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THE DISCOURSE OF APPLIED SOCIOLOGY
Samir Das Gupta, Jay Weinstein.
New Delhi, forthcoming
ReOrient World History, Social Theory, and the 19th Century
Andre Gunder Frank
This essay examines how Western social theory from Marx and Weber to Wallerstein and Frank has been based on a Eurocentric version of history. The latter not only denies real world history so much as to not only neglect most of human reality especially in Asia even during early modern history. In so doing, this Eurocentric history and historiography as well as the social theory derived from the same also subtantially distort the experience of the West as well. Therefore, as Asia is now REemerging to the center of the world historical stage, it is high time also to ReOrient our historiography and social theory and of the 19th Century as well during which the West and Asia traded places in the world.
I. HOW WESTERN PERCEPTIONS OF THE EAST CHANGED
Until about 1800, the predominant Western perception of the East was favorable. Europeans were attracted to and sought to learn from many parts of the Orient that were seen as civilizationally, culturally, politically, socially, economically, and technologically more advanced than any or all of Europe. Indeed, "Orient" , as still recorded in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English whose first edition dates from 1911, meant the following: 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.
What happened to make all those nice meanings disappear and have the American Oxford Dictionary  now say instead: ORIENT: The East, Countries East of the Mediterranean, Especially East Asia. Before 1880, Europeans and Arabs at least had a much more global/ist perspective that was then suppressed and replaced by the rise of Eurocentric historiography and social theory in the nineteenth century. For instance, the Tunisian statesman and historian, Ibn Kaldhoun [1332-1406] evaluated and compared the "wealth of nations" before and at his time: This may be exemplified by the eastern regions, such as Egypt, Syria, India, China, and the whole northern regions, beyond the Mediterranean. When their civilization increased, the property of the inhabitants increased, and their dynasties became great.... Their prosperity and affluence cannot be fully described because it is so great. The same applies to the merchants from the East ... and even more so to the far Eastern merchants from the countries of the non-Arab Iraq, India, and China. (Ibn Khaldun 1967:279). Even in the eighteenth century Father Du Halde, the most learned French publicist of matters Chinese [who never left Paris and used Jesuit and other travellers and translators as sources] still wrote that in China the particular riches of every province, and the ability of transporting merchandise by means of rivers and canals, have rendered the empire always very flourishing.... The trade carried on within China is so great, that of all of Europe is not to be compared therewith (quoted by Chaudhuri 1991:430 [for a longer version also see Ho 1959:199]). N1 Lach and Kley (1965--) have written volumes [7 so far with others promised] about Asia in the Making of Europe. They observe for instance "sixteenth- century Europeans had considered Japan and China to be the great hopes of the future" (ibid: 1890). By the end of the seventeenth century "few literate Europeans could have been completely untouched [by the image of Asia], and it would have been surprising indeed if its effects could not be seen in contemporary European literature, art, learning, and culture" (ibid: 1890]). For in the meantime, hundreds of books about Asia had been written, reprinted and translated in all major European languages. Adam Smith also recognized Asia as being economically far more advanced and richer than Europe in still in 1776. "The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the provinces of Bengal in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces of China.... Even those three countries [China, Egypt and Indostan], the wealthiest, according to all accounts, that ever were in the world, are chiefly renowned for their superiority in agriculture and manufactures.... China is a much richer country than any part of Europe" (Smith 1937: 20,348,169). Already by the mid-nineteenth century, European views of Asia and China in particular had drastically changed. Dawson (1967) documents and analyzes this change under the revealing title The Chinese Chameleon: An Analysis of European Conceptions of Chinese Civilization. Europeans changed from regarding China as "an example and model" to calling the Chinese "a people of eternal standstill." Why this rather abrupt change? The coming of the industrial revolution and the beginnings of European colonialism in Asia had intervened to re-shape European minds, if not to "invent" all history, then at least to invent a false universalism under European initiation and guidance. Then in the second half of the nineteenth century, not only was world history re-written wholesale, but "universal" social "science" was [new] born, not only as a European, but as a Eurocentric invention. In so doing, "classical" historians and social theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took a huge step backward even from European, not to mention Islamic, perspectives that had been much more realistically world embracing up through the eighteenth century. Among those who saw things from this narrower [European] new perspective were Marx and Weber. According to them and all of their many disciples to this day, the essentials of the "capitalist mode of production" that allegedly developed in and out of Europe were missing in "The Rest" of the world and could be and were supplied only through European help and diffusion. That is where the "Orientalist" assumptions by Marx, and many more studies by Weber, and the [fallacious] assertions of both and all their many disciples to this day about the rest of the world come in. Marx seems to have been selective in the sources he drew on to characterize "Asia" not to mention Africa. Marx followed Montesquieu and the Philosophes like Rousseau and also James Mill, who had instead "discovered" "despotism" as the "natural" condition and "model of government" in Asia and of "The Orient." Marx also remarked on "the cruelest form of state, Oriental despotism, from India to Russia." He also attributed to them and to the Ottomans, Persia and China, indeed to the whole "Orient." In all of these, Marx alleged the existence of an age-old "Asiatic Mode of Production" which kept all of Asia "divided into villages, each of which possessed a completely separate organization and formed a little world to itself." He alleged that in all of Asia the forces of production remained stagnant and stationary until the incursion of "The West" and "capitalism" woke it of its otherwise eternal slumber. Alas however, so is its obverse "capitalist mode of production," which was allegedly invented by Europeans and has ever since been held to be responsible for European, Western, and then global development. For as this book intends to show, all these were much more a function of world economic, including especially Asian development, than of any alleged European or "capitalist" exceptionalism, which have been the central themes of all social theory about "the Rise of the West" ever since. We will see below that all of this Marxian characterization was no more than a figment of his and other Eurocentric imagination, which had no foundation in historical reality whatsoever. Other social "scientists" may have risen to dispute Marx [and supposedly to agree with Smith], but they all agreed with each other and with Marx that 1492 and 1498 were the two greatest events in the history of mankind, because that is when Europe discovered the world. History and social theory have been marked ever since not only by the alleged uniqueness of [West] Europeans, which supposedly generated "The Rise of the West." What is worse, they allegedly also had to assume the civilizing mission of the white man's burden which bestowed "the development and spread of capitalism" on the world as Europe's and the West's gift to mankind. [Lately, some feminists have at least denied that this process has been a gift also to womankind]. For Max Weber of course agreed with Marx about all these European origins and characteristics of "capitalism," and with Sombart too. Weber only wanted to go them one better. Sombart had already singled out European rationality, and its alleged roots in Judaism, as the sine qua non of "capitalism" and its "birth" in Europe. Weber accepted that too. The additional acquaintance of Weber with Asian realities also complicated his argument and made it more sophisticated than the crude Marxian version. For instance, Weber recognized that Asia had big cities. And bureaucracies that worked. So they had to be somehow "fundamentally different" from European ones, both in structure and in function. So what was the essential difference, the missing ingredient that "The West" allegedly has and "The Rest" does not have if Weber himself did not find all these factors missing in the Oriental societies he studied? For Marx it was "the capitalist mode of production;" and Weber added also the proper religion and how it interfaces with the other factors to generate that "capitalist mode." Weber went to the trouble to study various major world religions and concluded that all of them had an essential mythical, mystic, magical, in a word anti-rational component, which "necessarily" handicapped all their true believers in coming to grasps with reality rationally, unlike the Europeans. This rational spirit is supposedly the missing secret ingredient that, when combined with all the others, distinguishes "The West" from "The Rest." Without it, the Asians could not possibly develop capitalism and therefore really "develop" at all, or even use their cities, production and commerce. Never mind that historical evidence belied that, from Catholics in Venice and other Italian cities to those gifted with the Protestant ethic in Eastern Europe and the European colonies early on in the South of the United States and still in the Caribbean, and elsewhere [as I already argued in Frank (1978b)]. This Eurocentric idea consists of several strands, some of which are privileged more by political economists like Marx and Sombart, and others by sociologists like Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber. All are summarized in the telling title The European Miracle by Eric L. Jones (1981). In a more recent book, the same Jones (1988) himself expresses doubts about his former book: He quotes another author to the effect that 'possibly the most exiting thing to do next would be to prove the theory wrong,' and goes on himself to say that "as a title The European Miracle was just a little too seductive.... I no longer see it as miraculous.... The trap seemed to lie in assuming that because Europe is different, the difference must tell us about the inception of growth... Formulated this way, Japanese and European histories seem to be matters of accidentally contrived balances of forces. Indeed, why not?" (Jones 1988: 5,6). However, these books are only a particularly visible tip of the iceberg of almost all western social science and history from Marx and Weber, through Spengler and Toynbee, to the spate of defenses of supposed Western "exceptionalism" since World War II, particularly in the United States. Norbert Elias' (1978) Civilizing Process is a more recent influential version. This Eurocentrism also had nineteenth century sociological great-grandfathers in the "father of sociology" Auguste Compte and in Sir Henry Maine who distinguished between supposedly new forms of thinking and of social organization based on "science" and contract," which allegedly replaced age old "traditional" ones. One grandfather was Emile Durkheim who idealized "organic" vs. "mechanical" forms of social organization and another was Ferdinand Toennis, who alleged a transition from traditional "Gemeinschaft" to modern "Gesellschaft." In a later generation, Talcott Parsons idealized "universalist" vs. "particularist" social forms, and Robert Redfield claimed to have found a contrast and transition or at least a continuum" between traditional "folk" and modern "urban" society and a certain symbiosis between "low" and "high civilization." The Marxist and contemporary neo-Marxist version is the alleged fundamental difference between "Asiatic," "feudal" or other forms of "tributary" modes of production on the one hand and the Western "capitalist" one on the other (Wolf 1982, Amin 1991,1993, 1996). Now we are all - knowingly or not - disciples of this completely Eurocentric social science and history. Talcott Parsons enshrined Weberianism and this Eurocentric historiography in sociology and political science when the United States became economically and culturally dominant in the world after World War II. His mistitled Structure of Social Action and The Social System as well as the derived "modernization theory," and the economist W.W. Rostow's (1959) Stages of Economic Growth were all cut from the same Eurocentric cloth and followed the same theoretical pattern. Alas we may ask, what was the point? Rostow's "stages" were little more than a "bourgeois" version of Marx's stage-by-stage development from feudalism to capitalism to socialism -- all starting in Europe! Like Marx, Rostow claimed that now the United States, following England, would show the rest of the world the mirror of its future. Rostow (1975), also explains How it All Began: Origins of the Modern Economy through the scientific revolution that allegedly distinguished modern Europe. David Landes (1969) finds the cultural conditions for The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe only in Europe itself. Thirty yearsa later, Landes repeats the same lithurgy in his very successful The Wealth and Poverty of Nantions (19980. Cipolla (1976:276) summarizes: "that the Industrial Revolution was essentially and primarily a socio-cultural phenomenon and not a purely technical one, becomes patently obvious when one notices that the first countries to industrialize were those which had the greatest cultural and social similarities to England." Other authors also offer only "internal" explanations to account for the alleged superiority and ascendance of the West over the rest of the world. For these writers, the rise of Europe was also a "miracle," which was due to allegedly unique qualities that Europeans had and all others lacked. Thus, White Jr. (1962), Hall (1985) or Baechler, Hall and Mann (1988) find the rest of the world deficient or defective in some crucial historical, economic, social, political, ideological, or cultural respect in comparison to the West. The claim is that presence in "The West" of what was allegedly lacking in "The Rest" gave "us" an initial internal developmental advantage, which "we" then diffused outward over the rest of the world as the "civilizing mission" of "the white man's burden." Among the worst offenders of all Eurocentrists are western economic historians, Marxists, and a fortiori Marxist economic historians. The vast majority of self styled "economic historians" totally neglect the history of most the world, and the remaining minority distort it altogether. The Study of Economic History: Collected Inaugural Lectures 1893-1970 (Edited by N.B Harte 1971) collects 21 such lectures by the most eminent English speaking economic historians. They in turn review and comment on the 'economic history' written by their colleagues in the profession over most of the preceding century: Almost every word is about Europe and the United States and their "Atlantic economy," which hardly even includes Africa. The rest of the world does not exist for them. Also in more recent decades, the International Congress of Economic History has met periodically and then published its conference proceedings. Going through their tables of contents reveals that some ninety percent of the "international" contributions are about the West. Lately, a couple of the congresses and/or volumes of proceedings have had titles like The Emergence of the World Economy 1500-1914 (Fisher, McInnis & Schneider, Eds. 1986). Yet the preponderance of the contributions are still about the West. Another current example of the same is the innovative publisher Variorum. Its newest series of books is published under the umbrella title "An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450-1800." The title of one of the edited volumes in this series is The European Opportunity. Yet the books in that series also concentrate on what Europe did, rather than on the opportunities in the world economy and especially in Asia, of which Europe only took advantage. Take for instance a recent review article on "Maritime Asia, 1500-1800" written by Willis (1993) for the American Historical Review. Willis revealingly subtitles it "The Interactive Emergence of European Domination." He reviews over a dozen books and cites perhaps one hundred others that deal with some "interaction" between East and West. However, most of the action reviewed remains directed from Europe toward Asia, and almost none the other way around. Moreover, the claim in the reviewer's title that European "domination emerged" already from 1500 onwards to 1800 is not at all substantiated. Indeed, it is disconfirmed even by the evidence supplied by the authors that Willis himself reviews and cites. So the very title of his article still reflects Eurocentric prejudice far more than it describes reality. A special Eurocentric charge is that the evidence does not support any contention that Europeans did anything other than by their own good efforts. Years ago, Bairoch (1969,1976), O'Brien (1982) and others already explicitly countered the earlier theses of Frank (1967, 1978) and/or Wallerstein (1974) that colonial and neo- colonial trade contributed to European investment and development. Bairoch (1969) denied that commercial capital made any significant contribution thereto. Patrick O'Brien (1982,1990) has on several occasions dismissed overseas trade and colonial exploitation as contributors to capital accumulation and industrialization in Europe, since by his calculations this trade, not to mention profits therefrom, amounted to no more than 2 percent of European GNP in the late eighteenth century. O'Brien (1982:18) contends that "for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral." O"Brien (1997: 76-77) goes even further and categorically contends under the sub-title "The Formation of a Global Economy, 1846-1914" that economic "interconnections across continents and countries down to the middle of the nineteenth century seem limited."
Marxist economic history, against whom Rostow, Bairoch, O'Brien and others also rail, may seem different; but it is equally, indeed even more, Eurocentric. Thus, Marxist economic historians also look for the sources of "The Rise of the West" and "the development of capitalism" within Europe. Examples are the famous debate in the 1950s on "the transition from feudalism to capitalism" among Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahashi, Rodney Hilton and others (reprinted in Hilton 1976) and the Brenner Debate on "European feudalism" (Aston and Philpin, Eds. 1985). The very existence of a world economic system was explicitly denied by Marx and only belatedly acknowledged by Lenin. However, his "imperialism" also was of recent European origin. In Rosa Luxemburg's version, the "world" capitalist economy had to rely on "external non-capitalist" space and markets outside of the capitalist system into which to expand. As Teshale Tibebu (1990: 83-85) aptly put it, all this Marxist economic history and theory is no more than 'Orientalism painted red." All of these "ideal type" West Yes/East diads [or triads in the case of the alleged Great Transformation of Karl Polanyi (1952,1957)] are idealizations of the West that have several things in common. The most important ones are that first they posit essentialist socio-cultural features and differences that are far more imaginary than real, and then they allege that the differences distinguish "us" from "them," or in the latter day terminology of Samuel Huntington (1993,1996) separate "The West" from "The Rest." Indeed, allegedly these features also distinguish modern [Western] society from its own past as well as from other societies' often still lingering present. Moreover, these "ideal" types attribute some kind of pristine self-development to some peoples - mostly to "us" - but not to others, and their subsequent diffusion [when positive] or imposition [if negative] from here to there. " The quintessential culmination of this "tradition" was Lerner's (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society. In the real world, the only practical holistic choice has been "none of the above."
II. SOME NECESSARY BUT STILL INSUFFICIENT CRITICAL BEGINNINGS
We may group our review of the new - and necessary but not sufficient - historiographic and theoretical departures as those that really do examine the East, those that re-examine the West, those that compare East and West, and those that propose a step toward more holism by looking at both from the perspective of a 'world-economy" and 'world-system,' which nonetheless remain European and western centered.
A. The East Never Was as the West Made It Out To Be
Historians and social scientists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America began [or better continued!] to re- examine these areas and their peoples. But there have also been some Western ones, among which Wim Wertheim himself and other Dutch scholars have been pioneers. J.C. van Leur's Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History was written already in the 1930s and republished in 1955. It was followed with a similar position by Van Schrieke (1955) in his Indonesian Sociological Studies and in 1956 by Wertheim's own Indonesian Society in Transition: A Study of Social Change. Other Dutch scholars like M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz (1962) continued this work on Indonesia in the world. Elsewhere, other important precurseos have been are Islam et Capitalisme by Maxime Rodinson (1972), The Venture of Islam by Marshall Hodgson (1974) and most globally Before European Hegemony by Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) and Asia Before Europe by K.N. Chaudhuri (1990), as well as his and others' earlier more documentary works. Special mention is merited by the multi-volume works on science and technology by Joseph Needham's (1954-) on China, Kuppuram and Kumusamani (1990) on India, and Nasr (1976) and al-Hassan and Hill (1986) on Islamic Science. Indeed conceptually, if not always chronologically, the first critique of the received wisdom is to recognize that Kipling's famous rendition that "the East is East, and the West is West" is no more than Western mythology to begin with. The very idea of and distinction between 'East' and 'West' is no more than a Western invention to 'distinguish' itself. An important opening gun was the scathing critique of the very idea of Orientalism itself by Edward Said (1978]. Coming from another direction, another critique was my own "The Sociology of Development and the Underdevelopment of Sociology" (Frank 1967a, 1969) and Susanne Jonas Bodenheimer's (1971) "Dependency and Imperialism: The Roots of Latin American Underdevelopment." We denied that the Third World South, then including the "Oriental" East, ever was 'traditional' as received theory had painted it to be. We and the theory of 'dependence' sought to distinguish between 'undevelopment' and 'the underdevelopment of development,' however successful, this challenge was nonetheless insufficiently holistic. Another, more recent, variant are 'post-colonialism' and other variants of 'post-modernism,' which also deny the colonially imposed 'reality,' but often at the cost of denying that there is any reality at all to speak of, except that which is mostly man-made by the speaker or writer himself.
B. But the West Itself Never Was or Did What its Advocates Claimed Either.
The second conceptual leg to collapse has been "The Myth of Western Exceptionalism." That is the telling sub-title of James Blaut (1993) in what he calls The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. Blaut microscopically examines, exposes and demolishes the myth of "The European Miracle" in its myriad forms of biology [racial superiority and demographic continence]; environment [nasty-tropical Africa; arid, despotic Asia; temperate Europe]; exceptional rationality and freedom [as against "Oriental despotism", the centerpiece of the Weberian doctrine, and part of the Marxian one]; alleged European historical superiority in technology, despite its borrowings from and dependence on earlier Chinese, Indian and Islamic advances; and society [development of the state, significance of the Church and "the Protestant ethic," the role of the bourgeoisie in class formation, the nuclear family, etc]. Thus, Blaut effectively demonstrates that each of these alleged European "exceptionalisms" and the whole "European miracle" is no more than a myth that is firmly based only in Eurocentric ideology. Therefore, its derived social "science" is empirically and theoretically untenable as well. Therefore, Blaut correctly argues, that it is wrong to attribute the subsequent development of Europe and the West to any of these supposedly internal European exceptionalisms. Jack Goody (1996) goes over some of the same ground again for the West, and comparatively finds similar or functionally analogous attributes also in studies like those mentioned in section A above about West, South, and East Asia. Goody again effectively refutes especially the Weberian allegations of the alleged "uniqueness [of] specific and peculiar achievements of Western rationalism." Yet, "the framework of such ideas has been the bread and butter of sociologists, historians, demographers, economists and , from a somewhat different angle, anthropologists" (Goody 1996:5). Many monographic and analytic studies on particular apsects of Western economic history, of course, do also show that it departed more than considerably from its Weberian 'ideal types'.
C. Comparing East and West Illuminates Both Another attempt to break down this Eurocentrism is to compare 'East" and 'West' to show that they were never so different after all, or at least to find what differences there really were. Indeed, this approach already has a long history and venerable tradition. Weber deliberately adopted it in his comparative study of world religions, even if it was to end up with the European exceptionalism of "the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." Since then, more and more comparisons have pulled the historical rug out from under Weberian, Marxist, Polanyian and other Eurocentrism. Notable among these have been the American Marshall Hodgson (1974, 1993), the European Fernand Braudel (1992) and especially the Asian N.K. Chaudhuri (1990). Of course, the same has been an element also in the arguments of Blaut (1993) and Goody (1996) already cited in section B above. Rutten (1994) also favorably compares European and Asian capitalists. My own ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998) also makes numerous East-West comparisons of patterns and changes in population, production, trade, science, technology, institutions, etc.
The book China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience by Bin Wong (1998), because it not only pushes such comparisons much further but also offers them as a theoretically sufficient alternative to the received wisdom, which Wong rightly rejects like I do. Wong begins by observing that since the nineteenth century most studies on China have been guided by the search for what China did not have or do by European standards. Instead, he proposes to examine Chinese reality itself and then proceed to ask how it can shed new light not only on China but comparatively also on the European experience. Wong writes:
One can find with little effort any number of differences between China and Europe, but assessing which of these differences mattered is difficult....A foundation of commonalities would locate more sharply the arena within which important initial differences could be located.... Without first identifying a set of commonalities, however, all differences compete for primary attention. The economic similarities to be considered here begin with Adam Smith. That is, the "Smithian dynamic" of the relation between the division of labor and the extent of the market was operative in China just as much as in Europe. So were the Ricardian ones of comparative advantage and the Malthusian demographic ones.
Wong, like Pomeranz (1997) and alas only much more superficially Frank (1998), also shows that per capita incomes, standards of living and death rates were quite comparable. Moreover, Wong observes as we also did in Sections A and B above, that most of the alleged cultural, social, and political differences either did not exist in reality or that their supposed differential effects on the observed differences in European and Chinese developments after 1800 are very dubious. Therefore he suggests that "other differences can then be introduced to explore further the distinctive paths followed by different parts of Eurasia" (Wong 1998:xx).
So far, so good. This kind of more careful discrimination between real commonalities and alleged and real differences in 'causes' may indeed be necessary to account for differences in 'effects.' But is or indeed can that scientific procedure be theoretically and empirically sufficient to account for the differential effects that we observe. My answer is that NO, it can NOT. For even more important however, what emerges from our review of early modern world economic history is that many of the specific "differences" are themselves generated by structured interaction in a common world economy/system. Far from being appropriate or necessary to understand this or that specificity here or there, differentiation then becomes an obstacle to accounting for and comprehending it. All attempts to account for features and factors of "development" on the basis only or even primarily of local antecedents and in the absence of their world economic "function" can result only in the neglect of factors that are essential to any satisfactory explanation. Only a holistic perspective on and from the global whole that is more than the sum of its parts can offer any adequate comprehension of any part and how and why it differs from any other! Therefore, all studies that compare "Western" and "Oriental" societies are already vitiated by their choice of the features or factors to be compared, which is itself derived from focusing on a part, be that Britain, Europe, the West or wherever. Indeed, van Leur (1955: 19) already wrote in his Indonesian Trade and Society that "justice cannot be done to the economic history of other periods and areas when one uses the categories of Western European economic history as the point of departure." But that is the the very design of the studies from Marx and Weber to Braudel and Wallerstein et al. They all suffer from the misplaced concreteness of looking for the explanandum with a magnifying glass or even a microscope, but only under the European streetlight. The real task is first to take up a telescope to gain a holistic view of the global whole and its world economy/system. As Frank Perlin rightly insists, we need to move beyond comparison in an attempt to draw broader structural conclusions....We need to ask questions about the possible existence, at the same particular moment in 'world' history, of similar, even identical [larger structural] forces operating on these different types of local political economy .... In short, commercial manufactures in Europe and in Asia formed dependent parts of wider international developments (Perlin 1990:50,89-90).
D. "Europeans Built a World Around Europe, as Historians Know."
That is what Fernand Braudel wrote on the dustjacket of Wallerstein's (1974) The Modern World-System. Both sought to extend the critiques summarized in Section B above by looking for other sources to account for "The Rise of the West.' An important early attempt to do the same was The Rise of the West by William McNeill (1963) with which he can be said to have fathered contemporary world history as a field of study. He criticized Toynbee for treating world history in terms of twenty- one different civilizations, when McNeill suggested that there were only three major contributory "civilizational" streams to world history and to the rise of the West. So far so good. However looking back twenty-five years after the publication of his book, McNeill (1990:9) recognized that "the central methodological weakness of my book is that while it emphasizes interactions across civilizational boundaries, it pays inadequate attention to the emergence of the ecumenical world system within which we live today... [and that the] three regions and their people remained in close and uninterrupted contact throughout the classical era" since 1500 BC, and therefore a fortiori since 1500 AD! Nontheless in this modern period, McNeill still sees the driving motor force of world history in the West and its development. Despite his important contributions to world history McNeill still testifies to the difficulties in overcoming a Eurocentric perspective and adopting a truly global world perspective of or on the world. The afore cited Jack Goody does seek to transcend this lingering Eurocentrism by going farther and farther back through world history and writes
A neglect of this common history over the long term lies behind a large body of research in sociology, in history, in economics and in anthropology that has dominated Europe over the last two hundred years and takes as its problematic the Rise and Uniqueness of the West.... I am arguing for the reverse, for the necessity of looking at Developments in Europe from a wider perspective, of taking a global point of departure (Goody 1996: 240,230)
Nonetheless, also Goody does not attempt a global history, neither since the Bronze Age nor even for early modern times. These same difficulties were also insuperable for Braudel and still are so for Wallerstein and their many disciples. Braudel's "Perspective of the World" since 1500 is broader than most. He divided the world into a "European world-economy" and several other and separate external "world-economies" outside the same. Braudel did, of course, also study and describe at least parts of these "other" world economies, especially in Volume III of his trilogy on Civilization & Capitalism. Indeed, so did Marx in his own Volume III of Capital! Yet both neglected to incorporate the findings of their third volumes into the model and theory of their first volumes. Moreover, their neglect was quite conscious, intentional and deliberate: Their Eurocentrism convinced both that any and all historical model and social theory, be it universal or not, must be based on the experience of Europe alone. Their only concession was that Europe and its model did have consequences for the rest of the world.
It was Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974) The Modern World- System [and if I may say so also my own simultaneously written World Accumulation and the companion Dependent Accumulation (Frank 1978a,b)] that sought to systematize these consequences of European expansion and "capitalist" development for both Europe and the rest of the world. Both of us emphasized the negative "underdeveloping" impact of European expansion in many other parts of the world and their contribution in turn to capital accumulation and development in Europe and then also in North America. However, both of us still limited our modelling and theoretical analysis to a modern "world" economy/system, which we saw and Wallerstein still sees as centered in Europe and expanding from there to incorporate more and more of the rest of the world in its own European based "world" economy. In his perspective, Europe's expansion did incorporate parts of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas into the world-economy/ system.
However as Wallerstein explicitly explains, this economy was only world-like, and not at all world-encompassing. For in his view, West-, South-, and East- Asia, and indeed Russia, were only incorporated into this European world-economy/ system after 1750. So Wallerstein's "world-system" perspective, theory and analysis not only do not encompass most of the world before that. He even claims explicitly that most of the world, including all of Eurasia east of the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe played no significant part in his "world-economic/system" history. Eric Wolf (1982) is rightly critical of others' neglect of the impact of Europe [on] the People Without History. He shows that people outside Europe did have histories of their own and how the expansion of Europe impacted on them. However, he still underestimates their mutual impact on each other; and he does not ask how the one world in which all participate together impacts on each of them. Moreover he retains, indeed even resurrects, the primacy of "modes of production," from kinship, to tributary, to capitalist based ones. Thus Eric Wolf (1982) and Samir Amin (1991) refer to a so-called "tributary mode of production," which supposedly characterised the whole world before 1500 according to the former and much of it still until 1800 according to the latter. Little is gained in my view, and much better opportunities at global reformulation are needlessly squandered, by inventing new latter day variations of these old European derived categories with fuzzy and euphemistic prefixes that characterize particular 'societies' as pre, proto, semi, quasi, commercial, petty, ersatz, or even post 'capitalist' and 'feudal' or 'socialist' for that matter.
The same must be said about the recent Dutch discussion about 'merchant capitalism.' The same original Eurocentric sin is still latent if not manifest even in the most recent conscious efforts to transcend Eurocentrism from Janet Abu-Lughod's (1989) Before European Hegemony [which ends in 1350 and previews a new beginning in Europe] and Chaudhuri's (1990) Asia Before Europe [whose subtitle established Indian Ocean limits, and does not attempt an economic history even of that], to Blaut's (1993) The Colonizers Model of the World [who criticizes Eurocentrism but offers no replacement and attempts no world economic history]. Indeed, the alleged European origin of the 'modern capitalist world system' is still fuetured even in Arrighi's (1994) The Long Twentieth Century, Snooks' (1994) Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary? and The Dynamic Society (1996), Sanderson's (1995) Social Transformation, Modelski & Thompson's (1996) Leading Sectors and World Powers, Adams' (1996) Paths of Fire, and Chase-Dunn & Hall's (1997) Rise and Demise. As noted in footnote 6 above, the Gulbenkian Commission Report on Open the Social Sciences for the twenty-first century, written mostly by Wallerstein (1996), also stops short of challenging the sacrosanct cage of the European origin and center of capitalism and all that allegedly follows.
Yet, as Marshall Hodgson (1993) already wrote before his untimely death in 1968
a Westernist image of world history, if not disciplined by a more adequate perspective, can do untold harm; in fact it is now doing untold harm.... We must force ourselves to realize what it means to say that the West is not the modern world, gradually assimilating backward areas to itself; .... At least as important was the very existence of the vast world market, constituted by the Afro- Eurasian commercial network (Hodgson 1993:290, 68, 47).
That is, most received economic and other history not only neglect and/or distort especially the Asian parts of real world [economic] history. Perhaps even more significant is that thereby Eurocentric history and social theory cannot even account for or explain the fundamentals of European and Western [economic] history itself. Therefore, it is useless to look for the "causes" of this rise only or even primarily under the Western streetlight.
III. A HOLISTIC GLOBAL ALTERNATIVE
How then did the West "rise," if there was nothing exceptional about it or its mode of production and it did not even entertain any hopes of hegemony before 1800? Instead, the entire question of "The Rise of the West" then and of the East now must be re- conceptualized and re-phrased in terms of the whole world economy/system itself and not just to any British, European, Western, and/or now East Asian part/s of the same. The only solution is to cut the Eurocentric gordian knot and approach the whole question from a different paradigmatic perspective. The "Rise of the West" in Europe, therefore was not a case of pulling itself up by its own bootstraps nor even with the exploitation of its colonies. More properly, the "Rise of the West" must be seen as occurring at that time in the world economy/system by engaging in NIE import substitution and export promotion strategies to climb up on the shoulders of the Asian economies. The [cyclical?] decline of Asian economies and regional hegemonies facilitated this European climb up, then as the subsequent renewed decline of the west facilitates the also renewed rise of the east now. East Asia's rise to world economic prominence makes it all the more urgent to focus on the long historical continuity of which both processes are parts.
THE EARLY MODERN WORLD ECONOMY 1400-1800 A WORLD ECONOMIC SUMMARY
Despite all the allegations to the contrary, on the evidence there can be no reasonable doubt that there was a globe encircling world-wide trading system and division of labor long before "Europeans built a world around themselves, as historians know." Janet Abu- Lughod (1989) outlined a "thirteenth century world system" with some "regional" patterns, which persist in the world economy through the eighteenth century. She identified three major - and within each of these some minor - regions, in eight mutually overlapping regional ellipses that covered Afro-Eurasia in her account of the world economy. These included regions centered - going from west to east - on Europe, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, as well as Inner Asia. All of these regions continued to play more or less major, but not equal, roles in the world economic division of labor and system of "international" trade, despite the addition of an Atlantic ellipse in the sixteenth century. This global economy and multilateral trade, also in Asia, was expanded through the infusion of American money by the Europeans. Indeed, that is what permitted Europeans to increase their participation in the global economy, which until and even through the eighteenth century remained dominated by Asian and particularly Chonese and Indian production, competitiveness, and trade. A number of works by mostly Asian historians are helping to put the Indian Ocean economy on the map, as its important place and role in history well merits. China was the focus of a Sino-centric sub-system in East Asia, whose economic weight in the world has been grossly underestimated, even when it has been recognized at all, which itself has been all too rare.
The work of Hamashita (1988,1994) and the proposed research by him and Arrighi and Selden (1996) are designed to help remedy this serious deficiency. There were also longstanding bilateral relations of China with Central Asia and the trilateral ones with Korea and Japan, and the significant roles of the coastal regions of China, of emporia and other ports on the South China Sea and in Southeast Asia and the Ryukus, and of the trading diasporas especially of "Overseas Chinese," which not incidentally continue to play their vital roles today. None of this global pattern of inter-regional division of labor and trade corresponds to the received image of a "modern capitalist world-economy" that began in Europe and only then expanded to "incorporate" one region after another elsewhere in the world until the West dominated them all.
Instead, the international division of labor and relative sectoral productivity and regional competitiveness in the world economy were reflected the pattern of trade balances and money flows on a global scale. In the structure of the world economy, four major regions maintained built-in deficits of commodity trade: The Americas, Japan, Africa and Europe. The first two balanced their deficit by producing silver money for export. Africa exported gold money and slaves. Southeast Asia and West Asia also produced some silver and gold money, which contributed to balance their trade. Unlike Europe however, they were able also to produce some other commodities for which there also was an export demand. Both Southeast and West Asia also realized "export" earnings from their respective locations at the south eastern and south western trade turntables of the central Asian economies. To some extent, so did Central Asia.
That is in economic terms, all of these deficitary regions nonetheless also produced some "commodities" for which there was a demand elsewhere in the world economy. The fourth deficitary region, Europe, was hardly able to produce anything of its own for export with which to balance its perpetual trade deficit. Europe managed to do so primarily by "managing" the exports of the three other deficitary regions, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to Asia, and from Asia to Africa and the Americas. The Europeans also participated to some extent in trade within Asia, especially between Japan and elsewhere. This intra- Asian "country" trade was marginal for Asia but nonetheless vital for Europe, which earned more from it than from its own trade with Asia. However, none of this European participation in world trade and the global division of labor would have been possible without European colonial access to American silver, of which more below.
The two major regions that generated and export surplus and were most "central" to the world economy were India and China. That centrality rested primarily on their outstanding absolute and relative productivity in manufactures. In India, these were primarily its cotton textiles that dominated the world market, and to a lesser extent its silk textiles, especially in India's most productive Bengali region. Of course, this competitiveness in manufacturing also rested on productivity on the land and in transport and commerce. They supplied the inputs necessary to supply raw materials to industry, food to workers, and transport and trade for both, as well as for export and import.
The other, and even more "central" economy was China. Its even greater centrality was based on its even greater absolute and relative productivity in industry, agriculture, [water] transport, and trade. China's even greater, indeed the world economy's greatest, productivity, competitiveness and centrality was reflected in its most favorable balance of trade. That was based primarily on its world economic export leadership in silks and ceramics and its exports also of gold and copper coin and later of tea. These exports in turn made China the "ultimate sink" of the world's silver, which flowed there to balance China's almost perpetual export surplus. Of course, China was only able to satisfy its insatiable "demand" for silver; because it also had an inexhaustible supply of exports, which were in perpetual demand elsewhere in the world economy.
Thus another "regionalization" of the world economy could be visualized in the form of concentric circles. Among these, China [and within that the Yangtze Valley and/or South China] would form the innermost circle. The "East Asian Tribute Trade System" studied by Hamashita (1988,1994) would form the next circle, which beyond China included at the very least parts of Central Asia, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. However, the boundaries of this circle were porous and uncertain, and Hamashita himself recognizes its extension to South Asia. That in turn of course had millenarian old close relations with West Asia and East Africa, as well as with Central Asia, which in turn became increasingly enmeshed with Russia and that with China. These regions could be said to form a next outer band, which we can then perhaps identify as an Asian, or Afro-Asian, regional circle. Europe and across the Atlantic the Americas would then occupy their rightful places in the outer band of the concentric circles, since Asia also had economic relations with Europe and through its mediation with the Americas. Apart from focusing on China, East Asia, and Asia respectively as major world economic regions, such a concentric circle mapping of the global economy also puts Europe and even the Atlantic economy in their marginal place.
This Asian economic predominance also means that European the supposed technological 'advance' and especially its 'seventeenth century scientific revolution' and the latter's alleged contribution to technological innovation are pure Eurocentric myths (Adams 1996, Shapin 1996, Frank 1997). At least four different but related kinds of evidence and argument must lead us to reject the received wisdom's mythology about the alleged technological and institutional superiority of Europe over Asia before 1800. They are the evidence of technological advance and institutional sophistication in various parts of Asia and their comparison with European ones, the fact that in response to world economic relations and competition these technologies and institutions were widely diffused in all directions whenever it was profitable to do so, and the myth of the alleged contribution of the 'seventeenth century scientific revolution' in Europe to the development of technology itself. Another still more important reason that casts even more than doubt on the thesis of European technological superiority is derivative from the above observations: There was no European technology! The development of technology, like all economic development, was a world economic process, which took place in and because of the structure of the world economy/system itself.
A SHORT HISTORY OF GLOBAL 'EAST'- 'WEST' RELATIONS
The present millennium began with a period of Afro Eurasian-wide political economic expansion around AD 1000, which was centered at its far "eastern" end in Song China, but it also accelerated an accentuated re- insertion of its "western" end in Europe, which responded by going on several Crusades to plug its marginal economy more effectively into the new Afro- Eurasian dynamic. A period of pan-Afro Eurasian political economic decline and even crisis followed in the late thirteenth and especially in the fourteenth century.
Another long period of expansion began in the early fifteenth century, again in East and Southeast Asia. It soon included Central, South and West Asia, and after the mid fifteenth century also Africa and Europe. The "discovery" and then conquest of the Americas and the subsequent "Columbian exchange" and then European "Ecological Imperialism" were a direct result, and part and parcel, of this world economy/system wide expansion (Crosby 1972, 1986). So if there was a "new departure," it was the incorporation of the Americas and then also of Australasia into this already ongoing world historical process and then global system. However, not only the initiative but also the very causes and then forms of execution of this incorporation had been generated by the structure and dynamic of the Afro Eurasian historical process itself. It was the renewed economic expansion that started in East, Southeast and South Asia in 1400 and reached Europe by 1450, which attracted Columbus and Vasco da Gama in 1492 and 1498.
For the "long sixteenth century" expansion in fact began in Asia in the early fifteenth century; and it continued in Asia through the seventeenth and into much of the eighteenth centuries. Indeed, this economic expansion was primarily Asian based, although it was also fuelled by the new supplies of silver and golden money now brought by the Europeans from the Americas. In Asia, this expansion took the form of rapid growth of population, production, trade including imports and exports, and presumably income and consumption in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, India, Persia, and the Ottoman lands. Politically, the expansion was manifested and/or managed by the flourishing Chinese Ming/Qing, Japanese Tokugawa, Indian Mughal, Persian Safavid, and Turkish Ottoman regimes. The European populations and economies grew more slowly than all but the last of the above, and they did so rather differentially among each other. So did some "national" and other quite multi-ethnic European states, all of which were however much smaller than the large ones in Asia. The differentiation in productivity and competitiveness that underlay the division of labor and exchange were manifest in im-balances of trade and "compensated" by flows over long distances of mostly silver specie money. Reflecting the macroeconomic imbalances and also responding to corresponding microeconomic opportunities to make and take profit, the silver moved around the world in a predominantly eastward direction across the Atlantic and - via Europe - across the Indian Ocean, and westward across the Pacific from the Americas and Japan. Ultimately, the largest silver "sink" was in China, whose relatively greatest productivity and competitiveness acted like a magnet for the largest quantity of silver. However there as elsewhere, the incoming money generated increased effective demand and stimulated increased production and consumption and thereby supported population growth. The new supply of money failed to do so where the political economy was insufficiently flexible and expandable to permit growth of production to keep pace with the increase in the supply of money. In that case rising effective demand drove up prices in inflation, which is what happened in Europe.
As a result, population grew much more and faster in Asia than in Europe before inflecting after 1750. Indeed in the centuries before that, European population grew at only 0.3 to 0.4 percent per year and maintained a stable 20 percent of the world population total. At the same time, Asian population grew at 0.6 per cent a year, and even faster in China and India, so that the Asian share of the world total rose from 60 to 66 percent. However, the Asian population was not only much larger and faster growing. To support its faster growing population, Asia also was able to produce more and more productively. Indeed, in 1750 Asia's 66 percent share of the world's population produced 80 percent of the world's GNP, while Europe's 20 percent of population produced less than the remaining 20 percent of world output, since Africa and the Americas also contributed to the same -- and to European GNP itself. Per capita income in Asia and especially in China was also higher than in Europe (Bairoch 1981, Frank 1998).
Europe's disadvantaged position in the world economy was partly compensated by its privileged access to American money. On the demand side, the use of their American money - and only that - permitted the Europeans to enter into and then increase their market share in the world market, all of whose dynamic centers were in Asia. On the supply side, access to and use of cheap - to the Europeans virtually free - money in the Americas afforded the wherewithal to acquire the supplies of real consumption and investment goods world-wide: servile labor and materials in the Americas to dig up the silver in the first place; slave labor from Africa; and from a European perspective virgin soil and climate also in the Americas. These resources were used to produce sugar, tobacco, timber for ships and other export crops later including especially cotton at low cost for European consumption. West European imports via the Baltic Sea of grain, timber, and iron from eastern and northern Europe was also paid for with American money and some textiles. And of course their American supplied money was the only means of payment that permitted Europeans to import all those famed Asian spices, silks, cotton textiles and other real goods for their own consumption and also for re- export to the Americas and Africa. Asians produced these goods and sold them to Europeans only for their American supplied silver. That is, all these real goods that were produced by non-Europeans became cheaply, indeed nearly freely, available to Europeans; because they had and were able to pay for them with their American supplied money. Indeed, this silver - also produced by non-Europeans - was the only export good that the Europeans were able to bring to the world market. Additionally moreover, this supply of goods produced by labor and raw materials outside of Europe also replaced and freed alternative resources for other uses within Europe: American sugar and Atlantic cod fish supplied calories for consumption for which Europe did not have to use their own farmland; Asian cotton textiles supplied clothes for which to European consumers and producers did not have to use wool from European sheep that would have eaten European grass. Otherwise, that grass would in turn have had to be produced on still more enclosures of land for even more 'sheep to eat [some] men' so as to produce still more wool to clothe others. Thus, the import of Asian textiles with American money indirectly also permitted Europeans to produce more food and timber in Western Europe itself. Thus, Europeans were able to use their position in the world economy both to supplement its own supplies and resources by drawing directly on those from the Americas to the west and Eastern Europe and Asia to the east. The supply of these additional resources to Europe from the outside also freed European resources for use in its own development. So the turn of the eighteenth century was not marked by Europe's alleged absolute or relative development nor by any Asian 'traditional' backwardness or stagnation. On the contrary and perhaps paradoxically, it was Asia's economic development and Europe's backwardness that set the stage for the simultaneous cyclical "Decline of the East" and "Rise of the West." Europe's still productive backwardness may have offered some of the "advantages" to catch up, discussed by Gerschenkron (1962). Europe's backwardness incentivated and its supply of American money permitted Europeans to pursue micro- and macro-economic advantages, which were to be had from increased European participation in the expanding Asian economies from 1500 to 1800. The roots of the post 1800 "Rise of the West" and "Decline of the East" can and must be accounted for in WORLD-wide economic and demographic terms, in which the economies of Asia played a major role.
A WORLD DEMOGRAPHIC/ ECONOMIC/ ECOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE DECLINE OF THE EAST AND THE RISE OF THE WEST
My explanation has three related parts. A combination of demographic and micro-/macro-economic analysis identifies an inflection of population and economic productivity growth rates that led to an "exchange" of places between Asia and Europe in the world economy/system between 1750 and 1850. Microeconomic analysis of world-wide supply-and-demand relations and relative economic and ecological factor prices can show how they generated incentives for labor and capital saving and energy producing invention, investment and innovation, which took place in Europe. On the other hand, macroeconomic analysis of cyclical distribution of income and derivative effective demand and supply in Asia illuminate the opportunity to do so profitably in world economic terms.
This summary explanation of the related "Decline of the East" and "Rise of the West" may be briefly elaborated as follows: The simple hypothesis is that technological innovations were a function of demand and supply and of relative factor prices of inputs like labor, capital, and land. Therefore it was primarily the higher wages and relatively abundant capital in Europe that eventually generated labor saving and energy producing technology. This argument may be challenged by the observation [e.g. by Pomeranz 1997] that the "industrial revolution" was less labor "saving" than labor "extending" and that it increased the productivity of both labor and capital. Direct wage rates or costs may also have been as high [or even higher] in some parts of China, e.g. in the Yangtze Valley and the South, though probably not anywhere in India, than in some parts of Europe, especially England.
An unequal distribution of income generates luxury and import demand at the top and a large supply of cheap labor at the bottom. I contended that this was the case moreoso, and Pomeranz (1997) that it was not so, in China than in Europe, although we agree that it probably was more unequal than either in India. N9 But the problem of absolute, relative and world wide comparative wage costs - in entrepreneurial calculation as in our analysis of the same - is related also to local and regional problems of labor allocation. And there were some economic differences in labor allocation especially between agriculture and industry, which were related to some institutional differences. However, it is less clear to what extent these differences were underlying causes or of the observed allocation of labor or whether they were only different institutional mechanisms through which the labor allocation were organized. Particularly important differences were: A. Bonded labor in India (Pomeranz 1997). B. Women were tied to the village and their labor was restricted to agriculture and dopmestic industry, eg. spinning, in China (Goldstone 1996). C. Some industrial workers could still draw directly on some subsistence goods produced by women-village- agriculture in China but less so in England without having to acquire these through the market (Pomeranz 1997). D. Enclosures [to produce more cheaper wool for textiles on more land - "sheep ate men"] expulsed male and female labor from the land into urban un/employment in England [and elsewhere in Europe?].
The industrial "revolution" was initiated with cotton textiles, but these required both a growing "external" supply of cotton [for Europe - from its colonies] and a "world" market for all in which everybody had to compete [except China, which still had a growing and protected domestic and regional market]. The industrial "revolution" also required and took place in the supply and production of more and cheaper energy, especially through coal and its use in making and using machinery to generate steam power, first stationary and then also mobile. The critical role of coal and its replacement of wood as a source of fuel in Britain is demonstrated by Wrigley (1994). These sources of power technically and economically first required [and permitted] concentration of labor and capital in mining, transport, and production. Then they also permitted faster and cheaper long distance transport via steam powered railway and shipping. Investment in such "revolutionary" industrial power, equipment, organization and the labor necessary to make them work was undertaken wherever, but also only where, it was economically rational and possible to do so, in terms of A. Labor allocation and cost alternatives; B. Location and comparative costs of other productive inputs [eg. timber/coal/animal/human sources of power and transport,as well as raw materials like cotton and iron], which were related to the geographical location of these resources and to ecological changes in their availability; C. capital availability and alternative profitable uses; and D. Market penetration and potential.
At the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries the above-mentioned factors in world economic competitive and comparative circumstances, changes, and transformation generated the following results:
- India continued but was threatened in its competitive dominance on the world textile market on the basis of cheap and also bonded skilled labor. Domestic supplies of cotton, food and other wage goods continued to be ample and cheap; and productive, trade and financial organization and transport remained relatively efficient despite suffering from increasing economic and political difficulties. However, supplies of alternative power and materials, eg. from coal and iron/steel, were relatively scarce and expensive. Therefore, Indians had little economically rational incentive to invest in innovations at this time. They were further impeded from doing so first by economic decline beginning already in the second quarter of the eighteenth century or earlier; then by the [resulting?] decline in population growth and British colonialism from the third quarter onwards; and finally from a combination of both decline and colonialism as well as "Drain" of capital from India to Britain. India switched from being a net exporter to being a net importer of cotton textiles in 1816. However India did continue to struggle on the textile market and began again to increase textile production - by then also in factories - and exports in the last third of the nineteenth century.
- China still retained its world market dominance in ceramics, partially in silk and increasingly in tea, and remained substantially self-sufficient in textiles. China's balance of trade and payments surplus continued into the early nineteenth century. Therefore China had availability and concentration of capital from both domestic and foreign sources. However, China's natural deposits of coal were distant from its possible utilization for the generation and industrial use of power, so that progressive deforestation still did not make it economical to switch from wood to coal for fuel. Moreover, transport via inland canals and coastal shipping, as well as by road, remained efficient and cheap [but not from outlying coal deposits]. This economic efficiency and competitiveness of the Chinese on both domestic and world markets also rested on absolutely and comparatively cheap labor costs. Even if per-capita income was higher than elsewhere, as Bairoch notes, and its distribution was no more unequal than elsewhere [as Pomeranz and Goldstone claim], the wage good cost of production was low, both absolutely and relatively. Labor was abundant for agriculture and industry, and agricultural products were cheaply available also for industrial workers and therefore to their employers, who could pay their workers low subsistence wages. Goldstone (1996) emphasizes one reason: Women were tied to the villages and therefore remained available for [cheap] agricultural production. Pomeranz (1997) emphasizes a related reason: Urban industrial workers were still able to draw for part of their subsistence on "their" villages, which were produced cheaply in part by the women to whom Goldstone refers. In other words from an entrepreneurial industrial employer and market perspective, wage goods were absolutely and relative cheap; because agriculture produced them efficiently and cheaply also with female labor. The "institutional" distribution of cheap food to urban and other workers in industry, transport, trade and other services was functionally equivalent to what it would also have been if the functional distribution of income had been MORE unequal than it was. The availability of labor was high, its supply price low, its demand for consumer goods attenuated; and there was little incentive to invest in labor saving or alternative energy using production or transport. Elvin (1973) sought to summarize such circumstances in his "equilibrium trap." Even so, China still remained competitive on the world market and maintained its export surplus. Emperor Ch'ien Lung said in his 1793 message to King George III of England "I set no value on objects strange and ingenious and have no use for your country's manufactures" (Schurman and Schell 1967, I: 108-109).
- Western Europe and particularly Britain were hard put to compete especially with India and China. Europe was still dependent on India for cotton textiles and on China for ceramics and silks that Europe re-exported and from which it profited in its [economic and/or political] colonies in Africa and the Americas. Moreover, Europe remained dependent on its colonies for most of the money it needed to pay for these imports, both for re-export and for its own consumption and other use, e.g., as inputs for its own production and export. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there was a decline in the marginal if not also the absolute inflow of precious metals and other profits through the slave trade and plantations from the European colonies in Africa and the Americas. To recoup and even to maintain - never mind to increase - its [world and even domestic] market share Europeans collectively and its entrepreneurs individually had to attempt to increase their penetration of at least some markets, and to do so either by eliminating competition politically/militarily or by undercutting it by lowering its own costs of production, or both. Opportunity to do so knocked when the "Decline" began in India and West Asia, if not yet in China. Wage and other costs of production and transport were still uncompetitively high in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. However especially after 1750, rising incomes and declining mortality rates sharply increased the rate and amount of population growth. Moreover, the displacement of surplus labor from agriculture increased its potential supply to industry. At the same time, the imposition of British colonialism on India reversed the perennial capital outflow to India and turned it into "The Drain" from India and into Britain. Moreover, a combination of commercial and colonial measures would permit the import of much more raw cotton to Britain and Western Europe. Deforestation and ever scarcer supplies of wood and charcoal and rendered these more expensive. At the same time since the second third of the eighteenth century, first relative and then absolute declines in the cost of coal made the replacement of charcoal [and peat] by hard coal increasingly economical and then common in Britain. The Kondratieff B phase in the last third of the eighteenth century generated technological inventions and improvements in textile manufacturing and steam engines [first to pump water out of coal pits and then also to supply motive power to the textile industry]. At the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, the "first" A phase [identified by Kondratieff] and the Napoleonic wars generated increased investment in and the expansion of these new productive facilities and then also of transport equipment. Ever more of the available but still relatively high cost labor force was incorporated into the "factory system." Production increased rapidly; real wages and income declined; and "the workshop of the world" conquered ever more foreign markets through "free trade." Yet even then, British colonialism had to prohibit free trade to India and recurred to the export of its opium to force an "Open Door" into China.
- Most other parts of the world still fall through the cracks of our world economic analysis. Yet in brief, we can observe that most of Africa may have had labor/land ratios at least as favorable to labor saving investment as Europe. However Africa did not have an analogous resource base [except the still undeveloped one in Southern Africa], and far from having a capital inflow, Africa suffered from capital outflow. The same was true of the Caribbean. Latin America had resources and labor, but also suffered from colonial and neo- colonial capital outflow as well as specialization in raw materials exports, while its domestic markets were captured by European exports. West, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia became increasingly captive markets for if not also colonies of Europe and its industry, to which they supplied the raw materials that they had previously themselves processed for domestic consumption and export. In the nineteenth century, only the European "settler colonies" in North America, Australasia, Argentina, and Southern Africa were able to find other places in the international division of labor, and China and Japan were able to continue offering significant resistance.
In short, changing world demographic/ economic/ ecological circumstances suddenly - and for most people including Adam Smith unexpectedly - made a number of related investments economically rational and profitable: in machinery and processes that saved labor input per unit of output, thus increasing the productivity and use of labor and its total output; increasing productive power generation; and increasingly productive employment and productivity of capital. This transformation of the productive process was initially concentrated in selected industrial, agricultural, and service sectors in those parts of the world economy whose comparative competitive POSITION made -- and then continually re-made -- such Newly Industrializing Economies [NIE] import substituting and export promoting measures economically rational and politically possible. Thus, this transformation was and continues to be only a temporally localized and still shifting manifestation of a WORLD economic process, even if it is not spread uniformly around the world -- as historically nothing ever has been and still is not likely. But that is another - later - story, which will lead to the Re-emergence of East Asia in the world economy today.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Received theory attributes the industrial revolution and the "rise" of the West to its alleged "exceptionality" and "superiority." The source of the same is sought in turn in the also alleged long-standing or even primeval Western preparation for take-off. This contention mistakes the place and misplaces the "concreteness" of the transformation by looking for it in Europe itself. Yet the "causes" of the transformation can never be understood as long as they are examined only under the European streetlight and must instead be sought under the worldwide global illumination in the system as a whole. That turns all received theory on its head.
The argument - and the evidence! - is that world development between 1400 and 1800 reflects not Asia's weakness but its strength, and not Europe's nonexis tent strength but rather its relative weakness in the global economy. For it was all these regions' joint participation and place in the single but unequally structured and unevenly changing global economy that resulted also in changes in their relative positions in the world. The common global economic expansion since 1400 long benefited the Asian centers earlier and more than marginal Europe, Africa, and the Americas. However, this very economic benefit turned into a growing absolute and relative disadvantage for one Asian region after another in the late eighteenth century. Production and trade began to atrophy as growing population and income, but also their economic and social polarization, exerted pressure on resources, constrained effective demand at the bottom, and increased the availability of cheap labor in Asia more than elsewhere in the world. That world economic change also opened the door to the "Rise of the West,' which must be re-examined in terms the more important global historical continuity instead of any and all its dis- continuities. The perception of a major new departure in 1500, which allegedly spells a dis-continuous break in world history, is substantially [mis] informed by a Eurocentric vantage point. Once we abandon this Eurocentrism and adopt a more globally holistic world or even pan EurAsian perspective, dis-continuity is replaced by far more continuity. Or the other way around? Once we look upon the whole world more holistically, historical continuity looms much larger, especially in Asia. Indeed, the very "Rise of the West" itself then appears derived from this global historical continuity.
East Asia's renewed rise to world economic prominence makes it all the more urgent to focus on the long historical continuity of which this process is a part. Wertheim (1967:639) already observed that "around the turn of the mid-century a fresh turnover ocurred ... [and] symbolized a decisice turnabout in world history." Decolonization in South Asia with independence in India in 1948, liberation in China in 1949 and then in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia marked a political beginning of this renewed shift. And only a half century later the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China heralded the completion of another 360 degree round the world global shift. Economically, it began in industrialization in China including Taiwan and in Japan and then Korea, but also included Hong Kong and Singapore among the first set of the East Asian NIEs or "four tigers." Since then, revived economic growth has been spreading also to other "tigers" or "little dragons" elsewhere in Southeast Asia and to the "BIG Dragon" on the China coast. That is the same South [and East] China Sea region, also with its "overseas Chinese" diaspora, which had been so prominent in the world economy in the previous long political economic phase of expansion from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
The now supposed dis-continuous but really renewed rise of the "East" must be seen as part and parcel of the fundamental structure and continuity in global development. Recognizing and analyzing this continuity will reveal much more than myopically focusing on the alleged dis-continuities, like the newly discovered "globalization" and "new emergence of the East" of the 1990's, or indeed also like the wholesale misinterpretation that already sees a renewed "meltdown" in 1997. The widely mis-interpreted 1998 'meltdown' of East Asia is a largely but not entirely financial symptom of the renewed reality of the growing importance of East Asian productive capacity, market demand, and finance in the world economy: It is in part this [over] productiuve capacity in East Asia that has generated the first world recession again to begin in East Asia and spread from there to the West, instead of vice versa. That marked the beginnings of the return back 360 degrees around the world of the world economic center to Asia where it had always been before the already past period of temporary Western ascendance.
Thus, the contemporary economic expansion in East Asia may spell the beginnings of a return of Asia to a leading role in the world economy in the future as it had in the not so distant past -- with 'Middle Kingdom' China again at its 'center'. Wertheim (1997:169) recalls that the Dutch historian Jan Romein (1962) already called ours The Asian Century and predicted that in two or three decades China would become an industrial nation and rise to become the greatest power in the East if not the world. These contemporary developments and future prospects demand new and better historiography and social theory to comprehend them and to offer at least some modest guide to social policy and action.
ReORIENT THE 19TH CENTURY
DEBUNK MYTHOLOGY, ReORIENT REALITY
This book is a nineteenth century sequel to my ReORIENT, which stopped in 1800. I now join Kenneth Pomeranz  when he writes I would emphasize an effort to re-think the 19th century, which as he observes has been abandoned by a whole generation of scholars. Also Edmund Burke [2000: 1] notes Why the nineteenth century? Because it seems to me to be the piece that has thus far been left out of the rethinking of modern world history . Were still far from being able to devise a truly world-centered historical framework for the nineteenth century. John F. Kennedy told us, that, "the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived, and dishonest - but the myth -persistent, persuasive and unrealistic [Frank 1998:x]. If that is true, then it has certainly been persistently, and persuasively, so, to meld the titles of two books, about THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS [Smith 1776/1937 & Landes 1997]. For the received and still persistent mythological 'explanations' are altogether wide of the mark of how THE GREAT DIVERGENCE, as Pomeranz  calls it, emerged out of the structure; function and transformation of the world economy in the nineteenth century.
Two dozen such still widely prevalent myths are examined in the first chapter of my forthcoming ReORIENT THE 19TH CENTURY, of which I append some excerpts below.
1. THE GAP WHEN AND HOW MUCH DID THE DIVERGENCE REALLY TAKE PLACE?
- The previously existing world economic landscape, if not already after 1500 as many claim, including Wallerstein  and Frank , was qualitatively transformed in the period 1750-1800, and certainly soon after 1800, as asserted among many others still by [Wolf 1982] and Frank . NOT SO.
ReORIENT had argued that the Decline of Asia came first, and then the Rise of the West. That thesis and wording , derived from Janet Abu-Lughod  seems still to have historically and theoretically important validity. I placed the transition and divergence around 1800 instead. So did the world historically oriented sinologists Bin Wong  and Kenneth Pomeranz  . Further inquiry of mine and research of theirs then moved the dating of the transition and divergence closer to the mid-nineteenth century [Wong xx, Pomeranz 2003]. But further evidence now suggests that its timing needs to be moved up by a whole century from 1760-70, or at least two thirds of one. My inquiry in this book, however, now leads me to advance the dating by yet another decade or two to at least 1860 in China and 1870 in the West. So the intervening Western interregnum mostly lasted only ONE century or LESS! .
2. ECONOMIC GROWTH
- The industrial revolution was a revolution in industrial growth that took off first in Britain and then elsewhere in Europe mostly on the basis of new industrial technology and productivity, which was developed there and permitted Europe to outpace the rest of the world from 1760 or at least from 1800 on. and to do so primarily on or for the domestic market. NOT SO.
In the home of the industrial revolution, nobody seemed to be aware what they were living through was one. Certainly not any of the great economists. Not Adam Smith in 1776. Not Malthus in 1798 when he launched his population/land thesis in the absence of technological change. Nor Ricardo in 1816 when he emphasized decreasing returns. Not the renowned French economist Jean Baptise Say who still in 1828 predicted that '' no machine will ever be able to transport people or goods around like the worst of horses [quoted in Bairoch 1997: I-270]. Perhaps that was because in reality there was not all that much to see. The current revisionist economic history of Europe has shown that previous suppositions of rapid growth were vastly exaggerated.
3. CAPITAL FORMATION
- Britain achieved its definitive 'take-off' in this period through the abrupt acceleration of capital formation. NOT SO.
The claims to this effect by Walt Whitman Rostow's and others have long since been altogether disconfirmed by all evidence that the formation of capital in and by Britain, e.g. investment as a percentage of income, remained as slow and low as before.
4. INCOME DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE REST
- Differentials of per capita income, including that of the masses, grew rapidly in the first half the nineteenth century and became substantial already by 1850. NOT SO.
Already reviewing '' the whole body of wage and price material currently available in print'' on Britain three decades ago, M. W. Flinn [1974: 395] concludes that there were few indications of real wage movements either up or down before 1810-14, and after that until mid-century ''the gains in real wages were slight'' at less than 1 percent per year. In view of research since ten, this estimate must be considered to be among the so-called optimists.
5. BRITAIN THE WORKSHOP FOR THE WORLD. NOT SO:
- Britains industrial revolution enabled it to dominate world export markets. NOT SO.
Britain had a structural and permanent merchandise trade deficit in EVERY year from, which rose from 10 million pound sterling in 1816 to 175 million around 1905-10 to end at 160 million in 1913
6. TEXTILES - THE INDUSTRIAL FORERUNNER.
- Textiles that were the advance guard of British and then Continental European industrial and technological 'revolution' that transformed the world economy early in the nineteenth century. NOT SO:
During most of the period to mid-century, handlooms still outnumbered power looms, and most of these were still driven by water rather than by steam. Moreover, manufacture of much textile machinery was just that, it was still made by hand.
7. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION
- Rapid industrialization, first in Britain and then elsewhere in Europe and the United States, is what set off The Great Divergence and the Gap in Income between the West and the Rest. NOT SO
Revisionist history casts ever more doubt on the very existence and concept of industrial revolution. But as noted above already contemporaries did not see themselves as living in or through one.
8. EXPORTS. DID BRITISH EXPORTS CONQUER THE WORLD MARKET?
- British exports particularly of textiles quickly conquered the world market, and battered down the Great Wall of China, as Marx put it. NOT SO:
In the 1830s also British exports, of which textiles still accounted for the largest share, were worth 94 million pounds sterling in total. Of these however, 36 million went to Europe, 15 million to the United States,13 million to the West Indies, 10 million to Latin America, and only 13 million to all of Asia [Imlah 1958:129].
-Coal was the most important innovation of the industrial revolution in Britain. YES AND NO
There is indeed consensus that it was the switch from biological above ground sources of energy from plants, animals and humans to the below ground mineral ones of first coal and then petroleum that made all the difference. But the switchover was quite late and slow in coming. But for long the principal use of coal was to generate steam, first primarily to pump out water to dig ever more and deeper for coal, and only then for other purposes after a further important delay in technological development. Moreover, Britain came to rely substantially on the export of coal , which was cause for some concern at the time that Britain share of world manufacturing export was declining and especially it was failing to move into exports of technological leadership, into which it was Germany that was moving instead [ Cains & Hopkins 2002:154].
- The driving force of the new industries was steam from early on. NOT SO:
Steam power made its way rather slowly in and through manufacturing. Steam began to replace water power In spinning after the 1830s, but not yet in weaving and knitting whose mechanization was more difficult. By 1835, in about a thousand mills with 30 thousand horse power [h.p.] were derived from steam , while 10 thousand h.p. were still derived from water. But at the same time in 1833, of the 350 thousand looms in Britain, 100 thousand were power looms and 250 thousand were still handlooms. Moreover, these figures are relative, since many looms were only power ASSISTED [Chapman 1972: 19,26]. That may be because until the 1830s, coal and steam offered little in the way of cost advantages over windmills, waterwheels, horses, or the hands of women and children to carry out mill and factory work [Clark
- New means of especially steam-powered railroads quickly transformed the British and North Atlantic economies. NOT SO:
In that land of their birth in the early-mid 1830s, the yearly number of railway miles opened was only 40 to 50, rising to an average of about 200 miles in the late 1830s and early 1840s, before rising to 800 miles in the late 1840s and 1851, after which it declined again to little more than the level of the 1830s [Rostow 1978:143]. In the United States there was a short burst of short distance railroad construction in the East before the Civil War, but the real epoch of railroad construction in North America had to wait for the 1870s and 1880s.
12. STEAM SHIPS
- Steam ships rapidly conquered the oceans, and with them 'Britannia Ruled the Waves'. NOT SO:
Although steam power was installed in some ships, shipping long continued still to rely on sail, some now complemented by machines. Of total maritime carrying capacity, steam accounted for only about 15 percent in 1840, and by 1870 still less than 50 percent [Hobsbawm 1075:58] was powered by steam Indeed the probably more reliable Ashworth [1962:68] source says that in 1870, only 12 percent of shipping tonnage was carried by steam ships and by 1880 still only 25 percent.
13. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
- It was Western and particularly British science that permitted and accounted for the industrial and technological revolutions and their impacts in Britain and the world. NOT SO.
There was no 'seventeenth century scientific revolution' [Shapin 1996], and it did not drive the 'industrial revolution' two centuries later in the nineteenth century. Detailed research, including industry by industry [Adams 1996] has shown that science had no input into nor made any other even indirect contribution to technological progress before 1870, when it began to so primarily in and through the chemical industry, which was not even born before then [Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986, Frank 1998]. And that was pioneered in German, not in Britain.
14. THE STATE
The world economy was organized by and through a world market, and imperialism of free trade operated on its own by laissez-faire without the need for significant state intervention. NOT SO.
No European state can match the Japanese one in stateliness, much less in being a national one. Other states in Asia, the big Chinese one, smaller Southeast Asian ones, and West Asian ones in between performed state functions as well or better than European ones. The Ottoman imperial state, even as the supposedly sick man of Europe, performed surely as well or better than the imperial Hapsburg, Russian and British ones with whom it was in recurrent conflict. Indeed, even more state-like have been the colonial states that they themselves set up and ran, as well as the neo-colonial ones. In them, their comprador bourgeoisie, as the Chinese called it or the Lumpenbourgeoisie, its Lumpenstate and the resulting Lumpendevelopment in Latin America, as I called it [Frank 1972], do the bidding of their imperial power with which they are in alliance, but as a junior partner. Moreover, nurturing and using colonial and neo- or semi-colonial states was purposeful metropolitan policy, especially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as it is again today.
15 MILITARY POWER
- If, and insofar as, not British and European industry was the battering ram that force open the walls and doors of the rest of the world, it was Western availability and exercise of vastly superior military power over the East and South. NOT SO:
Although there were dozens of colonial wars, they were limited, small and occasional to protect and sometimes to extend economic or strategic positions under momentary threat, sometimes by other colonial powers. Major wars were among the colonial powers themselves.
16 BRITISH HEGEMONY
Britain followed the Netherlands and preceded the United States as A or THE hegemonic power in the world during the nineteenth century. NOTSO
Certainly no one, and also not Britain, was hegemonic during the first half of the nineteenth century. The period 1850 to 1873 is often said to be the time of maximum British domination. Yet it certainly did not dominate North America, where in the 1860s Canada became independent and in the United States Britains southern allies lost the civil war and the northern winners regularly imposed protectionist anti-free trade policies. Also in Latin America, British influence was still being combated by national interests in almost all the states, and/or Britain was challenged by French occupation of Mexico and by American Monroe trine expansion. Africans still exercised independent and successful trading positions and the exercise of British political economic power was limited to small parts of Southern Africa and Egypt. In the Ottoman Empire, it is the case that Britain eliminated the challenge of Mohammed Ali in Egypt and forced unequal commercial treaties on the Turks, yet their domestic Tanzimat a sort of analogue to the Chinese self-strengthening was still quite successful. In Central Asia, Britain confronted Russia in The Great Game.
17. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
- American economic development in the nineteenth century, and its move from near the margin to near the center of the world economy, was indeed a marvel to witness, and had its roots primarily in the 'distinctive genius' of 'the American Way' to its 'Manifest Destiny'. NOT SO.
Therefore there has also been virtually no acknowledgment that and how the resulting beneficial improvements were derived from the position and role of the expanding American economy in the structure of the also expanding world system of trade and payments im/balances. Yet it was the latter that gave a largely unmentioned and even less acknowledged but very important boost to American domestic economic growth, income and other developments. Immigration, the construction of railroads and other infrastructure by and for the existing population, new migrants and their offspring, and the production of export crops of cotton and wheat, later also of meat, and import substitution to supply the domestic market all expanded.
-Industrialization also means free factory labor and proletarianization. NOT SO
Another Marxist thesis that has passed into general acceptance is that industrialization was accompanied, indeed accomplished, by a free labor force that works for wages, mostly in factories. Indeed for much Marxist theory but also in general public opinion that is the sine qua non essence of capitalism. The historical record belies this theory and belief for the nineteenth century of industrialization and before and after that as well. To begin with, wage work already had a history of several millennia in many parts of the world before it was introduced in nineteenth century Europe. On the other hand, most work, especially by women, is still not waged even today. So if the expansion and predominance of wage work is the criterion of the spread of capitalism, then there is still relatively little capitalism around. Moreover, the industrial revolution used, indeed produced, far more slave, serf, indentured, and bonded than free labor especially but not only in agriculture - not to mention that the women and children who labored around the clock in factories were only ''free'' in a very peculiar sense of that word. Yet it was slavery that came to be called peculiar at the very time that it was as we will observe below still expanding by leaps and bounds in the plantations and mines.
- The importance of intercontinental migration can be seen from its vast numbers who left Europe and from the reasons that pushed emigrants out and pulled immigrants in to where they contributed to development. NOT SO.
Nineteenth century migration was indeed global; and North and Southeast Asian destinations were as important, albeit also as neglected, as American ones that have received almost exclusive attention. Out migration from China was roughly as great as from Europe. Tens of millions of South Chinese migrants went to Southeast Asia and beyond into the Pacific islands and some to the Americas. Other tens of millions of Chinese moved into Manchuria and some beyond that into Siberia and the Russian Far East. There they were joined by migrants from Japan and Korea moving west and surely undercounted Russians moving eastward from west of the Urals. Indians and Ceylonese also moved into Southeast Asia and into the Pacific islands and many fewer as the better known indentured servants into the Caribbean.
20 FREE TRADE
- The nineteenth century was the golden era of free trade. NOT SO.
The policy of free trade was not even born until Britain's abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846. After that, it was practiced at most here and there, and it hardly survived 26 years until the Great Depression of 1973-1895 buried most of the praxis and of the policy as well. However, free trade did not go very far even in its heyday. Most significantly, Britain never allowed any free trade between itself and its most important colony, India, nor between the latter and other regions. China did not practice free trade, nor did Japan, even when Western states obliged them to lower tariffs. There was no free trade between Holland and its Indonesian colony nor between it and any place else. In the United States, Alexander Hamilton had already promoted high tariffs as part of his 'Manufacturing System'.
21 LAISSEZ FAIRE
- Laissez Faire, or the best government is the least government. Private entrepreneurship without state interference was responsible for most of the progress through the nineteenth century. NOT SO
The rebuttal of the fable about free trade also gives the lie to that of laissez faire, since it was state action that determined how unfree that trade was. It seems curious that French terminology invaded English and other languages in that respect, since particularly the highly centralized and colonial French state did and still does not practice what the saying preaches. However, the 'interference' of states and their promotion and finance of all kinds of economic projects was legion everywhere.
22. GOLD STANDARD
- Gold reigned, and the Gold Standard was an important weapon in British economic rule of the world. NOT SO.
Apart from the exaggeration of the extent of British economic rule in the world, the evidence shows that during the first 1813 to 1848/50, the de facto silver standard that had been dominant over the previous centuries [see ReORIENT particularly chpt. 3] continued to reign supreme. The second period from 1848/50 to 1873/80 was marked by a bi-metallic silver/gold standard, in which silver continued to weigh heavily, both in the extent of reliance still on silver in the world economy, as well as in the preponderant number of countries that remained on the silver standard. Thus silver continued first supreme and then still very significant through three quarters of the nineteenth century. Gold did not even begin its monetary rule until after 1873 and was only dominant for the four decades until 1913. Interestingly that is also precisely the period in which the gold standard's principal supporter, Britain, was losing its previous dominance in the world economy.
Missionaries went out to spread the word of God. NOT SO
An African saying had it first we had the land, and you had the book. Now we have the book, and you have the land. Indeed, however well intentioned. Many individual missionaries may have been, de facto they served as the avant garde spear head all around the world of colonialism and neo-colonialism and still do.
24. IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM - DO THEY PAY?
- European colonialism and imperialism, indeed and all political [colonial] and economic [ free trade or other] 'North-South' relations made no significant contribution to the development of the North. Calculation of the numbers show that the percentages of direct bilateral foreign trade, payments and possible profits with or from the 'Third World', or with even all of the world, were too small significantly to affect the development of Britain, Europe or the United States, as do those of O'Brien [also see his "Balance Sheet for the Acquisition, Retention and Loss of European Empires Overseas"  , Paul Bairoch, and Walt Rostow only to name a few. Bairoch [1997 passim] is repeatedly very clear that without risking error [II-673] colonialism was bad for the colonized, but for the colonizers it did no good. - NOT SO:
British Prime Ministers would frankly say what it was all about, and Disraeli explained that the Indian empire should pay for itself and that Indian resources should be available for the British imperial cause [Arrighi 19xx: 47 from Tomlinson]. The key words are the last three, for it was Indias support of the entire system, and not just its bi-lateral relationship with Britain, that was at issue.
Therefore, all calculations of whether Britain, Europe and/or the United States benefited or not from their colonies or neo-colonies are already vitiated AB INITIO, because in almost every case, they take into account only of the bilateral flows of investment, trade and payments between here and there. The same goes for the assessment of equal or unequal benefits from voluntarily or involuntarily entering into any bilateral exchange relations, as much theory and many analyses presume. On the 'left' on the other hand calculations and often only presumptions on the contrary are that the 'North' or some part thereof did benefit, substantially or only marginally, from their colonial, imperialist, or neo-colonial and de facto imperialist relations with some part or the entire 'South'. However, no matter what the answer to the question 'which side are you on', all these calculations about bilateral relations are largely altogether irrelevant for their own purposes of determining the balance sheet of gains and losses. For these can be determined if at all ONLY by examining the entire system of MULTILATERAL and not simply bilateral or even trilateral im/balances of trade and payments at any one time and also historically. As we will see in the following chapter, that was unavoidably [even if mostly neglected] the case during our last period after 1873.
So, if most of the received wisdom about the nature and causes of the wealth of nations during the nineteenth century does not stand up under the weight of evidence, then what is it instead or at least in addition that we must and should we inquire? For more careful examination of nineteenth century reality belies the now popular beliefs and still most 'scientific' opinion about the supposed Western penetration particularly of the Asian economy in most of the nineteenth century. Without trying in by any means morally to justify or politically to support any and all imperialism and colonialism nor any of its consequences, the time has come to review and where appropriate to revise the substantially ideological dogma of Western triumphalism over alleged 'traditionalism' elsewhere and simultaneously of much of the nationalist appeal to and 'defenses' of 'traditional' values and also its exaggeration of the deformation of 'Third World' economies. To do so in no way negates the critique of ideologically inspired classical, neo-classical and Keynesian scientific analysis and political propaganda by dependence and world-system theory and their alternative analyses. The re-examination of reality and its still other alternative analysis proposed below may also parallel the denunciation of the received wisdom of both now 'traditional,' and the new dependence as well as world-system theory by their denunciation by recent post-modernist, post-colonial, and sub-altern textual 'analysis' as far as the latter go, which is not much. For they offer no examination and much less analysis of any political economic reality and its history. Most importantly they have and offer no global perspective, examination, nor political economic history and analysis of the one world economy and system whose own whole globe encompassing structure and dynamic is so determinant of the possibilities, options and therefore successes and failures of its ever changing geographic, political economic, social and cultural parts.
The at least preliminary answer below is how location, location, location in an expanding and deepening multilateral world system and its UN-level playing field contributed to if not determined the absolute and relative wealth and poverty of nations and the dissipation/ absorption of entropy among, not to mention within, them. Indeed, taking voluntary of forced position on and playing from it made the field even more uneven.
NINETEENTH CENTURY GLOBAL MULTILATERALITY AND ENTROPY
So if these common explanations cannot account for the development of THE GREAT DIVERGENCE in the nineteenth century, what can?
This chapter outlines the conceptual framework for the theoretical argument and the empirical evidence within which this work proceeds. The argument herein as it was in ReORIENT is that global historical continuity has been far more important than any and all its discontinuities. The perception of a major new departure in 1500, and even of one in 1800 which allegedly spell a discontinuous break in world history, is substantially [mis] informed by a Euro-centric vantage point. Once we abandon this Euro-centrism and adopt a more globally holistic world or even pan Eurasian perspective, discontinuity is replaced by far more continuity. Or the other way around? Once we look upon the whole world more holistically, historical continuity looms much larger, especially in Asia. Indeed, the very "Rise of the West" itself then appears derived from this global historical continuity. Moreover, as Edmund Burke [1998: 16] writes we must rehistoricize the colonial period [and]colonial history as existing in its own right apart from the [Western] progress-oriented narratives that have operated until now . The intellectual and political stakes for such an undertaking are enormous.
My basic analytic procedure is the one I have recommended and tried to use for several decades without having persuaded many others of its importance and usefulness. It is the essential (because it is both the most necessary and the least accomplished) contribution of the historian to historical understanding is successively to relate different things and places at the same time in the historical process [and to] examine and relate the simultaneity of different events in the whole historical process or in the transformation of the whole system [Frank 1978:21]. Joseph Fletcher  then called for the same under the title of horizontally integrative macrohistory.
it was this GLOBAL ECONOMY that really gave rise to a " single world-wide system which also provided the transfer: along, round about routes ... [of wealth, income and entropy] to particularly, the United Kingdom ... by the much less adequately understood system of multilateral settlements of all classes of international accounts@ [Hilgerd 1942: xx].
My two main analytic guidelines are multilaterality and entropy. In short cut summary, we may regard position - LOCATION, LOCATION , LOCATION - in the multilateral system as the prime determinant of how much BENEFIT or disbenefit a person, group, sector, region or country can derive from its social structural and geographical position in the world system or global economy in analogy to reaping Ricardian rent from land. ENTROPY may be regarded as the COST of participation in the system and its economic production and growth. DISSIPATION of entropy then is the transfer or export of this entropic cost from me to you or here to there, and in the world from the rich North that generates or causes the generation of much of it to the poor South, which is obliged to absorb this dissipated entropy at its own cost. The two processes of deriving benefits and absorbing costs are in turn related by the same multilaterality, through which not only the benefits are spread and derived, but also the costs are channeled and absorbed.
Other than that, my basic analytic procedure is the one I have recommended and tried to use for several decades without having persuaded many others of its importance and usefulness. It is the essential (because it is both the most necessary and the least accomplished) contribution of the historian to historical understanding is successively to relate different things and places at the same time in the historical process [and to] examine and relate the simultaneity of different events in the whole historical process or in the transformation of the whole system . 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 is a significant step in the right direction (particularly at a time when 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].
The late Joe Fletcher  then called for the same under the title of horizontally integrative macrohistory. His untimely passing prevented him from carrying out his own mandate:
The full significance of the historical peculiarities of a given society cannot be seen [in the absence of horizontally integrative macrohistorys] search for and description and explanation of such interrelated historical phenomena. Its methodology is conceptually simple, if not easy to put in practice: first one searches for historical parallelisms (roughly contemporaneous similar developments in the worlds various societies), and then one determines whether they were causally interrelated [Fletcher 1985: 38-29, cited in Frank 1998:226].
To summarise the discussion that follows, the secular excess of the underdeveloped countries' exports over imports has throughout this period made a fundamental contribution to the accumulation of capital, technological progress and economic development of the now developed countries; and the generation of this exports surplus from the now underdeveloped countries has there developed the mode of production which underdeveloped Asia, Africa and Latin America.
This multilateral [along the sides] or multiangular [at the angles] structure of the global
economy, permits those at angular systemic locations of privilege to exact tribute or
rent from the system as a whole and in particular from those in the under-privileged
positions. For the role of the latter it is to produce and transfer wealth and income to
the privileged ones through the structure and operation of this multilateral/angular
system. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain came to occupy this position of
privilege; and THAT is what made it GREAT-- much more so than any qualities or productive
or other capacities of its own. Since then, The United States has replaced Britain in this
position of greatest privilege; and THAT rather than its productive capacity accounts for
most of its wealth and income.