Forwarded message:
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 13:41:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: "A. Gunder Frank" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: APOOLOGIES AND REPLACEMENT of AG Frank Book Blurb (fwd)
X-UID: 2148
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 16:57:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: APOOLOGIES AND REPLACEMENT of AG Frank Book Blurb
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT 1400-1800
by
ANDRE GUNDER FRANK
University of Toronto
96 Asquith Ave. Toronto, Ont. Canada M4W 1J8
Tel:416-972 0616 Fax:416-972 0071 & 978 3963
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This book applies the theoretical approach of Frank and
Gills'[1993] The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five
Thousand? to re-write the history and development of the world
economy during the early modern era. It pursues the therefor most
fruitful innovations of McNeill's [1963] The Rise of the West and
of Hodgson's [1993] only very posthumously published Rethinking
World History. In so doing, this book extends the Asian based
world economic analysis of Abu-Lughod's [1989] Before European
Hegemony and Chaudhuri's [1990] Asia Before Europe forward to the
beginnings of the industrial revolution. It complements the
critiques of the ideologies of Eurocentrism by Amin [1989] and of
The Colonizer's Model of the World by Blaut [1993], which are
still in the tradition of the also ideological critiques of
Orientalism by Said [19xx] and Black Athena by Bernal [1987]. The
present book supplements these only ideological critiques with an
economic historical record and analysis of real world development
in the early modern period. Thus, it replaces the European and
Western ethnocentrism of received historiography and social
theory with a truly global humanocentric perspective that
recognizes the predominance of Asia in world history and
development until at least 1800. This recognition is the result
however of taking a truly global perspective, instead of a
Eurocentric one or simply replacing that by some other Sino-,
Islamo- or Asia- centrism. The objective here is humano-, and
eventually also eco- "centrism."
Therein, the world economic analysis of this book also offers a
truly global perspective and alternative to Braudel's [1982]
rather European Perspective of the World in his otherwise
comprehensive 3 volume Civilization & Capitalism 1550-1800 and to
Wallerstein's [1974-1989] previously path-breaking but still
European centered Modern World-System [in its 3rd volume so far].
They were complemented by the otherwise theoretically innovative
focus on the rest of the world in Europe and the People without
History, by Wolf [1982] and the Social Transformations: A General
Theory of Historical Development by Sanderson [1994], which
nonetheless also did not sufficiently liberate themselves or us
from latent Eurocentrism. Other major recent theoretical
innovations are among others also The Long Twentieth Century by
Arrighi [1994], Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Co-
Evolution of Global Economics and Politics by Modelski and
Thompson [1996], and The Rise and Demise: World System and Modes
of Production by Chase-Dunn and Hall [1996]. All offer innovative
historical and theoretical analyses of recent world systemic
developments. Yet all of them still confine themselves and in my
view are limited by their procrustean categories of a Western
modern world-system based on a European initiated capitalist mode
of production.
The present book is the first and so far only one to attempt
instead a truly global explanation of "development" based on a
universal history of "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." Therein it
is even more critical of the ubiquitous but mischievous
Eurocentric historiography and social and political economic
analysis exemplified by such titles as The Rise of the Western
World: A New Economic History by Economics Nobel Prize winner
North and Thomas [1972] and How the West Grew Rich by Rosenberg
and Birdzell [1985], all of whose explanations are no more than
variations on the theme of The European Miracle by Jones [1981].
All these interpretations are in turn derived from the past two
centuries of Eurocentric re-vision of early modern history in
terms of "The Rise of the West" through the alleged "development
of capitalism" in Europe.
The present book is also a radically different new departure in
that already its mere presentation of the global historical
evidence demonstrates the lack of any real historical basis of
our classic Eurocentric social theories. The book's examination
of the world economic division of labor and im/balances of trade,
and the inter-regional comparisons and relations in the growth of
trade, population, production, income, productivity and
competitiveness as well as the development of technology and
institutions around the world demonstrate both the initial
predominance and the continued more rapid and greater development
of Asia, and especially of China and India, than of any part or
all of Europe in the world economy between 1400 and 1800. This
real world historical evidence challenges the received
Eurocentrism of Marx and Weber, Tawney and Toynbee, Sombart and
Polanyi, Parsons and Rostow, and still Braudel, Wallerstein and
the earlier Frank. For all of them and the legions of their
disciples over the past century and still today have constructed
their social and economic theories of "development" and of
"capitalism" on Eurocentric premises, which are showns to be
almost entirely devoid of any real historic foundation in the
light of the global historical evidence examined in this book.
Indeed, the argument of this book is that all alleged
"theoretical" explanations of "The Rise of the West" in terms of
some long European "preparation" for the same by relying on its
purported sociocultural "rationalism" and/or other political
economic "exceptionalism" since the Renaissance, not to mention
its roots in Greece and Judaism, are no more than purely
ideological Eurocentrism. Alas, so are the attempts to account
for what happened by arguing that Europe pulled itself up by its
own bootstraps through "scientific revolution" and/or "the
development of capitalism" in a unique "European miracle."
Instead, the present book argues that contrary to this entire
ideologically Eurcocentric tradition, all such attempts to
account for what happened in any part of the world only in its
own terms are doomed not only to emprical but also to theoretical
failure. For they violate the scientific canons of holism, not to
mention structuralism, system theory and recent chaos theory.
Since the whole is more than the sum of its parts, only an
analysis of the structrure and process of the whole world economy
and of the relations and differentiation it imposes on all its
parts can even hope to begin to account for the "development" of
any of its parts, let alone of the whole of development itself.
Therefore, this book presents an, alas so far only the first,
global analysis of how money went around the world and made the
world go round from 1500 to 1800 and a review of the related
macro-economic long and shorter cyclical basis of the nineteenth
century "Rise of the West" in its relation to the already partly
prior "Decline of the East." From its prior long standing base in
Asia, the "center" of global development is shown to have
[temporarily?] shifted westward no thanks to any European or even
"capitalist" "exceptionalism" and not before 1800. Instead this
global development is shown to have been due to global and inter-
regional/sectoral demographic-economic structures and processes
and perhaps also to the changing ecological balance [whose
analysis by Pomeranz is still unpublished] in the entire world
economy itself, which must be seen as a one single whole.
Accordingly, this book also offers a world encompassing micro-
economic analysis of the demand-and-supply for the labor-saving
and energy-producing technology, which generated the abrupt and
at the time still unexpected "take off" into the industrial
revolution phase of historical global development. Within that
also, the "centrality" of China [and not of Europe] in the world
economy through the eighteenth century may therefore also
forebode its resurrection again -- and doing so "my way" through
the "Sinatra Doctrine" -- in the twentyfirst century.
In the interests of social scientific comprehension of and
political guidance in the same, this book pleads for new social
theory and praxis that is compatible with the world's urgent need
for unity in diversity.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 916-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
