Since Ricardo brings up "long waves" in connection
with the discussion of Frank, let me simply note that these
are Braudel "la duree" 300-400 year waves and not the lower
level 40-50 year Kondratievs. Braudel also labeled these
"geographical" cycles and they have demographic, even
Malthusian, component that is very important.
Thus, for Braudel, "crashes" coincided with Malthusian
population declines due to war, famine, pestilence. In
Europe these include the plague deaths in the Eastern
Mediterranean that paved the way for the displacement of
Greeks with Slavs and Turks. Then in the 900s associated
with Viking invasions and general collapses. Then there is
the major blowout of the "Black Death" of the mid 1300s
which was preceded by about 50 centuries of mounting
famines weakening the immune systems of the populations
that died of plague. And then we have a similar blowout in
the late 1600s.
Frank used to argue that such points are when one can
get a switch between European and Asian dominance and that
we are now at such a switch point again on this much longer
long wave (Braudel, not Kondratiev), even if we are not
having a collapse/blowout in the European/North American
zone.
Barkley Rosser
On Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:30:17 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The A.G.Frank of Re-Orient is a great admirer of Smith, not Marx.
> Except for a minor point, every reference to Marx is
> highly negative, whereas those to Smith are always positive.
> As will become evident later, this is a new Frank, a sinocentric
> (anti-eurocentric) one; the old Frank of "underdevelopment or
> revolution" is no longer.
>
> Let me emphasise that the figure I posted yesterday (Rostow,
> 1978) to the effect that Europe accounted for 69% of world trade in
> 1720 appears to be a generally accepted one as it is also cited by
> Chilsom (1982) and Aldcroft (1994). And Frank, as one would hope,
> knows about such figures, as he cites Holtfrerich's figure that the
> European share of all world trade was 69% and 72% in 1720 and
> 1750. But his reaction is the rather blind one that "this unabashedly
> Eurocentric claim is disconfirmed by the evidence discussed in the
> present book" (183). I think those readers of my posts who read Re-Orient
> will agree I have been as fair as possible to Frank's side of
> the argument, presenting all his key figures; yet none of
> these figures constitute an adequate response to that simple fact
> given by Holtrerich, or the others I cited.
>
> Instead Frank digs himself into a deeper hole, adding precisely
> the point I made yesterday that Asia's exports to Europe were a
> "very small share of Asia's trade" - which of course simply suggests
> that Asia had its own world-economy with a hyphen, one that was
> secondary to Europe's own world-economy. Some may wonder why is he
> digging himself into such a hole? Well, because he wants to convice
> us that Europe was an insignificant player in the assumed Asian
> dominated world market. And that's not all, the hole gets bigger
> as he adds immediately that Asian exports to Europe "remained higher than
> Europe's imports from the Americas" (183) - which brings us to the
> role of the colonial trade, and the relation of the old to the new
> Frank.
>
> I am leaving for now Frank's arguements on the
> technological-institutional superiority of Asia to concentrate on the
> question "Why did the West Win (temporarily)?
>
> Frank approaches this using the theory of long waves. He speaks of a
> major "A" phase period of world expansion from AD 1000/1050 to
> 1250/1300, followed by a contraction from 1250 to 1450, followed by a
> a new "A" phase expansion after 1450. In both these two "A"
> phases, he says, China was the center of world expansion. This post
> 1450 growth lasted into the 18th century, followed by "B" phase
> contraction after 1800. Now, this long post-1450 expansive cycle,
> like any other long wave, experienced a Kondratieff "B" phase
> downturn in the 17th century, one which, however, hit the "weaker"
> European economy harder than it did Asia.
>
> But another Kondratieff "B" cycle that hit after the 1760s gave
> Europe the chance to overcome its (still) marginal position in the
> world economy - seemingly using Wallerstein's argument (1979) that,
> contrary to strict dependency theory, at certain historical junctures
> opportunities are created for some less developed economies to move up.
> So, what were the opportunities that Europe had? A favorable factor
> endowment of natural resources and relative prices of labor and capital.
> For one, it had cheap sources of capital , from the extraction of gold,
> the slave trade, the plantations, and the re-export trade. But what
> about O'Brien's powerful finding that the colonial trade amounted to
> no more than 2% of Europe's GNP in the late 18th century? On
> the one hand, Frank appears to take this evidence seriously but
> thinks there other types of evidence do suggest this trade was
> highly important to Europe's economy: "we must agree with
> O'Brien that the evidence will never settle this issue" (42). On the
> other, he says that O'Brien's figures do not "bear so much on the
> real dispute between us" (42). What he means, I take it, is that it
> was the monies extracted from the Americas which allowed Europe to
> enter the Asian market, and that Europe, without ever
> dominating the world market, accumulated huge profits "from the carrying
> trade and from parleying multiple transactions in bullion, money, and
> commodities in multiple markets (177). In the end, actually, Frank
> more or less dismisses O'Brien's evidence, as he goes on to say
> that the colonial trade was the crucial source of capital for Europe, for
> colonies "supplied not only almost free money, but also servile
> labor and the cheap sugar, tabacco, timber, cotton, and other goods
> produced in the Americas for European consumption [which] gave them
> access to the silk, cotton textles, and spices" of Asia (295). To
> boot, he even cites such outdated sources as Mandel and Eric
> Williams, with the additional, if rather lame argument, that the
> supply of colonial capital brought interest rates down from 12% in
> the 1690s to 8% in 1694 to 3% in 1752, thus cheapening investment
> (296).
>
> But a simple quesion now needs to be posed: did not the bullion
> extracted from the Americas, or at least a high proportion of it,
> ended up in Asia or China as the ultimate "sink"?!
> Whatever happened to Asia's "massive balance of trade
> surplus with Europe"?
>
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3124] Re: If Asia was more advanced, why did West rise?
Rosser Jr, John Barkley Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:44:42 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)
