Historical Perspectives on States, Markets and Capitalism, East and West
Giovanni Arrighi
Giovanni Arrighi, an authority on the political economy and geopolitics
of world social change, here reflects comparatively on states and
markets East and West at the dawn of capitalism. Ranging widely across
Smith, Marx, Weber and Braudel, he assesses the logic and interplay of
China’s tribute trade system and Europe’s emerging capitalism. This
article draws on and extends a chapter from his new book, Adam Smith in
Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, which looks across the
last five hundred years to consider the emerging position of East Asia
in an epoch that marks the end of US hegemony. MS
The Five-Hundred Years’ Peace
One of the great myths of Western social science is that national states
and their organization in an interstate system are European inventions.
In reality, except for a few states that were the creation of European
colonial powers (most notably, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines),
the most important states of East Asia–from Japan, Korea, and China to
Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Kampuchea–were national states long before
any of their European counterparts. What’s more, they had all been
linked to one another, directly or through the Chinese center, by trade
and diplomatic relations and held together by a shared understanding of
the principles, norms, and rules that regulated their mutual
interactions as a world among other worlds. As Japanese scholars
specializing in the China-centered tribute trade system have shown, this
system presented sufficient similarities with the European interstate
system to make their comparison analytically meaningful. [1]
full: http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2630
