The controversy emerges in the second part with Marx and Wallerstein,
which seems pretty unfair. Wallerstein replies in the _Review_ "Frank
proves the European miracle"..
Mine
PREFACE to REORIENT :
GLOBAL ECON0MY IN THE ASIAN AGE
[University of California Press April
1998]
by Andre Gunder Frank
EPIGRAPHS
There is no history but universal history -- as it really was - Leopold
von Ranke
Il n'y a pas d'histoire de l'Europe, il y a une histoire du monde! -
Marc Bloc
History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line
that separates East from West in Eurasia - Herodotus
History is all things to all men .... Perhaps the most important
methodological problem in the writing of history is to discover why
different historians, on the basis of the same or similar evidence,
often have markedly different interpretations of a particular
historical event. - R.M. Hartwell
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate,
contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive and
unrealistic - John F. Kennedy
ORIENT: The East; lustrous, sparkling, precious; radiant, rising,
nascent; place or exactly determine position, settle or find
bearings; bring into clearly understood relations; direct towards;
determine how one stands in relation to one's surroundings.
Turn eastward !
ReORIENT: Give new orientation to; readjust, change outlook !! - from
The Concise Oxford Dictionary thank you for being so
CONCISE !!!
PREFACE
I think authors ought to look back and give us some record of how their
works developed, not because their works are
important (they may turn out to be unimportant) but because we need to
know more of the process of history-writing.... Writers
of history are not just observers. They are themselves part of the act
and need to observe themselves in action. - John King
Fairbank (1969: vii)
This book pretends to turn received Eurocentric historiography and
social theory upside down by using a "globological"
perspective [the term is taken from Albert Bergesen (1982)]. Early
modern economic history is viewed from a world
encompassing global perspective. I seek to analyze the structure and
dynamic of the whole world economic system itself and
not only the "European [part] world-economy/system." For my argument is
that we must analyze the whole, which is more than
the sum of its parts, to account for the development even of any of its
parts, including that of Europe. That is all the more so the
case for the "Rise of the West," since it turns out that from a global
perspective Asia and not Europe held center stage for most
of early modern history. Therefore the most important question is less
what happened in Europe than what happened in the
world as a whole and particularly in its leading Asian parts. I render
historical events from this much more global perspective
and propose to account for "the Decline of the East" and the concomitant
"Rise of the West" within the world as a whole. This
procedure pulls the historical rug out from under the anti-
historical/scientific - really ideological - Eurocentrism of Marx,
Weber,
Toynbee, Polanyi, Braudel, Wallerstein and most other contemporary
social theorists.
Since writing history is part of history itself as Fairbank observes, I
also follow his counsel to give the reader some record of
how my work developed. I will signal only the most significant
"intellectual" way stations and avoid wasting the reader's time
with non-essential personalisms. Yet, I cannot avoid reference to at
least some persons who -- often unintentionally! -- have
lighted the way to me and to whom I wish to express my thanks in this
preface.
My anthropologist friend Sid Mintz and I have been debating without end
since the mid-1950s. He has said "culture matters,"
and I have always retorted "structure matters." My thesis was first
impressed on me in the seminar with the eminent cultural
anthropologist Robert Redfield, audited on the second floor of the
social science building at the University of Chicago. That is
where I was introduced to holism and the importance of its pursuit in
social science. In the parallel graduate student coffee-time
"seminar," I argued that what Redfield was missing is structure.
Perhaps, I had gotten the idea the previous semesters, when I
had [also] audited the visiting structural functionalist anthropologists
Raymond Firth and Meyer Fortes. I say 'audited,' because I
was supposed to be on the fourth floor where I was getting my PhD in the
Department of Economics. Since then, the members
and products of this Department and their brethren outliers in the
Chicago Business and Law schools [some of them my then
fellow economics graduate students] have gotten about half the Economics
Nobel prizes granted in this world, among them five
in the last six years. I, on the other hand, flunked my PhD exam three
times in a row in inter-national economics, which was my
strongest field on the fourth floor. The significance of the hyphen and
the bold-face in the word following it should become
evident in the present book. The previous two sentences may also offer
clues to why I felt more comfortable on the second
floor. However, much of the subsequent 'the personal is political' and
theoretical 'intellectual' account is already related in my
autobiographical Underdevelopment of Development (Frank 1991,1996). So
here I can stick only to what seems most
germane for the history behind this book, which pretends to re-write
"history."
In 1962, I went to Latin America, armed with the names of some friends
given to me by Eric Wolf, also an anthropologist --
and with his early writings on how world capitalism had intervened to
form [or underdevelop] parts of Mesoamerica. In 1963 in
Rio de Janeiro, I wrote On Capitalist Underdevelopment (Frank 1975); and
in 1965 in Mexico I debated in a national
newspaper with Rodolfo Puiggros who defended the then received wisdom
that Latin America had been feudal (reprinted in
Frank 1969). The 1963 manuscript had opened with a critique of received
theory which in revised form was published in 1967
as "The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology"
(reprinted in Frank 1969). It was a scathing
critique of all the theory I had received on both floors and from the
library at the University of Chicago. In particular relevance
to the present book, my critique was directed most of all against
Weberian sociology, transmitted to my generation by Talcott
Parsons (1951, 1937/49) in his mistitled The Structure of Social Action
and The Social System. It was applied to the "Third
World modernization theory" by my still good friend and former "mentor"
Bert Hoselitz, as well as by my also friend Manning
Nash and others there and elsewhere. After reading my draft, Nancy
Howell advised me to keep only the "theoretical"
references to them, and to take out all the many "personal" ones, which
I then did. Now she again asks me to do the same in the
present work, especially with regard to herself; but this time I am more
reluctant to do so.
In all these and other works, I sustained that "not feudalism, but
capitalism" had generated "the development of
underdevelopment" in Latin America and elsewhere in the "Third World."
The crucial factors in this underdevelopment, I
argued, were not so much "internal" to any of its regions, let alone due
to its peoples, but were generated by the structure and
function of the "world system" itself, of which all were integral parts.
However, I then wrote and continued to think that the
"capitalist world system" was born when Columbus "discovered" America.
That is why in the early 1970s in Chile I entitled a
book analyzing the development of the same World Accumulation 1492-1789
(Frank 1978a). My account had reached only as
far as the latter date when the 1973 military coup in Chile sent my
family and me back to my birthplace in Berlin.
Events in Chile before the coup already had obliged me to jump a couple
of centuries ahead to concern myself with the present
world economic crisis of accumulation, an expression of which I regarded
the Chilean coup itself. So that is what I then did in
several books and countless articles for the next two decades.
Nonetheless in the back of my mind, I kept harbouring the
sneaking suspicion that if "the system" had been born in 1492, or had
emerged since 1450 as Wallerstein announced, it could
not have just done so suddenly like Pallas Athene out of the head of
Zeus. Something before, maybe even also systemic, must
have led up to the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama and to the rise
of the "world capitalist system."
Yet also still in Chile, I wrote a blurb for the dust-jacket of the
first edition of the first volume of Immanuel Wallerstein's The
Modern World-System (1974). I said that it is a rendition of "the early
development of a world economy, the understanding of
which is essential for the proper appreciation of all subsequent
development. This book should become a classic immediately
upon publication." It did! The other two dust-jacket blurbs were by
Fernand Braudel and Eric Wolf. Braudel said that historians
already knew that "Europe had formed a world economy around itself. What
they had never thought of... [and] which
characterizes I. Wallerstein's thought is that this entity [the
world-system] provides a new framework for the subject of
European history, that ... is compelling." Eric Wolf's blurb said that
the book will become indispensable for understanding the
development of the world system and that "it is a book that people will
have to deal with, argue with, cite, learn by in order to
make their own points, take their own departures." I cite these blurbs
here because of how revealing they are for subsequent
developments related below.
Some of these developments ran in several parallel strands but need not
be related here, because also following Fairbank's
advice, they were already signalled in the preface to my The World
System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (Frank
and Gills 1993). Nonetheless, I wish to bring at least the following
developments together in this preface, because they are also
essential to an understanding of the genesis and purpose of the present
book.
Eric Wolf wrote Europe and the People without History (1982) to show how
they had been incorporated into the modern
world-system at the cost of much of their own welfare and culture. Since
his thesis is that they do have a history, he placed a
question mark after the title; but the publishers didn't like it and
took it off again. [Publishers never like question marks: the same
thing happened to Michael Barratt Brown (1963) with his After
Imperialism!, or so both authors told me]. Eric Wolf's editor,
Stanley Holwitz, had invited me to referee the book for publication, but
alas for family reasons I had to decline. I much
appreciated the book, and not only because its introduction singled
Wallerstein's and my above cited books out as the fore-
runners of his own. At a public tribute to Eric at the 1990 meetings of
the American Anthropological Association, I tried to set
the record straight after a student had said that my work had been major
influence on Wolf's: On the contrary I pointed out, Eric
and his work had been the most important early influence on mine in
showing me on my way to and around Latin America: It
was Eric who had signalled that all this was about the world capitalist
system, already in colonial times.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, it turned out for two reasons to be a
good thing that I had been obliged to decline to referee
Wolf's book: One day at my dinner table in Amsterdam, I told him
privately that I was appalled at what then seemed to me as a
"giant step backward" in his book, which now said that "capitalism"
began in 1800 and not in 1492 as he had previously led me
to believe. The second reason is that since then I have found more
reason to agree with his later thesis after all, as the present
book demonstrates. For, if there is such a thing as "capitalism" at all,
which I no doubt, it would seem better to date it from the
industrial revolution in Europe since 1800, as Wolf claims. But now I
also see that the "world system" to which he and I referred
in our blurbs for Wallerstein's book began much earlier than any of us
three imagined. However that also opens the question
what it means, if anything, to call the world economy or system
"capitalist."
Then Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) wrote Before European Hegemony. Some years
before the publication of the book itself, a
special issue of a journal was devoted to the discussion of an early
article- length version of her thesis. The editor asked me to
contribute a comment, which I did (Frank 1987). That led me back to my
"sneaking suspicion" about the possible earlier roots
of the "modern" world system. Abu-Lughod confirmed them by laying them
bare for the "thirteenth century world system," as
she called it. But she said that it was only a fore-runner of the
different modern one, for which she accepted Wallerstein's thesis
of its independent [re] invention after 1450. The main point of my
critique was extended in my review of her book (Frank
1990): The "modern capitalist world-system" was not the re-invention,
but the continuation of Abu-Lughod's version of the
same world system already since at least 1250. However, if this world
system existed already two hundred years before
Wallerstein's starting date of 1450, then why not still earlier?
Already in the preface to my World Accumulation 1492-1789, I had quoted
and followed another admonition, which I called
Fairbank's (1969:ix) rule No. 2: "Never try to begin at the beginning.
Historical research progresses backward, not forward....
Let the problems lead you back." The "problem" was the origin - and
therewith the nature - of "the world system," and my time
had finally come to let it lead my historical research backward as far
as the evidence could take me. If the beginnings of "the
system" were not in 1800, nor in 1492/1450, nor in 1250, then perhaps
around 1000 AD. Of course, Wallerstein did not and
still does not want to admit any of this, even though he would write
that it is clearly laid out and widely accepted that "the long
swing was crucial." According to him, this swing was upward after 1450,
but downward from 1250 to 1450, and previously
already upward from 1050 to 1250 (Wallerstein 1989, published in 1992).
As editor of Review, he graciously published my
first article, which argued that we probably can and should trace the
origins of the world system back much farther still, among
other reasons because of this long cycle cited by Wallerstein himself
(Frank 1989).
Barry Gills had already written but never published something similar on
his own several years before. When he read the draft of
my 1989 article, we made the initially obvious connection and then
started to work it out. The results were our joint articles on
"The Cumulation of Accumulation," on long cycles from 1700 BC to 1700
AD, on an interdisciplinary introduction to the 5,000
year world system, and the book The World System: Five Hundred Years or
Five Thousand? of which we are contributing
editors (Gills and Frank 1991,1992, Frank and Gills, Eds. 1993). Gills
generously shared his erudition with me, both of his
historical lore and of his theoretical sophistication. Indeed he also
loaned me much of his well selected library and his own early
manuscripts. Therein, he was of enormous help to push or allow me to go
much further much faster than I otherwise might have.
However, he also drew me into some directions about "international
relations" and about "hegemony" that I liked less and
pursued mostly for the sake of our collaboration.
At the same time, Christopher Chase-Dunn had begun to collaborate with
Thomas D. Hall. Chris had been a
"number-cruncher" who had, among many other things, "tested" and found
support for my and others' dependency theory.
Simultaneously, but mostly separately, we were also "pioneers" in
incorporating the analysis of the Soviet Union and other
socialist countries into that of the "capitalist world system." Tom
Hall's work on tribal and nomad societies in the American
Southwest expanded to include nomads elsewhere and with Chase-Dunn also
"marcher states" on the "borders" of or
temporarily outside the world system. Together, they embarked on
constructing more world system theory on the basis of their
comparative analysis of several little and big "world-systems" These
include several small ones but also the major one Gills and I
were researching and David Wilkinson's "central civilization," the
combination of which Chase-Dunn and Hall re-baptized as the
"central world system."
Chase-Dunn also encouraged me to go to the 1989 meetings of the
International Society for the Comparative Study of
Civilizations [ISCSC], where I met Wilkinson and Stephen Sanderson. From
there, I went on to the meetings of the World
History Association [WHA], where I met William McNeill, who has
encouraged my work on history every since. Jerry Bentley,
the editor of the just launched WHA Journal of World History also
attended both meetings and subsequently published my
review of Abu-Lugod and my "Plea for World System History" (Frank 1990,
1991a,). Stephen Sanderson has also been
working on parallel strands in his Social Transformations (1994). The
book includes a study of Japanese development as
parallel to that of Britain, which I also used in the present book. He
subsequently edited a special issue of the ISCSC journal
Comparative Civilizations Review, which led to his edited book of
comparative studies of Civilizations and World Systems
(1995). It contains contributions by most of the above- named and
authors, and also includes my "Re-reading of Braudel and
Wallerstein" (Frank 1995). Simultaneously, George Modelski and William
R. Thompson (1996 a,b) have expanded their long-
standing collaboration from their earlier focus on post 1494 political
hegemony and war in the European world to the study of
innovation and Kondratieff waves starting in 930 AD in China and also to
pre-historic world system evolution. The
collaboration, help and encouragement of these colleagues and now also
friends was already acknowledged in greater detail in
the preface to The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?
(Frank and Gills 1993) and is gladly reaffimed here.
The thesis of this Frank and Gills book is that the same features that
characterize Wallerstein's "modern" five hundred year old
world system can also be found in the same system going back at least
five thousand years. David Wilkinson and Jonathan
Friedman and Kaisa Ekholm joined us with their similar theses [which
were they worked out separately long ago but by now
were mutually influential]. My friends [and co-authors of two other
books on more recent times] Immanuel Wallerstein and
Samir Amin contributed chapters, which demur from the pre-1500 thesis.
Wallerstein (1991,1993) answered defending his
world-system with a hyphen against my world system without a hyphen and
still insists that we should "hold the tiller firm"
(Wallerstein 1995). Both he and Amin continue to stand their ground in
their contributions to a festschrift in my honor (Chew
and Denemark, Eds. 1996). Abu-Lughod declined to take a stand on this
issue and argued that we can't tell if we are now
dealing with the same or a new world system in modern times.
The modern "father" of world history, William McNeill, was kind enough
to write a foreword [and also to contribute it to my
festschrift in "representation of historians"]. He now agrees that his
own The Rise of the West (1963) devoted insufficient
attention to world systemic connections; and that we must now
increasingly map them through all networks of communication. I
agree. McNeill's University of Chicago colleague, Marshall Hodgson and I
shared an apartment in 1954. He talked to me about
his writings, some of which are only now collected in his posthumously
published Rethinking World History (1993). Alas at the
time, I was quite unable to understand what he was talking about. If I
had understood, it would have saved me about forty years
of wandering near-blindly through the historical woods. Only now do I
profusely cite and studiously follow his guides to
re-thinking world history.
One way to answer Abu-Lughod's question and also to do as McNeill and
Hodgson counsel would seem to be to attempt two
related things: One is to trace the roots of her system backwards, which
she said she was not interested in doing. But I was and
did (Frank and Gills 1993). The other task is to look for the possible
continuation of Abu-Lughod's own "thirteenth century
world system" and/or Frank and Gills' five thousand year one into early
modern times, which she also declined to do. Therefore,
that is the task I undertake in the present book. However, doing so also
poses many questions about what the implications of
our reading of history before 1500 are for the re-interpretation of the
early modern [and eventually contemporary and future]
history of the world system since 1500.
I then read volume III of Braudel's (1992) trilogy, The Perspective of
the World, and I re-read some Wallerstein to do an
internal critique of their writings under the title "The Modern World
System Revisited: Re-reading Braudel and Wallerstein"
(Frank 1995). I confined myself to showing how their own data and
especially Braudel's observations about them flatly
contradict their own thesis on the European centered
world-economy/system. An earlier version of the same critique had been
published as "The World Economic System in Asia Before European
Hegemony" (Frank 1994). This title combined elements of
Wallerstein's and Abu-Lughod's titles with that of the then recently
published Asia Before Europe by K.N. Chaudhuri (1990).
Both authors had shown that Asia was far more important, if not
hegemonic, in the world economy before Europe. Re-reading
Braudel and Wallerstein showed that, despite themselves and contrary to
their own thesis, there were not several
world-economies in the early modern era. Instead there was only one
world economy and system in which Europe was not and
could not have been hegemonic, as they mistakenly claimed. Thus, also
contrary to their claims, this world economy and system
also could not have started in Europe!
Here the significance of the three dust-jacket blurbs for Wallerstein's
first edition have become apparent. Braudel said that
Wallerstein provided a new framework for the subject of European history
so that they could better re-interpret what historians
already knew, that is that Europe had formed a world around itself. I
had said that the book would be an instant classic,
because we needed it for the proper appreciation of all subsequent
development. And Eric Wolf added that "people will have to
deal with, argue with, cite, learn by in order to make their own points,
take their own departures."
Yes indeed, for my critiques of Braudel and Wallerstein do learn from
and argue with Walletstein to suggest that Braudel is both
right and wrong: Wallerstein provides a better framework for the subject
of European history, but not for world history,
Wallerstein's title notwithstanding. And Braudel and other historians
are wrong to have "known" all along that Europe had
formed a world around itself. My above cited critiques show on their own
evidence that Europe did not expand to "incorporate"
the rest of the world into its "European world-economy/system." Instead,
Europe belatedly joined, or at least cemented its
previously looser ties with, an already existing world economy and
system. To combine Abu-Lughod's and Chaudhuri's titles,
pride of place belonged to Asia Before European Hegemony. Or to add
Braudel's and Wallerstein's own titles as well, we need
a new Perspective of the Modern World System of Asia Before European
Hegemony.
In this regard, I have related before (Frank 1991, 1996) what my then
about 15 year old sons told me almost two decades ago.
It turns out to be even more relevant to the thesis of the present book
than I, or presumably they, could realize at the time: Paulo
said that if Latin America had been colonial, it could not have been
feudal. Miguel said in 1978 that England is an
underdeveloping country. The significance of these observations to the
present book is several-fold: If Latin America was
colonial it was because it was part and parcel of the world system.
Therefore, not only can it make no sense to call it "feudal." It
also makes questionable sense to so categorize it at all - even as
"capitalist" - other than as a dependent part of the world
economy or system. What do we gain by any such "definition," if we can
even "define" it at all? Really nothing; indeed this focus
on "modes of production" only diverts our attention from the much more
importantly defining world system of which everything
is a part, as I already argued elsewhere (Frank 1991, 1993, 1996).
In that world economy/system, we can observe "the development of
underdevelopment" here and there, then and now. Much of
Latin America and Africa are still underdeveloping. However, now we can
also observe that "Great" Britain is also
underdeveloping. We noted that my son Miguel already observed that in
1978, before Margaret Thacher took over as Prime
Minister! Miguel and maybe Mrs. Thacher did not see it for lack of
sufficient world systemic hindsight, but in fact we can
observe Britain underdeveloping already since the beginning of "The
Great Depression" in 1873. How so? Well even with the
benefit of Wallerstein's modern-world- system perspective, we can now
see that some sectors, regions, countries and their
"economies" not only move up, but also move down in their relative and
even absolute positions within the world economy and
system as a whole. Britain began its decline over a century ago, when
its pride of place began to be taken by Germany and
North America. They fought two world wars - or one long war from 1914 to
1945 - to dispute who would take Britain's place.
Alas for some, today their place in the sun is also being displaced by
the "Rising Sun" in East Asia. One of the theses of this
book is that these developments should come as no surprise, because
parts of East Asia already were at the center of the world
economy/system until about 1800. In historical terms, "The Rise of the
West" came late and was brief!
So one of the [early] purposes of the present book was to show first
that there already was an ongoing world economy before
the Europeans had much to do and say in it. There were two naturally
derivative points: One was to show that Asia, and
especially China and India, but also Southeast Asia and West Asia, were
more active and the first three also more important to
this world economy than Europe was until about 1800. The other
derivative point is that therefore it is completely
counter-factual and anti-historic to claim what "historians already knew
that Europe built a world around itself." It did not; it
used its American money to buy itself a ticket on the Asian train.
However, this historical fact has still other far-reaching
implications, both for history and for social theory based on historical
understanding.
Under the title "Let's Be Frank About World History," my friend Albert
Bergesen (1995) points out that the proposition "the
world economy/system did not begin in Europe" also pulls the rug out
from all Eurocentric social theory. It is based on the
temporal precedence and structural priority of a Europe around which the
remainder of the world was allegedly built. If Europe
did not have this place and function, then the derived Eurocentric
social theory also does not rest on the firm historical
foundation that it claims to have in what historians "knew." Thus, the
very scaffolding of western social theory threatens to come
tumbling down around us. It now does so through its own undoing or at
least through the wrong-doing of its principal architects
and all the "master" builders who constructed their theoretical
scaffolding and built on unstable historical foundations. As I will
show in the Introductory chapter that follows, these architects of our
social theory include Marx, Weber, Sombart, Polanyi and
others, as well as still Braudel and Wallerstein [and indeed Frank
1978]. Aall of them [mis]-attributed a central place in their
theories to Europe, which it never had in the real world economy. How
and where does that leave us? Well, just about as in the
proverbial [European/ American/ Western] Emperor Who Had No Clothes.
Naked!
More or less well known critiques of this Eurocentrism have already been
made at the ideological level by Edward Said (1978)
in his critique of the idea of Orientalism, Martin Bernal (1987) when he
argued for the African origins of Western culture in
Black Athena, Samir Amin (1989) when he inveighed against Eurocentrism
and others to be cited in the introductory chapter to
come. I mention them here mostly as other precursory strands for the
critical part of this book. Another major one is James
Blaut (1993) who literally demolishes all the myths of European
"exceptionalism" in The Colonizer's Model of the World. All
these writers have done yeoman work to show that the now naked
Eurocentric Emperor has no clothes. So what is to be
done?, as Lenin might have said! Bergesen insists that we do something
globological about it, even if it is not yet quite clear just
how to do it.
It is not my purpose to fashion a new set of clothes for the same old
Eurocentric Emperor, although others who are too
embarrassed by his new-found nakedness may wish to try. I frankly prefer
no emperor at all. However, I am not naive enough
to think that we can just think him away. Nor will it do simply to
"deconstruct" him and his garb, post-modernist fashion. I do
believe that we are in dire need of an Alternative "Perspective of the
World" for the new world [dis]order in the making.
The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? [with a question
mark!] was my first attempt to fashion an
alternative "perspective of the world" and analytical tool to grapple
with its own structure and function. Marta Fuentes used to
say that I am still a "functionalist," because I used to ask her all the
time, 'what's the sense of this, that or the other?'. She said
that by 'sense' I really meant 'function' within the structure of the
system. She thought it was all only in my head. I think the
system is really out there in the real world, and it is about time that
we fashion ourselves at least a rudimentary mental picture of
this system, its structure, and its dynamic. My friend Robert Denemark
agrees. He co-edited the festschrift for me, which was
nice of him. However he is also very demanding of both of us. He insists
that we must, and helps me to, study the whole
[system], which is more than the sum or its parts. That is, we need a
more holistic theory and analysis of the whole world, and
not of just the part that centered around Europe.
Alas, we lack even an adequate terminology, not to mention the analytic
constructs and over-arching theory, to replace 'inter-
national' trade and other relations. To say instead 'world trade' in the
'global system' [or vice versa] is only a small step in the
right direction, if that. For the point is to elucidate how the flow of
trade and money is only analogous to the oxygen carrying
blood that pulses through the circulatory system [or to the other
information also through the nervous system] of the world
body's economy. The world body also has a skeletal and other structure;
it has organs that are vital to its survival, but whose
'function' is also bodily determined; it has cells that live and die and
are replaced by others; it has daily, monthly, and other short
and long cycles; indeed a life cycle; and it seems to be part of an
evolutionary [albeit not pre-destined] scheme of things. Last
but by no means least, our world economy and "system" is not independent
of the ecology or the cosmos, with both of which it
can and does have mutual interactions, which also bear more and more
systematic attention. The other co- editor of the
festschrift for me, Sing Chew, insists that my attempts at
'humanocentric' analysis are not enough. What we need, he says, is
'ecocentric' theory and praxis. Alas, we or at least I lack even the
conceptual wherewithal adequately to address either of these
problematiques, let alone their combination.
This book is my first more holistic attempt at extending Denemark's and
my "perspective of the [whole] world" onwards to early
modern world economic history. The task is to look in the attempt to see
how the structure/ function/ dynamic of the world
economy/system itself influences, if not determined, what happened - and
still happens! -in its various parts. The whole is not
only greater than the sum or its parts. It also shapes the parts and
their relations to each other; which in turn transform the
whole.
So this is the record of how the beginnings of the present work have
developed out of partly parallel and partly already
intermingled strands. This book now seeks to go beyond these roots in
order to make my own points and take my own
departures as Eric Wolf correctly predicted. That means to take and make
a departure, indeed a radical break, also from him
and all the others - including myself - cited above. Nonetheless, I
gratefully acknowledge much help from all of them and others.
I gladly accepted the invitation of my often co-author Barry Gills and
his University of Newcastle to begin the joint construction
there of such an alternative perspective in March 1994. Its 20 page
first draft was entitled "The Modern World System under
Asian Hegemony: The Silver Standard World Economy 1450-1750" (Gills and
Frank 1994). Alas, this work was then
interrupted, largely due to illness on my part. Only in late 1995 did it
become possible again for me to pursue and now to
expand this work; but now, after my retirement from the University of
Amsterdam, on my own here in Toronto.
Not really on my own! For Nancy Howell and I were married in Toronto in
1995, and she has given me untold emotional and
moral support to resume this project and carry it further as the present
book. It would and could not ever have undertaken, let
alone completed, without Nancy. Moreover, she also provided me with the
physical facilities to do so in a beautiful study in our
home and access as her husband [to compensate my lack of any other
institutional support] to the library facilities of the
University of Toronto.
That also allows me the use of its e-mail to communicate about issues in
and sources for this book with colleagues all over the
world. There have been so many, in addition to those already
acknowledged elsewhere in this preface, that I can here only
name and thank a few of the many whom I have consulted who have helped
me most, alas some still by snail-mail: Bob Adams
in California, Jim Blaut in Chicago, Greg Blue in British Columbia,
Terry Boswell in Georgia, Tim Brook in Toronto, Linda
Darling in Arizona, Richard Eaton in Arizona, Dennys Flynn in
California, Steve Fuller in England, Paulo Frank in Geneva, Jack
Goldstone in California, Takeshi Hamashita in Tokyo, Satoshi Ikeda in
Binghamton, Huricihan Inan in Ankara, Martin Lewis in
North Carolina, Victor Lieberman in Michigan, Angus Maddison in Holland,
Pat Manning in Boston, Bob Marks in California,
Joya Misra in Georgia, Brian Moloughene in New Zealand, John Munro in
Toronto, Rila Mukherjee in Calcutta, Jack Owens in
Idaho, Frank Perlin in France, Ken Pomeranz in California, Anthony Reid
in Australia, John Richards in North Carolina, Morris
Rossabi in New York, Mark Selden in Ithica, David Smith in California,
Graeme Snooks in Australia, Burton and Dorothy
Stein in London, Sun Laichen in Michigan, and Richard von Glahn, John
Wills and Bin Wong all in California.
The attentive reader will find that most of these names reappear in the
text in connection with my use of their own work and/or
that used or recommended by them. Before proceeding to publish
especially my disputes with them [eg. about estimates and
other issues regarding population, trade, production, income, money,
cycles and institutions in China, Europe, India, Central-,
Southeast-, and West-Asia, as well as Africa], I submitted my relevant
text to their personal review and acceptance. I then
amended my text in accordance with their return e-mailed collegial
comments, for which I wish to express my gratitude here.
Alas, similar communication was not possible or was interrupted about my
disputes with some colleagues in India.
Last but not least, I am thankful to Paul De Grace, cartographer at the
Department of Geography of Simon Fraser University,
for converting my hand schetched designs into his computer generated
maps; to the World Society Foundation of Zurich in
Switzerland for financial aid to pay for them and other expenses; to my
long time friend Stan Holwitz and now also my editor at
the University of California Press in Los Angeles for humoring me
through the travails of the book's production in Berkeley; and
to the ever active production editor there Juliane Brand. My special and
greatest thanks in this department go to Kathleen
MacDougall. Her good substantive help far beyond thecall of duty as
copy- editor strengthened this book's content and
argument, while her professional expertise combined with endless
patience and good cheer much improved its form and
comunicability to the reader, in whose name I therefore thank her as
well.
To conclude, I hope I may be excused if I repeat something from the
preface of my previous book on World Accumulation
The very attempt to examine and relate the simultaneity of
different events in the whole historical process or in the
transformation of the whole system - even if for want of empirical
information or theoretical adequacy it may be full of
holes in its factual coverage of space and time - is a significant
step in the right direction (particularly at a time in which
this generation must "rewrite history" to meet its need for
historical perspective and understanding of the single historical
process in the one world today). (Frank 1978a: 21).
To end this already too long preface, I would like to continue my
quotation from and agreement still with John King Fairbank:
The result can only be an imperfect approximation. Fortunately, no
one has to regard it as the last word. Once and author
looks back at what he thought he was trying to do, many
perspectives emerge. Foremost is that of ignorance, at least in
my case. A book that to its author is a mere antechamber to a whole
unwritten library, bursting *with problems awaiting
exploration, may seem to his readers to have a solidity which
shunts their research elsewhere. It is useless to assure them
that the book is really full of holes (Fairbank 1969: xii).
Unlike Fairbank, at least I need not fear that any of my readers may be
fooled into seeing a non-existent solidity here. Surely,
they will note that this book is full of holes. I do hope however not to
shunt all of their research elsewhere, and I invite them to
use at least some of it to help fill these holes -- and to dig up new
ones of their own.
Andre Gunder Frank Toronto, January 26, August 8, and December 25, 1996
--
Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222
