CHAPTER 7
Historiographic Conclusions
and Theoretical Implications
Macrohistorians…focus attention on large-scale changes in the lives of millions and hundreds of millions of persons—some of which were not noticed at all in contemporary sources. Questions asked and answered govern what the macrohistorian discovers…[and] give macrohistory its meaning…. By asking questions appropriate to the actual geographic scale of human interaction…real patterns from the past emerge that escape historians who interest themselves in a single part of the world. That is because different aspects of past realities emerge with a change in the scale of historical observation.
William McNeill (1996: 20–21)
It is time to draw some conclusions and suggest some implications from our study. It will be relatively easy to conclude from the evidence presented here that a number of widely held theoretical propositions, or rather suppositions, are not supported by the historical evidence. It will be more difficult to begin searching out the implications of this evidence for alternative theoretical propositions.
The conclusions are doubly troubling: the historical evidence against these widely held theoretical propositions is so abundant and systematic that it empirically invalidates them altogether. However, these propositions form the very basis and heart of nineteenth-and twentieth-century social theory. Therefore, the fact that these propositions are themselves quite untenable also pulls the historical and empirical rug out from under this theory itself. Thus, this “theory” turns out to be no more than Eurocentric ideology. Since this ideology has been used to “legitimate” and support colonialism and imperialism, the falsity of these propositions also exposes the Eurocentric Emperor as having no clothes. In this concluding chapter, we will strip one garment after another off this ideological emperor.
The implications are also at least double: One is that we need to fashion new social theory to which the empirical evidence is more suited. The other and related one is that we must fashion this theory at least in part inductively through the analysis of the historical evidence itself. Therefore, we also need to ask what implications the evidence may have for an alternative, more realistic social theory. However, here we can only begin to inquire into the implications for the construction of a more holistic global social theory. Those who reject either of these procedures, or both, may wish to reject them by charging that this is no more than circular reasoning. So be it.
Historiographic Conclusions: The Eurocentric
Emperor Has No Clothes
THE ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION
Perry Anderson (1974: 548) asked that the notion of an Asiatic Mode of Production (AMP) “be given the decent burial that it deserves.” That is very decent of him, since the AMP hardly deserves even that. We need not go into the controversial and controverted history of this “concept” to see that on the evidence it never had the slightest basis in fact to begin with. I say “to begin with,” because before the AMP was invented the world already knew that the real world was not that way at all. Various citations throughout this book testify to the knowledge even in Europe of the economic, political, social, and cultural advances and developments in Egypt and West, South, and East Asia. In 1776, Adam Smith testified that on all accounts China and India were ahead of Europe even in technology. Why then did he also say that China seemed not to have changed in five centuries? Of course, that was not so; but if it had been, it would mean that China was so far advanced so early on that Europe had been unable to catch up in even five centuries of its own development. In fact, China was far more developed, and as we have seen, its economy continued to expand and develop. So did that of most other parts of Asia. We have observed that, far from Asia being “stagnant,” population, production, and trade expanded rapidly; and economic and financial institutions generated or at least permitted this expansion.
Therefore, Marx's description of China as a “mummy preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin…vegetating in the teeth of time” had absolutely no basis in fact. Nor did his idea that a supposed AMP reigned in India, Persia, Egypt, or anywhere else. That was no more than “Orientalism painted Red,” as Tibebu (1990) apdy remarked. Marx's contention that “in broad outline, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society” was pure ideological fiction and had no basis in fact or science (quotations from Marx are from Brook 1989: 11, 6). There never have been any such epochs, and the very idea of unilinear transitions from one “mode of production” to another, be they on a “societal” or a worldwide basis, only divert attention from the real historical process, which has been worldwide but horizontally integrative and cyclical.
Alas, “the importance of Marx's analysis of Asia is…that it functioned as an integral part of the process through which he constructed his theory of capitalism” (Brook 1989: 6). “The importance of Orientalism for the study of Marxism lies…[in] the notion that, in contrast to Western society, Islamic [and other Oriental] civilization is static and locked within its sacred customs, its formal moral code, and its religious law” (Turner 1986: 6). To that extent, Marx's entire “theory of capitalism” was vitiated both by the lack of support from the Eurocentric leg of its fables about a supposed AMP and by his equally Eurocentric supposition that Europe was different and that what happened there must have originated there. We have seen that no such thing really originated in Europe—let alone because of any supposed transition from feudalism to capitalism. The historical process was worldwide and world-encompassing—including Europe.
For another severe theoretical and empirical critique of the notion of an AMP, see Islamoglu-Inan (1987) and several of the contributors to the book she edited on the Ottoman Empire. It illustrates how slavish attempts to squeeze the evidence to fit this procrustean category, and even rebellious attempts to escape from it, handicap and contort rather than aid and extend the analysis of the contributors' own evidence. Her book also vividly illustrates how limiting not only is the category of an AMP but also that of a “capitalist mode of production” as well as Wallerstein's European-based “modern world-system” and the idea of its “incorporation” of the Ottomans or any other region in Asia, to which we return below.
EUROPEAN EXCEPTIONALISM
We must take exception to this alleged European exceptionalism on six related grounds.
First, the theses of Afro-Asian Orientalism and European exceptionalism empirically and descriptively misrepresent how Asian economies and societies performed. Not only the alleged AMP and Oriental despotism, but also the allegations about nonrational and anti-profit seeking characteristics, and other supposed pre-/non-/anti-commercial/productive/capitalist features of Asia are very much off the mark, as demonstrated by our review of Asia's participation in the world economy. In fact, Afro-Asian economic and financial development and institutions were not only up to European standards, but largely exceeded them in 1400 and continued to do so in 1750 and even in 1800.
Second, for the centuries between 1400 and at least 1700 as well as earlier, there was nothing “exceptional” about Europe, unless it was Europe's exceptionally marginal, far-off peninsular position on the map and its correspondingly minor role in the world economy. That may have afforded it some “advantage of backwardness” (Gerschenkron 1962). None of the alleged European exceptionalisms of “superiority” is borne out by historical evidence, either from Europe itself or from elsewhere, as Hodgson (1993) warned four decades ago and Blaut (1993a, 1997) unequivocally demonstrated recently. Therefore, the really critical factors in Europe's economic participation and development have also been both empirically and theoretically misrepresented by almost all received historiography and social theory from Marx and Weber to Braudel and Wallerstein. No matter what its political color or intent, their historiography and social theory—as well as that of Tawney or Toynbee, and Polanyi or Parsons and Rostow—is devoid of the historical basis from which its authors claimed to derive it. Just as Asia was not stuck-in-the-mud, so did Europe not raise itself by its own bootstraps.
Third, the comparative method itself suffers from inadequate holism and misplaced concreteness. At its worst, and Marx was among those whose analysis was so flawed, some “features” were rather arbitrarily declared to be essential (to what?) but wanting everywhere except in Europe. At best, Western observers (alas, including also some from Asia and elsewhere) compare “Western” civilizational, cultural, social, political, economic, technological, military, geographical, climatic—in a word racial “features”—with “Oriental” ones and find the latter wanting on this or that (Eurocentric) criterion. Among the classical writers, Weber devoted the greatest study to the comparisons of these factors, and especially to embellishing the Marxist notions about Oriental “sacred customs, moral code, and religious law.” His many followers have further embellished this comparative approach with still more peculiar features. Even if these comparisons were empirically accurate, which we have observed that most are not, they had and still have two important shortcomings: One is how to account for the allegedly significant factors that are being compared; another is the choice to compare these features or factors in the first—and last—place. Yet the choice of what features or factors to compare is based on the prior explicit or implicit decision that European characteristics are significant, distinct, and therefore worth comparing with others. We will examine these decisions and implicit choices in turn.
Fourth, the sometimes explicit supposition but mostly implicit assumption is that the institutional basis and mechanisms of production and accumulation, exchange and distribution, and their functional operation are determined by “traditional” historical inheritance and/or other local, national, or regional developments. This kind of “analysis” does not even consider the possibility that the factors under consideration were local, national, or regional responses to participation in a single worldwide economic system and process. Yet as we have argued and demonstrated, accumulation, production, distribution, and their institutional forms throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas did adapt to and reflect their common interdependence. Certainly the institutional form and very lifeblood of all entrepots like Hormuz and Malacca, and most other ports and caravan crossroads was a function of their increasing and decreasing participation in the world economy. But so were their productive and commercial hinterlands. My study of Mexican agriculture from 1520 to 1630 showed how successive institutional forms of labor recruitment and organization were local responses to world economic and cyclical exigencies (Frank 1979): In chapters 2, 3, and 4 we observed analogous institutional adaptations and development on the Bengal frontier (Eaton 1993), South China (Marks 1997a), South East Asia (Lieberman 1995), and the Ottoman Empire (Islamoglu-Inan 1987). Even related “civilizational” or “cultural” variables are not so much determinant or independent, as they are themselves derivative from and dependent on the worldwide economic structure and process. All attempts to account for or explain local, national, or regional ripple developments primarily in terms of their respective supposedly cultural or class determinants are too limited in their purview. They neglect the fundamental world economic sea change, of which the local ones often are only superficial ripples and manifestations. In short, all attempts to account for features and factors of development on the basis only or even primarily of local antecedents and in the absence of their function in the world economy/system can result only in the neglect of factors that are essential to any satisfactory explanation.
Therefore, my fifth objection is that even the best comparative studies violate the canon of holism, for they do not study the global whole and the world economy/system from which the factors to be compared are or may be derivative. That is, we also need to construct a holistic theory and analysis of this global economy and world system, as well as of its own operation and transformation, for these also generate and shape the institutional forms themselves. A vivid illustration that we need such a completely different approach is the issue on new approaches to European history published in 1995 in the Turkish journal Metu. The journal offers a “Theory of the Rise of the West” by John A. Hall and a discussion by several Turkish colleagues. Hall (1995: 231–32) admits to “more than a touch of megalomania” in being “able to offer a completely new account” of the rise of the West in which he “is going to solve Max Weber's problem in entirely different terms.” He begins with his own examination of China and brief references to Islam and Hindu/Buddhist India, which he still compares unfavorably with Europe, as he had earlier (Hall 1985). Economic development allegedly was impossible in China because of the imperial state, in India because of the Hindu caste system, and under Islam because of nomadic pastoral tribalism. All allegedly lacked the unique European state and interstate system. So Hall reverts to the same old argument about European exceptionalism, except that he gives the latter a slightly new twist. One of his Turkish commentators makes “rather a defense of Mr. Hall. I think most of the counter-arguments base themselves on a certain misunderstanding” (Metu 1995: 251). Alas, the “counterarguments” of his Turkish colleagues do no more than take exception to some of Hall's European exceptionalism and comparisons. They themselves have no alternative explanation or even an approach to offer, least of all a holistic one that would not just compare but relate Europeans and Ottomans within a single world system. We have only just begun this task here!
Finally, studies that compare “Western” and “Oriental” societies are therefore already vitiated by their choice of the features or factors to be compared, unless that choice is itself derived from the study of the whole world economy/system to begin with. And of course it is not. Indeed, the choice of the very features and factors to be compared is derived from focusing only on a part of the world, be that Britain, Europe, the West, or wherever. That is, the very design of the study, from Marx and Weber to Braudel and Wallerstein, suffers from the misplaced concreteness of looking for the explanandum with a magnifying glass or even a microscope but only under the European street light. The real task is first to take up a telescope to gain a holistic view of the global whole and its world economy/system. Only that can reveal what passive features, or more likely active factors, we then need to regard with greater care with a magnifying glass. To that task we turn in the discussion of implications in the second part of this chapter. But first, there are some more derivative conclusions about what not to do, because doing so prevents seeing history “as it really was”—in the global whole.
A EUROPEAN WORLD-SYSTEM OR A GLOBAL
ECONOMY?
Contrary to the mistaken allegations of Braudel and Wallerstein among so many others, our study also leads to the inevitable conclusion that early modern history was shaped by a long since operational world economy and not just by the expansion of a European world-system. I already demonstrated elsewhere how the model and theory of Braudel and Wallerstein is contradicted by their own evidence and analysis (Frank 1994, 1995). Much more overwhelming still is the historical evidence reviewed throughout the present book: Chapter 2 shows how the worldwide division of labor was made operational through chain-linked trade relations and (im)balances. Chapter 3 shows how money was the lifeblood that went through a circulatory system all the way around the world and made the world go round. Chapter 4 shows not only that Asia was preponderant in this global economy, but also argues that its technology and economic institutions and processes were derivative from and adaptive to the world economy itself. Chapter 5 shows how common cyclical and other processes simultaneously shaped the fortunes and misfortunes of distant but interlinked economies, regions, and polities around the world. Chapter 6 seeks to analyze how the structure and transformation of these links themselves generated the related “Decline of the East” and “Rise of the West.” Therefore it is only vain Eurocentrism to seek to account for or hope to explain any of these events, processes, and their relations within the framework of either “national” economies/societies or even by the expansion of only a “European world-system.”
Therefore, the real world economy/system also cannot be squeezed into the procrustean structure of Wallerstein's European-centered “modern world-system,” for the globe-encompassing world economy/ system did not have a single center but at most a hierarchy of centers, probably with China at the top. Therefore, it would also be difficult to establish the existence of a single-centered structure of center-periphery relations although there is evidence of such relations on intraregional and perhaps on some interregional bases. It is doubtful that there were “semi-peripheries” in Wallerstein's sense; but it has never been very clear just what that they are supposed to be.
Yet the possible countercharge that therefore there really was no such (whole) world economy/system is not acceptable. On the contrary, there clearly was a world economy/system, and indeed only one. It had a global division of labor and commercial and financial linkages, especially through the worldwide money market. Moreover, this world economy/system appears also to have had a global structure and dynamic of its own, which still bears much more study. Thus this third conclusion about the global economy is entirely consistent not only with the historical evidence but also with the first two conclusions.
1500: CONTINUITY OR BREAK?
Another and derivative but inescapable conclusion is that the alleged break before and after 1500 never took place. Historians often mark a break in “world” history in 1500 (see for example Stavarianos 1966, Reilly 1989). Even Bentley's (1996) innovative proposals to derive “periodization” in world history not just from European but from worldwide processes still marks 1500 as the beginning of the last period. Historians and social theorists of Europe, both of earlier generations as well as contemporaries, mark this same break. So do world-system theorists like Wallerstein (1974), Sanderson (1995), and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997). The allegation that there was a sharp break around 1500 was already reflected in the opinions of both Adam Smith and Marx that 1492 and 1498 were the most important years in the history of mankind. Perhaps they were directly so for the peoples of the New World and indirectly so for those of Europe. However, Braudel (1992: 57) disputed Wallerstein's allegation of this break in Europe, where Braudel saw continuity since at least 1300 and even from 1100.
Indeed, even Wallerstein (1992) refers to the widespread agreement that an expansive long “A” phase from 1050 to 1250 was followed by a contractive “B” phase from 1250 to 1450 and then after that by still another expansive “A” phase in the “long sixteenth century” from 1450 until 1640. The evidence above, however, suggests that this long expansive phase had already begun in much of Asia by 1400—and that it lasted there until at least 1750. Wallerstein's European “long sixteenth century” probably was a belated and more temporary expression of this world economic expansion. Indeed, the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama should probably be regarded as expressions of this world economic expansion, to which Europeans wanted to attach themselves in Asia. Therefore, the continuity across 1500 was actually far more important and is theoretically far more significant than any alleged break or new departure.
Thus I suggest that it is not appropriate or even necessary, as the common argument has it, to regard early modern and contemporary history as the result and/or as the harbinger of a significant historical break. The widespread discontinuity theses are far less a contribution, let alone a necessity, and far more an impediment to understanding the real world historical process and contemporary reality. These misleading discontinuity theses have been presented in various forms, including the “birth of capitalism,” “the Rise of the West,” “the incorporation of Asia into the European world-economy,” not to mention the West's alleged “rationalism” and “civilizing mission.” I prefer to leave for philosophical consideration by others elsewhere whether or not modern and contemporary history is a vehicle or manifestation of “progress,” unilinear or otherwise.
Here, I prefer to reconsider and question the scientific validity or analytic usefulness here in Europe or there in Asia of such time-related concepts and terms as “protocapitalism” or “protoindustrialization,” or for that matter such “quantitative” ones as “petty-capitalism,” “semifeudalism” or “protosocialism.” The endless disputations about the alleged transitions from one to another of these categories at particular but different times in any part the world is literally a blind alley which cannot possibly lead to even the faintest enlightenment. For only the study of the continuing structure and dynamic of the one and only world (system) can illuminate the hows, whys, and wherefores of the “development,” “rise,” or “fall” of any part of the world (system), be it in Europe, America, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and/or any part thereof.
CAPITALISM?
Of late (that is, since Marx), the “fascination,” as Braudel (1982: 54) called it, with 1500 as the date of a new departure that makes a supposed break with the past is mostly a function of the allegation that it ushered in a new, previously unknown or at least never before dominant, “capitalist mode of production.” That was of course the position from Marx and Sombart to Weber and Tawney, and it is still shared by their many contemporary followers. This is still the position of world-system theorists from Wallerstein (1974) and Frank (1978a) to Sanderson (1995) and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997). Even Amin's (1991, 1993) and Blaut's (1993a, 1997) vehement critiques of Eurocentrism stop short of abandoning 1500 as the dawn of a new age of European-born (and European-borne) capitalism. All of the above Marxists, Weberians, Polanyists, world-systematizers, not to mention most “economic” and other historians, balk at pursuing the evidence and the argument to examine the sacred cow of capitalism and its allegedly peculiarly exceptional or exceptionally peculiar “mode of production.”
Therefore, the mere suggestion that perhaps this conviction might or even should be open to question is already rejected as unacceptable heresy. Having already broached this heresy to little effect before (Frank 1991a,b, Frank and Gills 1993), there is little point in trying to pursue the argument further here. Suffice it to point out that the same evidence and argument that support the first four conclusions outlined above also have implications for the idea of “capitalism.” These conclusions deny the AMP and European exceptionalism, but affirm a world economy and its continuity across 1500. Yet world-system theorists and Blaut accept the first two conclusions about the AMP and European exceptionalism, but reject the next two (which affirm the continuity of a global economy and deny the break in 1500). Braudel in turn also denies the break in 1500 and de facto recognizes a global economy, even if it does not fit it into his model of a “European world-economy.” Yet all four of these conclusions inexorably render questionable to say the least the very concept of a “capitalist mode of production” and the supposed significance of its alleged spread from Europe to the rest of the world. Indeed, these first four conclusions question the very significance imputed to different “modes of production,” of course including “feudalism” and “capitalism,” not to mention any alleged “transition” between them. To begin with, these categories were derived from narrow “societal” or even national blinkers. Since then, this received conceptualization has continued to divert our attention away from the much more significant world systemic structures and processes, which themselves engendered the organizational forms that were then misleadingly termed “feudal” and “capitalist” “modes of production.”
As we have observed, not only was there no unilinear “progression” from one “mode” of production to another; but all manner of relations of production were and remain widely intermingled even within any one “society,” not to mention world society as a whole. Many different relations of production have “delivered” products that have been competitive on the world market. However, it has not been so much one relation or another, and still less any “mode,” of production that has determined the success and failure of particular producers. Instead, competitive pressures and exigencies on the world market have been and continue to be much more determinant of the choice and adaptation of relations of production themselves.
The incessant discussions about non-, pre-, proto-, blooming-, full blown-, declining-, post-, or any other “stage” and quantity or quality of capitalism or the lack thereof have led us down the garden path and diverted us from analyzing the real world. A recent example was mentioned in chapter 1: Gates in her (1996) China's Motor does very well to examine the relations between commercialism and patriarchy for a thousand years. However, her continued insistence on using the categories of “the tributary and petty capitalist modes of production” and their uneasy relations handicaps instead of illuminates her analysis of the real world issues.
The review of van Zanden's “merchant capitalism” in chapter 1 also rebuts the contention that it represented a distinctive “articulation of modes of production” between “non-capitalist” modes of reproduction and use of labor “outside the system” and others inside the “world market” of the “world-economy.” However, the hidden but most revealing aspect of this discussion is that, irrespective of which side of the arguments the discussants support, they all recur to these terms (quoted above) again and again. But they all use them without quotation marks, because they largely agree on the meaning and referents of what is allegedly excluded by these terms. Indeed, van Zanden and others even name several of them: slaves, peasants, those who work at home in cottage industry, in West Africa, and in East Asia (van Zanden 1997: 260). In this discussion and the related literature it refers to, all of these producers and even traders remain outside the universe of discourse in which “admittedly, the Dutch Republic became the largest staple market the world had even known”; so “Amsterdam was both the central warehouse of world commerce and the pivotal money and capital market of the European world-economy's control booth” (Lis and Soly 1997: 233, 211, 222). Of course in the real world economy, Amsterdam and the Netherlands were none of the above. But for all these discussants on the topic of “modes of production,” the real world economy—of which Amsterdam was but an outpost—does not exist.
Indeed, Wallerstein's (1997: 244) intervention even stresses “let us not quibble about the unit of analysis”! But the most important issue in this whole discussion is precisely the unit of analysis, which all of the participants disregard—that is, the world economy and not their little European one. The moment we recognize that, the whole discussion about “modes of production” more than pales into insignificance and irrelevance: it becomes instead no more than a distraction from the real issue, which is the holistic analysis of the whole that all these discussants are so intent on avoiding.
Therefore, it is much better to cut (out) the Gordian knot of “capitalism” altogether. That was my argument in Frank (1991a, b), Frank and Gills (1992, 1993), and Frank (1994, 1995); and it is well put by Chaudhuri (1990a: 84) writing under the title Asia Before Europe: “The ceaseless quest of modern historians looking for the ‘origins' and roots of capitalism is not much better than the alchemist's search for the philosopher's stone that transforms base metal into gold.” Indeed, that is the case not only for the origins and roots, but the very existence and meaning of “capitalism.” So, best just forget about it, and get on with our inquiry into the reality of universal history.
HEGEMONY?
The notion of European followed by Western “hegemony” over the rest of the world is implicit in most historical, social “scientific,” and popularizing writing and perception. Political hegemony is explicit in much recent international relations literature, from Krasner (1983) and Keohene (1983) to Modelski and Thompson (1988, 1996). Economic hegemony is explicit in Wallerstein and his followers. I have expressed doubts about the dubious theoretical status of such hegemony before (Frank and Gills 1992, 1993; Frank 1994, 1995). The evidence presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 is enough to lay to rest any claim to historical veracity of any such political, economic, or political economic, or indeed cultural, hegemony of a (whole) world scope by any part or even by the whole of Europe before 1800. At no time during the four centuries under review was any economy or state able to exercise any significant degree of hegemony, or even leadership, over the economy, political relations, culture, or history of the world as whole. If the world economy had any regional productive and commercial basis at all, that was in Asia and it was centered if at all in China. Europe was to all intents and purposes entirely marginal.
Still less was any part of Europe able to exercise any hegemonic power or even economic leadership in or over the world. This was certainly not possible for the Iberian Peninsula or little Portugal with one million inhabitants in the sixteenth century, nor for the small Netherlands in the seventeenth century, nor even for “Great” Britain in the eighteenth century. The very notion of such economic leadership or political power or even balance of power (as for example after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) is itself only the effect of an optical illusion from the myopic perspective of a “European world-economy/system.” It is just plain Eurocentrism. Arguably, the above-mentioned economies and/or states may have been successively relatively big fish in the small European and/or the regional Atlantic economic pond—that is, if we discount the Hapsburg, Russian, and other empires. However on the evidence, the European and even Atlantic economies, not to mention their polities, were no more than backwaters in the world economy. They did not even exercise significant technological leadership. The European states were altogether small-time players on the political checkerboard of the empires of the Ming/Qing, Mughals, Ottomans, and even the Safavids. In the face of the evidence, should we not review and revise the entire concept of “hegemony”?
THE RISE OF THE WEST AND THE
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
How then did the West rise, if there was nothing exceptional about it or its mode of production and it did not even entertain any hopes of hegemony before 1800? The inescapable conclusion is that there must have been some other factors at work or that some as yet unspecified circumstances let or made these factors work within them. We have seen that most efforts to address this question have heretofore suffered from misplaced concreteness, because they looked for these factors only under the European street light. Yet since the West was part and parcel of the global world economy, the West could not rise on its own or by itself. Instead, any such Western rise must have been within the world economy itself. Therefore, it is useless to look for the causes of this rise only or even primarily in the West or in any part of it—unless the “use” for doing so is only ideological, that is to pat oneself on the back and put all others down as incompetent.
The implication of the preceding six conclusions and the evidence from which they were derived is that the entire question of “the Rise of the West” must be reconceptualized and rephrased. The evidence suggests that the question must be addressed to the whole world economy/system itself and not just to any British, European, Western, and/ or now East Asian part of the same. I know that I will lay myself open to the charge of circular reasoning if I point out as well that the historical evidence is not compatible with any of the many singular or multiple European/Western “causes” of its rise. Yet, it is not for nothing that the industrial revolution was already a thrice-squeezed orange almost a century ago and yields still enough juice for interminable controversies—within the narrow paradigm of a British or European process or event.
Therefore in Europe, “the Rise of the West” was not a case of pulling itself up by its own bootstraps. More properly, “the Rise of the West” must be seen as occurring at that time in the world economy/system by engaging in import substitution and export promotion strategies (in the style of Newly Industrializing Economies) to climb up on the shoulders of the Asian economies. The (cyclical?) decline of Asian economies and regional hegemonies, facilitated this European climb up. The thesis of Rostow and others that there was a sudden jump in the British rate of capital accumulation has long since been disconfirmed.
The only solution is to cut the Eurocentric Gordian knot and approach the whole question from a different paradigmatic perspective. That is a fortiori the case if we consider the further controversy about whether there was even an industrial “revolution” or only an “evolution” and expansion—which was world economic.
EMPTY CATEGORIES
AND PROCRUSTEAN BEDS
I hope I may be permitted to add that both the evidence reviewed above and the more holistic approach invoked in analyzing it here, suggest some additional conclusions about what not to do. Both historiography and social theory, not to mention good common sense, have suffered far too much already from the most arcane attempts to fit the Asian evidence into the procrustean beds of received (Eurocentric) theories and models. These have, as noted above, been largely devoid of empirical content and scientific sense even in their European origins. The attempts to extend them elsewhere has been even more nefarious. Thus for instance, there have been long-winded debates about the evidence for and against the AMP, including quite recently a series of contributions by Chinese scholars edited by Brook (1989) on The Asiatic Mode of Production in China. Similarly, there have been incessant debates, far too many even to name, about feudalism here or there, then and now. The opposite side of the same coin was the ongoing debate about capitalism and whether it was indigenous or imported/imposed, promoted, constrained, or even eliminated in Asia by the coming of European colonialism and imperialism. We noted in chapter 2 how adherence to these empty categories and procrustean beds vitiated Soviet research on its regions in Central Asia.
Latter-day analogies are questions about whether and when the “European modern world-economy/system” incorporated, marginalized, and/or bypassed this or that part of Asia and Africa. Recently for instance, Pearson (1989) devoted an entire book to squeezing India into or yanking it out of the procrustean bed of Wallerstein's European world-economy. That leads Pearson into considerations of how that “world-economy” is or is not bounded by the trade of “necessities” and/or “luxuries” and which commodities do or do not qualify for which of these denominations. That in turn defines the boundaries of the European world-economy, what these boundaries were or were-not at different times, and whether the Indian Ocean itself qualifies or not as a “world-economy” of its own. Debating the necessities/ luxuries question is a waste of time generated by a worse than useless distinction, which has already been disposed of by archaeologists such as Schneider (1977) for earlier times; for reviews see Frank and Gills (1993) and Frank (1993a). Useless also is the distinctions between world-systems and world-empires, and the attempts to squeeze parts of the real world into these categories (Frank 1993a).
Downright alarming is the question that Pearson, and also Palat and Wallerstein (1990), ask about when the “European world-economy” “incorporated” India and the Indian Ocean and its possible separate “world-economy.” This question is analogous to the one about when you stopped beating your wife (the answer is “I am not married”). The whole question is literally neither here nor there, since there was no “European world-economy” separate from an “Indian Ocean world-economy.” If anything, the latter “incorporated” the former and not the other way around (Frank 1994, 1995). Pearson and others are looking under the European street light, when they should be looking for illumination in the Asian parts of the world economy. The only “answer” is to understand that Europe and Asia, and of course other parts of the world as well, had been part and parcel of the same single world economy since ages ago, and that it was their common participation in it that shaped their “separate” fortunes.
Each and all of these debates make sense only in terms of the “AMP,” “feudalism/capitalism,” “world-system” categories of received theories. Yet these categories themselves are not only procrustean beds. They are also useless for the analysis and understanding of world history. Their only real use has been strictly ideological. The debates they generated are analogous to those about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The wrong answer sometimes led to the stake and fire or the firing squad. But the “right” answer leads nowhere, at least on scientific grounds. Indeed, these categories are worse than scientifically useless, since their very use diverts us from any real analysis and understanding of world reality. The only solution is to cut the Gordian knot altogether and divest ourselves of all these useless Eurocentric categories, which only lead to arcane debates and blind us to the real historical process.
In view of my past work, of special interest to me and perhaps to many of my readers are the notions of “development,” “modernization,” “capitalism,” and even “dependence,” or call it what you will. All are procrustean and empty categories; because the original sin of Marx, Weber, and their followers was to look for the “origin,” “cause,” “nature,” “mechanism,” indeed the “essence” of it all essentially in European exceptionalism instead of in the real world economy/system. All of these allegedly essential exceptionalisms, whatever their name, were derived from the same Eurocentric perspective that, on the evidence reviewed in this book, has absolutely no foundation in historical reality—that is in “universal” history, “as it really was.” They were all derived only from European/Western ethnocentrism, which was propagated around the world—West and East, North and South—as part and parcel of Western colonialism and cultural imperialism.
The Western version can be encapsulated in a selection or combination of received-theory tides, like “The Stages of Economic Growth” from “The Passing of Traditional Society” to “The Achieving Society” (Rostow 1962, Lerner 1958, McClelland 1961). “Development” by “modernization” was doing “it my way” as in the Frank Sinatra song. “Dependence” was one reaction that denied the efficacy of that way, only to allege that “delinking” might offer another way—to do essentially the same thing, as I only recently recognized under the tide “The Underdevelopment of Development” (Frank 1991c, 1996).
The “Eastern”—and alas also the Western Marxist—version was to debate essentially the same thing under the terminology “the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” That debate was even more sterile than the Western one if only because it involved (literally) interminable disputes about the categories of “capitalism” and “feudalism” and “socialism” and so on, and whether this or that local, regional, national, sectoral, or whatever piece of “reality” does or does not fit into the procrustean category. Of course, since these categories are really empty—that is, devoid of any real world meaning—these debates must be interminable until we divest ourselves of the categories themselves. This should be obvious, except that the categories themselves often prevent the debaters from seeing reality as it really was. And when they did do so, they tried to stretch, bend, and combine the categories to accommodate that reality. All manner of variations and combinations of “semifeudal,” “precapitalist,” “noncapitalist,” and “protosocialist” “articulation of modes of production” were invented that might offer a “nonaligned,” “third,” or any other way to replicate or not what the West did or how it did it. (The same categories in turn constrained Marxists, “neo-Marxists,” and dependency theorists to debate whether “capitalism” is or is not the “right”—or “left”—way to go.) Bergesen (1995) rightly argues that it is equally futile to stretch the procrustean category of the Euro- or Western-centric “modern capitalist world-system,” and/or to try to manipulate reality to fit into the Wallersteinian procrustean bed. On the evidence reviewed here, we must agree.
This entire “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” debate is derived from the original sin of European ethnocentrism. That was enshrined in and as social “science” by Marx, Weber, and their myriad of followers who plod the straight and narrow path of “development”—or even those who rebelled against and bolted from it. However, all their vision was—and alas mostly still remains—confined by the same Eurocentric blinkers, which prevent them from seeing the whole real world out there. Sadly and worse still, non-Westerners have imbibed and sometime choked on much of the same Eurocentric (non) “scientific” misreading of both world and their own history. That has perhaps been most dramatically visible in the debates—and persecutions—about “Marxist” orthodoxy in Russia and its colonized Central Asia (see chapter 2), China (Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, Gang of Four, “black and white cats”), India (with its varieties of communist parties and intellectuals), the “Arab” world, Africa, and Latin America.
Not that any or all of these are devoid of their own ethnocentrism. Paradoxically, ethnocentrism itself appears to be universal and also to appear universally, or at least to be universally exacerbated by political economic crisis. It is only that most other ethnocentrisms have not lately had the same opportunities to spread, let alone to impose themselves. The Western ones have, by force of their money and arms. The Marxist ones were propagated in reaction to the former and with the support of Soviet and Chinese power. In reaction to both and to political economic crisis, Afro-, Hindu-, Islamo-, yes and also again Russo-, Sino-, and other ethnocentrisms are spreading now and offer salvation through the “Sinatra” doctrine: “Do It My Way” or “To Each His/Her Own.” Many will welcome at least some of these as antidotes to the poison of Euro/Western-centrism. However, they are no remedy-unity in diversity is the only remedy!
There is no way to see what happens at a distance anywhere else inlet alone in all—the world by using a European or Chinese or any other microscopic perspective. On the contrary, any of these views is possible only with a telescopic perspective capable of encompassing the whole world and all its parts, even if the details of the latter may remain unclear from afar. Not only are all perspectives in terms of European or any other “exceptionalism” doomed to blindness. So are those using the perspective of a European-based world-economy/system (or any Sino-, Islamic-, or Afrocentric analogues thereof). The very attempt to find the “development of capitalism” or “the Rise of the West” “or the Islamic golden age” under the light shed by a European (or Chinese or Muslim) street light only blinds the onlooker.
For history and social theory therefore, the most important and neglected task is to attend to the posthumously published plea of Joseph Fletcher to do integrative “horizontal” macrohistory and analysis. His plea is a modest effort to help remedy this neglect for the early modern period from 1500 to 1800. Recall that the world-renowned historian Leopold von Ranke called for a study of history “as it really was.” However, Ranke also said that “there is no history but universal history.” Only world history can show how it really was. But there is no way to understand world history—or even any part of it—without abandoning the blinkers of the Eurocentric tunnel vision, which still so confine us to darkness, for there is no light at the end of that Eurocentric tunnel. The proverbial joke has it that you can't find your lost watch just because the lamppost you are looking under provides some light. In this case however, not only was the watch lost elsewhere, but the brighter light under which to find it is also elsewhere. And that is no joke.
In conclusion, what we need is a much more global, holistic world economic/systemic perspective and theory. That may permit seeing first that “the decline of the East preceded the Rise of the West,” then how the two may have been related, and finally why the world economic/ systemic shift took place. The latter has been microscopically misperceived as a process that was allegedly “internal” to the West, when it should be telescopically viewed as a worldwide process. So, this catalog of eight relatively easy to draw historiographic and theoretical conclusions about which received propositions have no basis in the evidence leads to the much more difficult task of drawing implications for the construction of a theory and analysis that is or at least could be compatible with the evidence.
Theoretical Implications: Through the Global
Looking Glass
If received social theory is unsatisfactory because it is based on bad Eurocentric historiography, then what? The obvious answer is to start by doing better—non-Eurocentric—history. But to do that, we seem also to need a better—more holistic—perspective, if not theory. Braudel and Wallerstein's, and Frank's (1978a), “world-economy/system” took a step in the right direction by biting off a bigger part of the whole than earlier “national” “societal” histories and theories did. However, as we have seen, they did not go nearly far enough and have themselves now become an obstacle to going further. John Voll's (1994) article on an Islamic-centered world system might seem to be a step in the right direction; however, it is only a very small step and is itself excessively ideological and confined to Muslim ideology. Afrocentrism, alas, is nothing more than ideology. Hamashita's China-centered tribute trade system (1988) might seem another step in the right direction. So is the discourse by Chaudhuri and others about an Indian Ocean world-economy and Reid's work on the Southeast Asian world. Yet, as the preceding chapters have shown, all of these welcome initiatives are still too limited because they are too limiting. All of these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are necessary components of the whole picture. However, none of them individually nor even all of them put together can ever reveal the whole, since the whole is more than the sum of its parts—and shapes the parts themselves!
Only a holistic universal, global, world history—“as it really was”—can offer the historiographic basis for a better social theory. Maybe such a holistic history itself needs to be informed by elements of a more holistic alternative social theory. Both will have to deal better with the historiographic and theoretical problems broached below, which, among others, continue to be disputed.
HOLISM VS. PARTIALISM
The currently fashionable “globalization” thesis has it that the 1990s mark a new departure in this worldwide process. Grudgingly, some observers see the same since 1945 or even during the entire twentieth century, or at the very most since the nineteenth century. Yet, this book demonstrates that globalism (even more than globalization) was a fact of life since at least 1500 for the whole world, excepting a very few sparsely settled islands in the Pacific (though only for a little while). A few observers, like McNeill (1963, 1990), Hodgson (1993), Wilkinson (1987, 1993), Frank and Gills (1993), and Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997) argue that at least a Afro-Eurasian “eucumene” or “central world system” was already functioning as a single unit long before that.
So, how to regard this global whole holistically, be it before or after 1500? In previous writings (Frank and Gills 1993), I have suggested the analogy of a three-legged stool. It rests equally on ecological/economic/ technological, political/military power, and social/cultural/ideological legs. The most neglected of these, also in my own work, has been the ecological component. After that, the most neglected basis has been the economic one, “economic history” notwithstanding. The political economic structure of the world economy/system requires far more study than it has received. Economic historians have neglected it altogether. Economists have mistaken it for “international” economic relations among nonexistent “national” economies. Students of international (political) relations have done what they say, that is, study relations among “nation” states as their basic building blocks. world-system analysts have confined themselves to only a small part of the real world economy/system before 1750 centered on Europe. That was something but not much more than what historians and political economists were already doing. Students of East, Southeast, South, West, not to mention Central Asia and Africa, have rarely sought to fit their regions into a wider economy. Even when they have done so, their endeavors have also been mostly European-centered. The recent exceptions are Chaudhuri (1991) and Abu-Lughod (1989), whose limitations we noted above. Therefore, lacking sufficient pioneers to follow and build on, this book has also been able take no more than a few preliminary steps to looking at the world economy as a whole. Far more work is needed, but from a really globally holistic world systemic perspective, not just from this or that regional, including the European regional, limitation. Moreover, the discussion here has itself been very limited to only the economic part of the ecological/economic/technological leg, and makes scarce mention even of the other two legs, let alone how to combine them in a global analysis.
COMMONALITY/SIMILARITY VS. SPECIFICITY/
DIFFERENCES
Historians in particular, and social theorists in general, are wont to identify and stress the specific and unique particularist features of every “civilization,” “culture,” or “society” and their respective historical processes and events. That is the stock-in-trade of historians, especially when they are socially and economically supported and encouraged to do “national” and local history for ideological and political reasons “of state.” Social scientists are supposed to devote more efforts to making generalizations. Yet much of their ideal type and comparative practice, not to mention their disciplinary divisions, lead them also to stress specificities and differences more than commonalities and similarities in the “object,” and all the more so in the “subject,” of their study. When pressed, most social scientists will de facto, if not also de jure, contend that differences matter more than commonalities and similarities, and that it is their job to study the former more than the latter. Otherwise, they also could not engage in their favorite “comparative” multivariate and factor analysis.
One implication of this review of early modern world history is rather the opposite: commonalities are both more common and more important even than the real differences, not to mention the many alleged differences that are not even real. Many alleged differences—“the East is East, and the West is West; and never the twain shall meet”—are at best superficial institutional and/or “cultural” manifestations of the same essential junctional structure and process. At worst, like this well-known quote from Rudyard Kipling, they are purely ideological fig leafs for the exercise of crass political economic colonial interests.
Even more important however, what emerges from our review of early modern world economic history is that many of the specific “differences” are themselves generated by structured interaction in a common world economy/system. Far from being appropriate or necessary to understanding this or that specificity here or there, differentiation then becomes an obstacle to accounting for and comprehending it. Only a holistic perspective on and from the global whole that is more than the sum of its parts can offer any adequate comprehension of any one part and how and why it differs from any other! Alas, this real-world circumstance very much limits the scientific—as distinct from the ideological—usefulness of successive local or national histories. It also poses serious limitations to time-series and cross-sectional comparative analyses, which are restricted to an arbitrarily selected, that is differentiated, process. All of these multivariate “factor” analyses, and even more so the identification of supposed specific “features” of this or that factor, violate the scientific canons of holism and therefore miss the global real-world boat. No doubt however, combining historiographic particularism and/or scientific “control” of variables with truly holistic analysis is easier said than done. Alas, hardly anyone even tries or is conscious that it should be done!
CONTINUITY VS. DISCONTINUITIES
A most particular contention about historical “particularity” is the widespread notion that the present and/or the recent past marks a discontinuous new departure. As already noted, the latest such fad is the alleged novelty of “globalization.” Most particularly, this view also supposes a major historical discontinuity between medieval and modern times. There may be disputes about whether this discontinuity dates from A.D. 1100, 1300, 1500, or 1800; but there is widespread agreement that the world historical process changed radically and qualitatively thanks to “the Rise of the West”—and capitalism.
The argument here has been that historical continuity has been far more important than any and all discontinuities. The perception of a major new departure, which allegedly spells a discontinuous break in world history, is substantially (mis)informed by the Eurocentric vantage point. Once we abandon this Eurocentrism and adopt a more globally holistic world or even pan-Eurasian perspective, discontinuity is replaced by far more continuity. Or the other way around? Once we look upon the whole world more holistically, historical continuity looms much larger, especially in Asia. Indeed as suggested in the preceding chapters, the very “Rise of the West” and the renewed “Rise of the East” then appear derived from this global historical continuity.
Received theory attributes the industrial revolution and “the Rise of the West” to its alleged “exceptionality” and “superiority.” The source of these alleged attributions is sought in turn in the also alleged longstanding or even primeval Western “preparation” for takeoff. This contention mistakes the place and misplaces the “concreteness” of continuity and transformation by looking for them in Europe itself. Yet the “causes” of the transformation can never be understood as long as they are examined only under the European street light, instead of seeking them under worldwide global illumination in the system as a whole.
For, the comparative and relational real-world historical evidence examined above shows that, contrary to received historiography and social theory, it was not the alleged prior European “development” that poised it for takeoff after 1800. That is, the rise of the West after 1800 was not really the result of the its “continuous” European preparation since the Renaissance, let alone thanks to any Greek or Judaic roots thereof. Indeed, industrialization was not even the continued outgrowth of European “proto-industrialization.” The same process did not generate the same outcome in Asia and especially in China, where proto-industrialization was even more developed, as Pomeranz (1997) and Wong (1997) show to support their similar arguments that the industrial revolution was a new and distinct departure, to whose explanation we must bring other factors to bear.
The industrial revolution was an unforeseen event, which took place in a part of Europe as a result of the continuing unequal structure and uneven process in and of the world economy as a whole. That process of world development, however, also includes new departures in some of its regions and sectors that may appear discontinuous. It may indeed be the case that the industrial revolution, like the agricultural one before it, was an inflection in a continuous global development, which marks a “departure” in a vector and direction that is different from the previous one and is perhaps irreversible—short of total cataclysm, which may itself lie at the end of that vector. Thus, the systemic global structure and continuity that generated the rise of the West marked a departure in the West, which did not continue its earlier marginal position. Instead, there was a discontinuous departure of the global economy into a more industrial direction and a shift in the position of the West within the world economic system as a whole.
East Asia's rise to world economic prominence makes it all the more urgent to focus on the long historical continuity of which this process is a part. The now supposed discontinuous but really renewed rise of the East must also be seen as part and parcel of the fundamental structure and continuity in world development. Recognizing and analyzing this continuity will reveal much more than by myopically focusing on the alleged discontinuities. Perhaps it would be better to refer to two major early modern “inflections” in an essentially continuous historical process and dynamic within the same world economy and system: One was the Columbian exchange after the incorporation of the New World into the old one after 1500. The other was the “exchange” of demographic and economic productivity growth rates and perhaps of ecological pressures on resources between Asia and Europe, which generated the industrial revolution around 1800. Both, however, were only inflections generated by a process of world economic development. In both cases, Europeans were acting more as instruments than as initiators of global development.
HORIZONTAL INTEGRATION VS. VERTICAL
SEPARATION
Another methodological alternative is between doing the conventional vertical history through a tunnel of time in a specific smaller or larger locality or of a particular issue (for examples, the issues of politics, culture, or women) in a specific locality and doing instead, or at least also, the globally horizontal history and analysis recommended by the Fletcher (1985, 1995). He noted with dismay that most historians “are alert to vertical continuities (the persistence of tradition, etc.) but blind to horizontal ones…. At 1500 I see nothing but compartmentalized histories”(Fletcher 1985: 39, 40). This methodological perspective and its blinders have been made even worse by the introduction of “area studies” in American and other universities, which produce “a microhistorical, even parochial outlook” (Fletcher 1985: 39).
If this praxis is deficient, its elevation to theoretical and methodological guideline is even worse. In my (1978a) book, I took Perry Anderson to task for writing—and doing as if—“there is no such thing as a uniform temporal medium: for the times of the major Absolutism…were, precisely, enormously diverse…no single temporality covers it…. Their dates are the same: their times are separate” (Anderson 1974: 10). That perspective and theoretical orientation and Anderson's maxim are themselves a methodological guarantee for failure to understand any of the absolutisms or anything else whose “dates are the same.” I already sounded the alarm against “Anderson's apparent attempt to make historiographic virtue out of empirical necessity” in Frank (1978a). Instead I pleaded, as now repeated in chapter 5 above, that “the essential (because it is both the most necessary and the least accomplished) contribution of the historian to historical understanding is successively to relate different things and places at the same time in the historical process” (Frank 1978a: 21). That is methodologically analogous to and derivative from my maxims in the first three implications above regarding holism, commonality/similarity, and continuity.
Fletcher would make the same admonition, as cited in the epigraph to chapter 5, where he pleads for a “horizontally integrative macrohistory” of as much of the world as possible. “Its methodology is conceptually simple, if not easy to put into practice: first one searches for historical parallelism…and then one determines whether they are causally interrelated” (Fletcher 1985: 38). Alas, Fletcher did not live long enough to do so himself. However, Teggart (1939) had already undertaken to do so when he wrote Rome and China: A Study of Correlations in Historical Events. Yet even Braudel (1992), despite his exceptional sensitivity to “conjuncture,” “la longe duree” and “perspective of the world,” failed to do so regarding the events in 1762, 1772, and 1782, as noted in chapter 5. He analyzes them in different only vertically organized chapters, even though their worldwide simultaneity stared him in the face. Or at least it would have, if only he had organized his “perspective of the world” more horizontally and less vertically.
I did so for these same “dates” (to use Anderson's terminology) in my World Accumulation 1492–1789 (Frank 1978a) even before learning of what Teggart, Fletcher, or Braudel said and did. With the help of some additional data provided by Braudel, I proceeded further still in my critique of his book (Frank 1995) and again in chapter 5 above. It shows that, if we are only willing to look, each of the years 1762, 1772, and 1782 were marked by worldwide recessions that generated and can account for many of the economic and political events that Braudel, Wallerstein, and I observed. Yet they have occasioned countless books on the French, American, and industrial revolutions, which take no account of the cyclical instigation of these and other simultaneous events, nor of their worldwide relations.
Chapter 5 also makes some preliminary attempts to do the same for other “same times,” especially around 1640. It also offers an answer to Fletcher's (1985: 54) question, “Is there a general economic recession in the seventeenth century, or not? There seems to be a parallelism here.” Yet only an examination of this apparent horizontal parallelism permits an answer, and my tentative one is “No, there was no generalized ‘seventeenth-century crisis'.” Nonetheless, even a negative answer in this case lays the basis for the necessary horizontally integrative macro-historical study of what did happen, which in the seventeenth century seems to have been continued world economic growth and expansion. Of course, chapter 5 is no more than an isolated stab in the dark. What is really needed is a comprehensive, horizontally organized, global political economic macrohistory of simultaneous events, which is itself guided by the cyclical ups and downs that it should identify and analyze. Yet even before attempting that, it would be useful to pursue other more partial “horizontal” inquiries.
Fletcher himself poses several other such “parallelisms” for study in the early modern period from 1500 to 1800, including population growth, quickening tempo, growth of “regional” cities and towns, the rise of urban commercial classes (renascence), religious revival, and missionary movements (reformations), rural unrest, and decline of nomadism. Then he asks, “And other parallelisms? Are there not more? Unhappy landings” (Fletcher 1985: 56).
Some of these parallelisms have been partially addressed. Goldstone (1991a) undertook a major study of simultaneities in population growth as the basis for “demographic/structural” crises and their analysis. Wilkinson (1992, 1993), Bosworth (1995), and Chase-Dunn and Willard (1993) examined global horizontal simultaneities of urban growth to test Gills and Frank's (1992; also in Frank and Gills 1993) hypothesis about five-hundred-year-long cycles extending back long before 1500. Frank and Fuentes (1990, 1994) reviewed and found worldwide horizontal simultaneities of rural unrest as well as of various social movements (women's, peace, environment, consciousness, and so on) simultaneously in several Western countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All of these studies seem to uncover world-encompassing cyclical patterns, as do of course many studies that focus explicitly on cycles.
CYCLES VS. LINEARITY
It is frequently suggested that “Western” historiography, or at least its inclination, has gone from regarding life and history cyclically to perceiving it unilinearly and directionally through the “idea of progress.” This idea was expressed by Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and it was recently reiterated by Francis Fukuyama (1989, 1992) in his work on the “end” of history. The findings about parallel horizontal simultaneities and our review of the early modern world economy imply and suggest that we would do well, however, to return to a more cyclical perspective of early modern economic history and probably of all history.
Continuity need not be linear, and horizontal integration need not be uniform. On the contrary, the continuity of a systemic structure and dynamic seems to depend on and continually reproduce nonlinearity and nonuniformity, as recently and also universally demonstrated by chaos theory and analysis in the physical and natural sciences (Gleick 1987, Prigogine 1996). To our eyes, the nonuniformity may appear as disequality, as in center-periphery or class differences and relations. (The distinction between differences only and their relational causes or consequences is emphasized by Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997.) Analogously, a continuous process can—and apparently usually does—contain periods of acceleration, deceleration, and also temporary stability, only the last of which would be represented by a flat or even straight line. That is, continuous processes also pulsate, as chaos theory and Prigogine's (1996) analysis of The End of Certainty also stress. However, pulsations are not indications of discontinuity in the system and process. Instead they can be manifestations of the internal structure and dynamic mechanism that maintains the system and propels its continuity itself. The question becomes whether the apparent pulsations are really in fact cycles.
Cyclical motion seems to be a universal fact of existence, life, and being, which is manifested in many or all spheres of reality. It is found in physical and cosmological, biological and evolutionary, and indeed cultural and ideational realms. Perhaps that is why there is a Society for the Study of Cycles, any and all cycles. So why should we not also expect to find cyclical history in the social world and the world economy/system—if we only look for it? At least, we should be prepared to recognize it when we see it. Aristotle observed that social life seems to be cyclical, but that people who experience the cycle phases may not be aware of doing so because the phases may be longer than their own life spans.
Early modern economic history (as well as political and social history) displays all sorts of cycles, or at least apparently quite regular fluctuations and pulsations. We have identified some of them in this study, as Frank and Gills (1993) among others have sought to do also for some earlier ones. Moreover, the evidence and the argument here are that these cycles are world-embracing and, at least in Afro-Eurasia, have existed for millennia (Frank 1993a).
The importance of these cycles, and of their recognition and analysis, is that they generate possibilities and constraints or limitations for social action, economic, political, cultural, ideological, and so on. The rising tide of an expansive “A” phase tends to lift all boats, enhance their range, and facilitate their steering and management. It also extends and encourages unifying relations among them, although it does not guarantee that some boats will not also sink at the best of times. A receding tide of a contracting “B” phase, not to mention its deepest crisis, constrains these same possibilities and imposes limitations on social action and sinks many more boats. It also tends to fractionate political economic and sociocultural “units” among and within each other. Such breakdown of previous relations may then appear to be a breakdown of the world economy/system as a whole, and at that moment might also signify or “prove” the “nonexistence” of any such system.
Yet the resultant involution or even implosion is really a function of participation in the larger world economy/system rather than of the lack of it, as it might appear from the more inward-looking and limiting perspective of that particular time and place. Therefore also, fractionating involution makes it appear that social action is more “inwardly” generated and oriented in “B” phases and more “externally” influenced in the more relational and expansive “A” phases. Yet in reality, both are a function of the structure and dynamic of the world economy/system itself. It stands to reason (rather than to crisis-generated emotion) that any awareness of the structural advantages of “A” and disadvantages of “B” phases can enhance the ability of social (and especially political) actors to manage themselves and their “society” at each of these times.
The structure and process of the world economy/system is complicated much further still by shorter cycles, insofar as they nest within longer ones. Schumpeter (1939) tried to analyze the relations among economic cycles of about three to four, ten, and fifty years' duration. However, he was far too schematic as far as he went, and he did not even consider the possibility of twenty-year-long (Kuznets 1930) cycles, not to mention Cameron's (1973) two-hundred-year-long “logistics” or Snooks's (1996) three-hundred-year-long cycles, nor the Gills and Frank's (1992; also in Frank and Gills 1993) five-hundred-year-long cycles. The nesting of shorter cycles and their phases within longer ones complicates the identification and influences of their respective phases; but it does not mean that these cycles cannot or do not exist and matter.
On the contrary, the existence of any such cycles means that we are all in the same world economic boat at the same time and are subjected to the same forces and events at the same time. These forces themselves have their own ups and downs, which simultaneously and apparently cyclically tend to lift all boats on a rising tide at one time, and to lower them again at another. Therefore, by and large the possibilities open to “economies”—really parts of the single world economy—and to their associated polities are greater, better, and easier during upward “A” phase “good times” than during the succeeding downward “B”-phase “bad times.”
However, the Chinese meaning of “crisis” is a combination of danger and opportunity. Thus a time of crisis, especially for the previously best-placed part of the world economy/system, also opens a window of opportunity for some—not all!—more peripherally or marginally placed ones to improve their own position within the system as a whole. (For general analyses, see Frank and Gills 1993 and Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997.) We observe how this is the case with the East Asian NIEs today, as it was for West European ones two centuries ago. The analysis of this process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is beyond the scope of this book, which deals only with the early modern world economy.
However, even the above more than usually holistic review of the 1400–1800 period serves to show that we can account for and understand the subsequent “Rise of the West” only within the world economic/systemic scope within which it really took place. Moreover, this world systemic process included “the Decline of the East” as a conditioning factor, if not as the precondition, for “the Rise of the West,” which displaced the East within the same one and only world economy/ system.
This book has only begun to suggest three very preliminary world economic reasons and analyses for this “exchange”: One is the hypothesis about microeconomic demand and supply for labor and capital-saving and energy-generating technology to help account for the industrial revolution that was temporarily located in parts of the West. Another is the long-cycle macroeconomic hypothesis, according to which the East “declined” as part of the structure, operation, and transformation of the world economy/system itself. The third explanation combines the other two in a demographic/economic/ecological analysis of the global and regional structure and process of world development, which helps to account for the differentiation that occurred between Asia and Europe around 1800. Pomeranz (1997) is working on a related, more ecological explanation as well.
This explanation suggests that the nineteenth and at least the first half of the twentieth centuries be considered a “B” phase for Asia. Given Asia's previous preponderance, was that a “B” phase for the world economy as well? If so, how do we accommodate the enormous expansion of productivity, production, and trade, not to mention population, which occurred in the West during this time? From a Western point of view the past two centuries appear like a long “A” phase, which at least in the West follows a long “A” phase in the East. Would this mean that one “A” phase in a previously marginal area in the West followed another one in the previously “core” area in the East? Moreover, does that “A” phase also precede still another possible “A” phase now beginning in the East, and a renewed core shift to the East as the West's time in the sun declines? That would leave us with double, and even triple or more successive “A” phases, and no worldwide “B” ones. In that case, what happened to our “long cycle”? Was it only an optical illusion?
Both the “micro” demand-and-supply hypothesis and the long-cycle “macro” one require far more testing, and presumably amendment. Moreover, they need to be systemically related to each other and to other world economic/systemic hypotheses and analyses yet to be considered or even proposed. That is, economics still needs to marry micro- and macroeconomics into a dynamic structural economic theory, and social “science” still needs to construct a real-world system theory. This social theory also requires a marriage of real micro- and macrohistory (including ecological history) to provide a real basis for the equation History = Theory for the world as a whole.
These observations also lead to the additional supposition that the very uneven cyclical process within the world economy/system itself functions as a mechanism of its own structural transformation. By analogy, we might consider how biological mutations affect the evolutionary process and the natural “system.” In his The Dynamic Society, Snooks (1996) independently proposes a similar labor-capital-resource factor price and cyclical analysis of the industrial revolution as part of his economic interpretation of natural selection during the past two million years. As noted in chapter 6 and in my review of his book (Frank 1998a), his factor price analysis of recent developments is hampered by being limited to Western Europe. Therefore, while the focus on the “mutating” newly industrializing economy may be of paramount momentary interest, it also merits attention—much more than it receives—for its long-run significance for the world economy/system itself. On the other hand, such a cyclical “mutation” sometimes does receive inordinate historical and social scientific attention, as “the Rise of the West” has. Yet much of that attention is the result of misplaced concreteness. It reflects only the appearance that this event is uniquely self-generated, when in reality it is primarily a cyclical manifestation of the structure and process of the whole world economy/system itself. Therefore, the latter merits much more appreciation and attention, which received historiography and social theory has heretofore denied it.
In the absence of sufficient and adequate cycle analysis, it is admittedly hazardous even to speak of cycles. For any and all observed fluctuations and pulsations are not necessarily cyclical. They could be random or they could be responses to common forces “outside” the system. To have more—indeed, any—confidence that a pulsation is truly cyclical, it is necessary to demonstrate why, or at least that, the upper and lower turning points or inflection of the curve that maps these pulsations are endogenous and not only exogenous to the system. That is, not only must what goes up come down, and vice versa; but the going up itself must generate the subsequent downturn, and the going down the subsequent upturn. (For a debate on the endogeneity and/or exogeneity of Kondratieff cycle inflections, see Frank, Gordon, and Mandel 1994.) However in this regard, we are still very much in limbo, since hardly any historians even look for pulsations or cycles, and those who specialize in such “conjunctures” and even “perspective of the world” like Braudel have refrained from relating, let alone analyzing, them on a world economy/system-wide basis. Nor are demographers yet of enough help. They have not done enough even to identify possible long demographic cycles, and much less to relate them to economic ones. Global macrohistory truly has a long—and itself cyclical?—way to go.
AGENCY VS. STRUCTURE
The structure/agency problematique is age old and not likely to be resolved or even furthered here. Philosophers have long since debated about determinism vs. free will and historians about the individual in history. Does the individual make history, or does history make the individual? Marx argued that humans make their own history, but not in conditions of their choosing. This book has been an attempt to outline at least some of the underlying economic structure and transformation of early modern and therefore also of modern and contemporary world economic history. These at least condition the way in which we have and have not made our history in the past and can and cannot make it in the future.
There are two major lessons that emerge from this review of history and the conclusions drawn therefrom in the present chapter: One is that there is unity in diversity, indeed that it is the world economic/ systemic unity that itself generates diversity. The other is that this unity has been continuous yet cyclical. These two structural and process conditions do influence how we can and do make our own history. Admittedly, this book still confines itself far too much to “description” and not enough to “analysis,” let alone to laying bare all of the structure of the world economy/system that underlies the description of features and the relation of events.
The more we learn about the structure of these conditions, the better can we manage our “agency” within them; indeed, the better we can perhaps affect or even change these conditions. To quote Wang Gungwu's (1979: 1) takeoff on Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “historians have only perceived the past in different ways: the point is to use it.” Yes, the point is to use it, but which “it”? My point is that “it” is the one world history in which differences are part and parcel of its unity.
EUROPE IN A WORLD ECONOMIC NUTSHELL
Let me try to put in a nutshell what we have observed about the world economy and Europe between 1400 and 1800. Early modern and modern (and therefore presumably also future) history all have a long history of their own. Moreover, it has been a continuously common history at least throughout all of Afro-Eurasia. If there was a “new departure,” it was the incorporation of the Americas and then also of Australasia into this already ongoing historical process and then worldwide system. Not only the initiative for this incorporation, but also its very causes and then the forms of its execution, had been generated by the structure and dynamic of the Afro-Eurasian historical process itself.
Afro-Eurasian history had long since been cyclical, or at least pulsating. The present millennium began with a period of system-wide political economic expansion. It was apparently centered at its far “eastern” end in Song China, but it also accelerated an accentuated reinsertion of its “western” end in Europe, which responded by going on several Crusades to plug its marginal economy more effectively into the new Afro-Eurasian dynamic. A period of pan-Afro-Eurasian political economic decline and even crisis followed in the late thirteenth and especially in the fourteenth century. Another long period of expansion began in the early fifteenth century, again in East and Southeast Asia. It soon included Central, South, and West Asia, and after the mid- fifteenth century also Africa and Europe. The “discovery” and then conquest of the Americas and the subsequent Columbian exchange were a direct result, and part and parcel, of this world economy/system-wide expansion.
So, the “long sixteenth-century” expansion in fact began in the early fifteenth century; and it continued through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries. This expansion also continued to be primarily Asian-based, although it was also fueled by the new supplies of silver and gold money now brought by the Europeans from the Americas. In Asia, this expansion took the form of rapid growth of population, production, trade including imports and exports, and presumably income and consumption in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, India, Persia, and the Ottoman lands. Politically, the expansion was manifested and/or managed by the flourishing Chinese Ming/Qing, Japanese Tokugawa, Indian Mughal, Persian Safavid, and Turkish Ottoman regimes. The European populations and economies grew more slowly than all but the last of these Asian ones, and they did so rather differentially among each other. So did some “national” and other quite multiethnic European states, all of which were however much smaller than the large ones in Asia. The increased supply of money and/or population generated more inflation in Europe than in most of Asia, where increased production was more able to keep pace, including during the seventeenth century. In much of Europe however, economic and political growth were constrained and regionally even reversed in a major “seventeenth-century crisis,” which left most of Asia unscathed. Therefore also, population growth was faster and greater in Asia than in Europe, and so continued into the eighteenth century before inflecting after 1750.
The already long existing “system” of “international” division of labor and trade widened and deepened during this expansive long “A” phase. However as usual, different productive sectors and regions were differentially situated in this “system” of accumulation, production, exchange, and consumption, which were de facto on a “silver standard.” The differentiation in productivity and competitiveness that underlay the division of labor and exchange were manifest in imbalances of trade and “compensated” by flows over long distances of mostly silver specie money. Most of this silver was produced in the Americas and some also in Japan and elsewhere.
Reflecting the macroeconomic imbalances and also responding to corresponding microeconomic opportunities to make and take profit, the silver moved around the world in a predominantly eastward direction across the Atlantic and—via Europe—across the Indian Ocean, but also westward from Japan and from the Americas across the Pacific. Ultimately, the largest silver “sink” was China, whose relatively greater productivity and competitiveness acted like a magnet for the largest quantity of silver. However there as elsewhere, the incoming money generated increased effective demand and stimulated increased production and consumption and thereby supported population growth. The new supply of money failed to do so where the political economy was insufficiently flexible and expandable to permit growth of production to keep pace with the increase in the supply of money. In that case rising effective demand drove up prices in inflation, which is what happened in Europe.
Europe's disadvantaged position in the world economy was partly compensated by its privileged access to American money. On the demand side, the use of their American money—and only that—permitted the Europeans to enter and then increase their market share in the world market, all of whose dynamic centers were in Asia. On the supply side, access to and use of cheap—to the Europeans virtually free—money in the Americas afforded the wherewithal to acquire the supplies of real consumption and investment goods worldwide: servile labor and materials in the Americas to dig up the silver in the first place; slave labor from Africa; and from a European perspective virgin soil and climate also in the Americas. These resources were used to produce sugar, tobacco, timber for ships, and other export crops including especially cotton at low cost for European consumption. West European imports via the Baltic Sea of grain, timber, and iron from eastern and northern Europe was also paid for with American money and some textiles. And of course their American-supplied money was the only means of payment that permitted Europeans to import all those famed Asian spices, silks, cotton textiles, and other real goods for their own consumption and also for re-export to the Americas and Africa. Asians produced these goods and sold them to Europeans only for their American-supplied silver. That is, all these real goods that were produced by non-Europeans became cheaply, indeed nearly freely, available to Europeans because they were able to pay for them with their American-supplied money. Indeed, this silver—also produced by non-Europeans—was the only export good that the Europeans were able to bring to the world market.
Additionally moreover, this supply of goods produced by labor and raw materials outside of Europe also replaced and freed alternative resources for other uses within Europe: American sugar and Atlantic fish supplied calories and proteins for consumption for which Europe did not have to use their own farmland; Asian cotton textiles supplied clothes for which European consumers and producers did not have to use wool from European sheep, which would have eaten European grass. Otherwise, that grass would have had to be produced on still more enclosures of land for even more sheep to “eat men” in order to produce still more wool. Thus, the import of Asian textiles with American money indirectly also permitted Europeans to produce more food and timber in Western Europe itself. Thus, West Europeans were able to use their position in the world economy both to supplement their own supplies and resources by drawing directly on those from the Americas to the west and from Eastern Europe and Asia to the east. The supply of these additional resources to Europe from the outside also freed European resources to use in its own development.
The process can be elucidated by making an interesting comparison with the second half of die twentieth century: Americans now need not even incur the small cost of getting others to dig up silver money for them. They simply print dollar bills (especially in the denomination of $100) and treasury certificates at no more cost to themselves than just the printing. Thus Americans were able to respond to the “dollar shortage” in Europe of the 1940s and in the “Third” and former “Second” worlds in the 1990s by using these paper “dollars” to buy up real raw materials and manufactures—and nuclear scientists!—for virtually nothing in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere around the world. Witness that today far more dollars circulate outside the United States than inside it; and most of its national debt, unlike that of others, is denominated in its own currency. And the United States can print at will without generating inflation at home as long as most of the dollars flow and circulate abroad. Moreover, Americans sold literally tons of treasury certificates to West Europeans and Japanese in the 1980s. Therefore additionally, Americans now continue to receive increasingly valuable Japanese yen and German marks in the 1990s in exchange for the ever more worthless American dollar debts incurred in the 1980s. That way, part of the population in the West is once again able to spend far beyond its real means and consume way beyond its own resources and production—other than of money—and to permit itself the luxury of promoting more benign “green” environmental policies that save its own ecology besides! This something-for-nothing strategy is essentially what Europe also practiced for the three centuries between 1500 and 1800. The difference is that the U.S. dollar is at least based in part on American productivity, while the European silver was only extracted from its American colonies. Of course, the later Western productivity is also derived in part from its earlier colonialism.
To return then to 1800, Europe's still productive backwardness may also have offered some of the “advantages” to catch up discussed by Gerschenkron (1962). Europe's backwardness provided the incentive and its supply of American money permitted Europeans to pursue micro- and macroeconomic advantages, which were to be had from increased European participation in the expanding Asian economies from 1500 to 1800. Of course, Europeans also took advantage of their increasing political economic relations with Africa and the Americas, including especially the “triangular” trade among all three. All of these, including of course the investment of profits derived from all of these overseas political economic relations at home, contributed to capital accumulation in Europe, or more precisely to Europe's participation in “world accumulation 1482–1789/' to quote my earlier title (Frank 1978a).
Nonetheless, however much European “investment” and the Atlantic “triangle” may have contributed to Europe's participation in world accumulation, from a world economic perspective the Asian contribution was greater still. That was so for at least two reasons: To begin with, throughout this early modern period until at least 1800, productivity, production, and accumulation were greater in Asia than elsewhere in the world. Indeed it was greater in the Chinese, Indian, and other regional parts of Asia than in any other region of the world. Second, this increase in European (participation in) accumulation was possible only thanks to that Asian accumulation. Chapter 6 seeks to show (with the help of Adam Smith) how Europe used its American money to buy itself a ticket on the Asian economic train. Of course, in the absence of that economy or its dynamic in Asia, Europe would not have gone or gotten anywhere! That is, Europe would have remained where it already was: in world economic terms, just about nowhere; or it would have made its way only through the Atlantic “triangular” trade, which was much smaller and poorer than the Asian economies.
Finally, Europe arrived somewhere (in the world economy!) after three centuries of trying to do business in Asia. Really, however, Europeans attempted to do business in Asia even earlier than 1500; the European crusades to West Asia since the twelfth century and their fifteenth-century European excursions in search of South and East Asia were also already generated by the attractions of Asian wealth. Chapter 6 accounts for the roots of the post-18oo “Rise of the West” and “Decline of the East” in world economic and demographic terms, in which the economies of Asia played a major role. The proposed explanation has three related parts. A combination of demographic with micro- and macro- economic analysis identifies an inflection of population and economic productivity growth rates that led to an “exchange” of places between Asia and Europe in the world economy/system between 1750 and 1850. Microeconomic analysis of worldwide supply-and-demand relations shows how they generated incentives for labor- and capital-saving and energy-producing invention, investment, and innovation, which took place in Europe. On the other hand, macroeconomic analysis of the cyclical distribution of income and derivative effective demand and supply in Asia and the world illuminated how the opportunity to do so profitably was generated by the global economy itself. The combination of these processes and of their analysis above cut the Gordian knot of Kipling's famous saying about the East and West never meeting.
Of course, the “East/West” knot was only tied, and its unraveling was boxed up, by the compartmentalization of Afro-Eurasian and world history against which Herodotus had already warned, as cited in one of our opening epigraphs: the line between West (Europe?) and East (Asia?) is purely imaginary and a Western construct. Real-world history continuously (and cyclically?) jumps and alternates across this imaginary Western/“Orientalist” division. That is what happened in the nineteenth century and promises to happen also in the twenty-first.
JIHAD VS. McWORLD IN THE ANARCHY OF
THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
However, Western historiography and social science still seek either to deny this reality of unity in diversity altogether, or to subvert and/or distort it. Pundits seek even to arouse ordinary people against unity and to use the press and other media to mobilize “us” against “them.” The press has recently served as a worldwide vehicle and echo of a series of intentionally alarming pronouncements by Western pundits. Fukuyama on the “end” of history (1989, 1992) was followed by Bernard Barber on jihad vs. “McWorld” (1992, 1995), Robert Kaplan on the approaching “anarchy” (1994, 1996), and Samuel Huntington on the “clash” of civilizations (1993, 1996). Following the end of “the evil empire,” all of them sound Western alarm bells against the threat of the new bogeyman, Islam—and then China. All of them do so by starting with a compartmentalized perspective on history, in which “the West is West, and the East is East.” However, in their view now the two do meet on an ideologically mined Battlefield in which “the West” needs to protect itself from “the rest” in general (in Huntington's terminology), and from Islamic jihad in particular. Fukuyama claims that “the end of history” has been attained through the “liberalism” of the West, but that, alas, the “East” and “South” are still marked by varieties of deplorable “traditional” “Oriental despotism.” These and the hiatus between them allegedly generate “the coming anarchy in the world,” as announced by Kaplan.
Although Barber detects a globalizing centripetal “McWorld” tendency, he also fears opposite and antagonistic centrifugal jihad tendencies that seek to liberate themselves through escape. Barber anticipates that in the long run McWorld will be victorious, but in the short run jihad promises to be quite troublesome. It does not occur to Barber that the fractionating jihad is itself generated by the globalizing McWorld, as it has been since time immemorial. The Bible observes that “to those who have, shall be given; and from those who have not, shall be taken” away what little they have. Moreover, both the Bible and the Qur'an are also critical of this political economic and social structure and encourage the victimized and disadvantaged to resist and redress the same. Therefore, the prospects are rather dim that Barber's McWorld globalization will soon eliminate the many forms of jihad that it itself generates.
Huntington goes even further, to deny McWorld's very existence. Instead he discovers only age-old “civilizations” (including “Latin American” and “Russian” ones) allegedly confronting each other. Since he sees no North-South economic divide and finds no more East-West cold-war battles to be fought, the future will be defined by the “clash of civilizations” instead. That is his “explanation” not only of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, but of most strife everywhere. Therefore, this strife pits “the West against the rest,” although Huntington avers that the greatest threat comes from Islam and then China—the “yellow peril” again!
These divisive ideological diatribes—it is difficult to call them anything more generous—all have their intellectual roots in ignorance or denial of a single global history. They assume the existence of innate and primeval diversity against unity, and they proclaim the libertarian pretensions and universalist aspirations of the exceptional, indeed exceptionalist diversity that allegedly distinguishes “The West” from “the rest.” The Eurocentric social theory reviewed in this study serves as ideological “legitimation” for such divisive pronouncements and action. However, as the documentation in this book has shown, this social theory lacks all basis in historical reality and itself rests on no foundation other than Eurocentric ideology.
This ideology is being used in these new guises today when worldwide economic crisis again constrains peoples' livelihoods and accentuates their competition for even a meager livelihood around this one world. As a direct result, historians, archaeologists, postmodernists, and others are being increasingly pressed into service to dig up proof that “this land is—and always has been—mine” and can, therefore, be “ethnically cleansed” from, or at least “multiculturally” guarded against, all other claimants. Alas, the more people, including historians and social “scientists,” are affected and constrained by worldwide forces beyond their comprehension and control, the less do they want to know about them. The faster the world spins around them or spins them around, the more do they insist on “stopping” the world: “I want to get off—and do my own thing!” The “Sinatra Doctrine” of “doing it my way” all over again.
The purpose of this book is instead to help construct an intellectual basis for accepting diversity in unity and celebrating unity in diversity. Alas, those who need it most will be the ones least interested. And those who wish to arm for the “clash of civilizations,” if they even acknowledge this book, will do Battle against it by invoking ever more culturalogical and civilizationist arguments. That is because the evidence presented in this book helps pull the historical rug out from under their social “science,” which is little more than a mask for Eurocentric ideology of domination. And that is already being undermined by the world historical process itself—for which we can be grateful.