REVIEWING THE MILLENNIA: A review of C. Harman, "A People's History of the
World" (Bookmarks, 1999), £15.99
by Robin Blackburn, editor of "New Left Review"
Our culture is today prey to seemingly relentless commercialisation and
dumbing down. Fortunately there are some counter-tendencies and one of
those is the evidence of widespread interest in world history, anthropology
and archaeology. While the bestseller lists are crammed with the likes of
Jeffrey Archer, John Gray and Jilly Cooper, respectable sales can still be
achieved by serious works of popularisation by authors like Richard Leakey
or Stephen Jay Gould. When it comes to world history, writers like Jared
Diamond and William McNeill can find hundreds of thousands of readers for
books which offer a materialist perspective. Thus McNeill has surveyed the
differential impact of disease in "Plagues and Peoples", and more recently
Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" has had great success. These works
have their weaknesses, usually that of pursuing a valid insight further
than it can go, missing vital aspects of the complex texture of human
social relations. So McNeill has much to teach us concerning the impact of
microbes; but while he does have a concept for the exploitative features of
social structure, it is a rather simplistic one. Likewise Diamond offers an
ecological explanation of why agricultural development flourished more
consistently and cumulatively in Eurasia than Africa, which perhaps tries
to explain too much but nevertheless at least poses the question in ways
that provoke helpful argument. His thesis is that Africa's north-south
succession of very different terrains desert, savannah, tropical
rainforest, veldt etc. greatly impeded the spread of domesticated plants
and animals while Eurasia's lateral spread of somewhat more similar
habitats facilitated it. While Diamond is able to elaborate his account in
interesting ways, by the end of several hundred pages the danger of
reductionism is palpable.
The serious concerns of such work contrast not only to the frivolities of
'infotainment', but also to the whimsy of the occult or the narrow and
obtuse specialisms of academia. Evidently there is a popular thirst for
authors who try to explain where we have come from and where we are going,
and who confront the large questions without recourse to the supernatural.
Socialist writers have always seen this as one of their essential tasks;
the fact that "The Communist Manifesto" offers a compelling historical
sketch as well as a vivid sense of what drives global development helps to
explain its enduring appeal.
Chris Harman's "A People's History of the World" is a very welcome and
largely successful attempt to produce a popular history of the human
species, bringing out the interconnection between the development of modes
of production on the one hand and class struggle on the other. The book is
closer in spirit to "The Communist Manifesto" than to "Capital", because of
this interweaving of story and structure while taking into account a
further century and a half of history and historiography. It is 729 pages
long, with the last 150 years taking up just over half the space. But to
put this another way, Harman still devotes 300 pages to events and
developments prior to the industrial revolution. Early chapters cover the
farming revolution, the urban revolution, and the rise of the early states
and empires, drawing on the work of Jared Diamond as well as Gordon
Childe's classic materialist studies in pre-history, updating Childe's
account with the later findings of such scholars as Colin Renfrew and
Charles Maizels.
Some topics could, perhaps, have received a bit more attention. It would
have been interesting to have more on what Harman thinks about the new
evidence concerning conditions of life in the first settled communities, or
on the origins and spread of language, or on variations in family form and
their link to the dynamic of different relations of production, or on the
impact of nomad warriors on history. But given the book's already
considerable length, it is clear that hard choices had to be made about
coverage. And lest I imply that Harman is uninterested in cultural
superstructures, I should add that he has chapters on the rise of
Christianity and Islam. Indeed, I have the impression that he attributes
too much importance to the intrinsic qualities of Christian ideology and
too little to the fact that its decisive growth occurred after it had
become the state religion of the Roman Empire.
Marxist accounts of world history have sometimes been accused of
Eurocentrism but Harman makes an effort to give space to the fate of Asian
empires, to the impact of Islam, to Africa and the Americas, and to
resistance to slavery, racism and colonialism. If Europe still looms quite
large in the story there is a reason for thatnamely that the capitalism
and imperialism which developed most strongly in Europe, and in the lands
settled by Europeans, have dominated the world history of the last few
centuries. Writers as diverse as Jack Goody and Andre Gunder Frank have
recently been disposed to object that the dominance of European capitalism
is a more recent and a more shallow phenomenon than Marxists have
traditionally supposed. Some authors are now claiming that China was as
developed as, or even more developed than, Europe as recently as 1800 and
that it is likely to catch back up within the next 20 years or so. [1]
It is, perhaps, in the relative weight accorded to China's history that a
certain residual Eurocentrism may be detected. Today more than a fifth of
the world's people live in China and the last century and a half of that
country's history has embraced an extraordinary sequence of events leading
up to both the Communist seizure of power and a recent surge of economic
development without parallel in the Third World. Harman devotes only two
pages and in substance really only two paragraphs to the crucial two
decades between 1930 and 1950. The 19th century T'ai-p'ing Rebellion and
the revolutionary struggles of the 1920s are properly dealt with, but
little attempt is made to assess the overall significance of the last
quarter century. Harman is prepared to allow that the Stalinist regime did,
at terrible cost, modernise the Russian economy, but he does not essay a
comparable balance sheet of China's development.
The long term perspective of macro-history can illuminate contemporary
history in important ways. Thus awareness of the historical achievements of
Chinese and Indian agriculture helps to explain different patterns of
rural-urban relations in today's world. Thus in Africa migrant workers send
back a stream of remittances to the villages from which they come; in much
of Asia workers can be hired for less than the cost of their upkeep because
they receive food from their villages.
Ensuring even and comprehensive coverage in a work such as this is
extraordinarily difficult, especially if the aim is to keep the story going
and to convey the overall sense of pattern and direction in human affairs.
Without forcing the evidence Harman does usually succeed in conveying that
sense of flow, as of some gigantic river, and in deftly identifying
counter-eddies, the silting up of some channels and the opening of others.
Popular struggles are recounted, but also the historical conditions which
both favour and frustrate them. A good example here would be his account of
the French Revolution and of the impact of Jacobinism outside France's
borders in Britain and Ireland, in Italy and Germany, and in the Caribbean
and Latin America.
The still-dominant national framework for the writing of history
characteristically misses the way that events and ideas overspill national
borders. Harman's account of the 20th century gains from the fact that he
tries to see it whole. He rightly insists on the far-reaching and
disastrous impact of the First World War, whose carnage and brutality did
so much to make possible and probable (not, of course, inevitable) the
subsequent rise of Stalinism and Nazism. A global perspective is needed,
not only because this allows us to compare and contrast, but also because
there are shared themes and common impulses.
This is a book about history and not a book about books. But from time to
time Harman does allude to controversies and authorities so that it is not
inappropriate to suggest that when he came to such a decisive watershed as
the rise of capitalism he should have provided his readers with some
signposts to the great controversies to which the study of this event has
given rise. As it happens the work of Marxist writers Maurice Dobb, Paul
Sweezy, Eric Hobsbawm and Robert Brenner has attracted what are widely
acknowledged to be the central debates on 'the transition' and 'the crisis
of the 17th century' so it would have been especially helpful for Harman to
have addressed them more directly. However, the reader does glean that
Harman is not persuaded by those whose single minded focus on the emergence
of a capitalist calculus in north west Europe has led them to neglect
material constraints and technology on the one hand, and Marx's own theses
on 'primitive accumulation' and 'bourgeois revolution' on the other. When
forced to choose, Harman is more concerned with understanding the
connection of events than exploring the intricacies of structural logic, a
very understandable preference for someone attempting to cover the whole
span of history in a single book.
The fact that capitalism first achieved a real and lasting breakthrough in
Europe is, however, a structural event that demands explanation on several
levels. The fragmentation and rivalries of feudal power structures gave
more leeway to would-be capitalists than was ever permitted by the large
agrarian empires, no matter how advanced their technical achievements. At
the same time fertile soil, regular rainfall, a network of navigable rivers
all contributed to productivity, market expansion and surplus generation
once direct producers could avail themselves of heavy ploughs, animal
power, windmills and watermills. Like others, Harman gives importance to
the weakening of lordly power consequent upon peasant revolt and great
plagues, but he also stresses the role of the printing press, the clock,
new blast furnaces and new forms of animal husbandry. He believes that by
the 14th century a mixed species of 'market feudalism' had developed, and
that the social and military strife launched by the Reformation was greatly
to weaken the feudal element and to promote a new social landscape more
conducive to the rise of independent producers and merchants.
Perhaps the reason for Harman's peremptory treatment of prior debates on
the transition stems from the fact that they have focused on structure, not
narrative. Consequently they cannot readily be used to interpret the
striking sequence of bourgeois revolution and capitalist advance in such
events as the Reformation, the Peasant War in Germany, the religious wars
in France, the revolt of the Netherlands, the Thirty Years War, the English
Revolution, the Enlightenment, the war for American independence and the
French Revolution. One of the most original features of this book is that
it argues that each of these episodes ultimately strengthened the autonomy
of capitalism, notwithstanding the great variety of the social forces which
participated in these events and contrived to set their own stamp upon
them. Indeed Harman evidently warms to the popular and heroic dimension of
struggles against the old order and usually has less to say about the phase
of bourgeois exploitation and consolidation. In the case of the English
Revolution he evokes the revolutionary spirit of the Levellers and New
Model Army, drawing on the work of Brian Manning and Ian Gentles, but has
little to say about the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, which put such
vital finishing touches on the new bourgeois order as the Bank of England
and the National Debt. As John Brewer has shown in "The Sinews of Power",
it was these financial mechanisms which enabled the new regime to defeat
its enemies at home and abroad. In his account of the American Revolution,
Harman also dwells on its popular contribution with somewhat less attention
paid to the advances of capitalism to which Gordon Wood has drawn attention.
This is a matter of emphasis only and one cannot complain that Harman
neglects the bloodshed and oppression associated with capitalist
accumulation. In my view Harman rightly stresses the contribution of
colonial conquest and super-exploitation to the accumulation process while
insisting that it was capitalism that gave rise to slavery and not slavery
to capitalism. Some accounts of the capitalist rationality and the
advantages of free wage labour fail to register that capitalism's reach was
always greater than its grasp. Accumulation in the metropolis needed
ongoing systems of primitive accumulation in the colonies because it had
not yet managed completely to penetrate and transform the periphery. This
is one of the reasons that a new breed of Atlantic merchants and planters
were to play a leading role in the first wave of bourgeois revolutions. The
slave systems they thus consolidated made necessary a second wave of
struggles in which the new order was forced to jettison the most extreme
forms of personal bondage, as Harman relates of the American Civil War.
In the dialectic of popular struggle and capitalist consolidation at least
two possibilities are usually present, namely 'two steps forward, one step
back' and 'one step forward, two steps back'. In other words there are no
guarantees of social progress even where productive possibilities are
expanding. The Nazi economic order managed to mobilise capitalist interests
for a time more effectively than did the bourgeois democratic
administrations in Washington, Paris and London. If Hitler had been content
with his winnings in May 1941 the Nazi regime might have ruled Europe for a
generation or more.
Harman's focus on politics and popular struggle helps to convey the drama
which always attends the clash of rival social forces and regimes. This is
especially true of his deft handling of the great sweep of world history
from the 14th century down to the First World War. By the time we reach the
middle and end of the 20th century Harman's story will be more familiar to
most readers and his thumbnail sketch accounts less forceful. Harman
briefly problematises capitalist democracy or the nature of the Second
World War, but does not have the space to develop a rounded argument. On
the latter, for example, it is not clear whether he thinks that the points
he advances against Hobsbawm's claim that the war was fundamentally
anti-fascist in nature add up to a flat contradiction or to an important
qualification.
The account given by Harman of the rise of Nazism does not, in my view,
sufficiently register the disastrous failure of the Social Democrats and
Communists to form a democratic front. In my view Trotsky's grasp of the
terrible threat in Germany was sounder than his sense of what was happening
in France; on the evidence here Harman might put it the other way round.
Likewise the boost given to social reform and decolonisation by the defeat
of the Axis powers is somewhat underplayed. The narrative approach
naturally tends to stress what happens rather than to note what does not
happen. Thus Harman does not ponder the fact that workers' councils and
soviet-type bodies did not arise in France in May 1968, or Portugal and
Spain in the mid-1970s or in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989.
In all these cases the popular longing for a more democratic order was to
be cheated to a greater or lesser extent but calls for 'workers' self
management' or 'workers' power' seemed abstract if counterposed to
elections based on universal suffrage.
But my reservations on such points detract little from my appreciation of
Harman's achievement in this book. The dovetailed accounts of historical
developments across seven or eight millennia are always interesting,
usually well informed and sometimes highly original. The left has no dearth
of polemics concerning the major events of the 20th century. On the other
hand it has few accounts which convey as well as this book does the broad
sweep of human history.
Notes
1. Those interested in such claims might like to consult A. Maddison,
China's Growth in the Long Run (New York, 1999).
Issue 86 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM, quarterly journal of the Socialist
Workers Party (Britain)
Published March 2000
Copyright © International Socialism
Spring 2000
http://www.internationalsocialist.org/pubs/isj.html
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