrive at the same conclusions regarding the importance of examining developments in Europe within the global real world context in which they took place.
That also leads us to agree—as a minority of two standing against the conventional wisdom—that these developments were not the result of centuries of (intra-)European sociocultural or even economic preparation, but rather primarily the results of only belated and very sudden inflections and departures in European and world affairs. Among these, Pomeranz devotes much more and better analysis to the role of ecological/economic constraints, incentives, and possibilities. He shows how these were generated by Europe's coercive extraction not only of finance but also of real goods from its colonies in the Americas. Of course I also recognize these; but I place still greater emphasis on the benefits that Europe derived from its relations with Asia, to which he devotes less attention. Sing Chew (1997 and forthcoming) is also doing an ecological economic history with global scope, but like Pomeranz also, he nonetheless refrains from trying to analyze the world economy as a whole. Moreover, I devote more effort (in chapter 5) than they to what Joseph Fletcher (1985, 1995) called “horizontally integrative macrohistory” in which simultaneous events and processes in the world economy are examined and related on a global level.
In so doing, this book will argue, and I hope demonstrate, that the widespread failure to use a holistic global perspective not only confines us to parochial views, but that these also seriously distort all regional, sectoral, and indeed temporal findings because they fail to fit these findings into the global scheme of things. So do all attempts to escape from parochialism and get at structure and processes in the global whole by starting with a part, especially with one in the wrong place. That has been the original sin of received Eurocentric historiography and social theory, which started in Europe and worked from there outward. The same procedure and narrow parochialism have been even more characteristic of the “exceptionalism and…exaggerated sense of uniqueness” prevalent among historians of “American” history, as Gordon Wood (1997: 51) points out in The New Jork Review of Books. Even its recent “broadening” to “place the history of the United States within the setting of the entire Atlantic basin” is still limited to the concept of “Adantic civilization.” Moreover, Wood and the historians he reviews can think of no better remedies than “increasingly teaching joint comparative courses at various universities” and “publishing works that compare developments in the two continents of the Western Hemisphere.”
This book turns this procedure around and instead works from the whole world inward. Or at least it begins by working our way around the globe, starting with trade, money, population, and production worldwide. Chapters 5 and 6 offer a more holistic conceptualization and an analysis of global processes, including European and American ones. Thereby, we arrive at conclusions and implications in chapter 7 that are very different from those of received Eurocentric social theory, which is thereby turned on its head, or rather head up!