How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism - Softcover

Anievas, Alexander; Nişancıoğlu, Kerem

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745336159 ISBN 13: 9780745336152

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told. How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to the dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an outline of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu provide an account of how these diverse events and processes came together to produce capitalism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexander Anievas is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014), How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015) and editor of Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2010).

Kerem Nişancıoğlu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author of How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015), and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018). He also blogs at The Disorder of Things.

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How the West Came to Rule

The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

By Alexander Anievas, Kerem Nisancioglu

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2015 Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nijancioglu
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3615-2

Contents

List of figures, X, 
Acknowledgements, xi, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique, 13, 
2 Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism: The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development, 43, 
3 The Long Thirteenth Century: Structural Crisis, Conjunctural Catastrophe, 64, 
4 The Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry over the Long Sixteenth Century, 91, 
5 The Atlantic Sources of European Capitalism, Territorial Sovereignty and the Modern Self, 121, 
6 The 'Classical' Bourgeois Revolutions in the History of Uneven and Combined Development, 174, 
7 Combined Encounters: Dutch Colonisation in Southeast Asia and the Contradictions of 'Free Labour', 215, 
8 Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée: Rethinking the 'Rise of the West', 245, 
Conclusion, 274, 
Notes, 283, 
Index, 371, 

CHAPTER 1

The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique

In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation, and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed itself of every branch of industry.

Karl Marx, 1867

... events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

Karl Marx, 1877

Introduction

In this chapter, we critically assess a number of influential Marxist-inspired theorisations of the transition to capitalism. We focus on such Marxist-inspired perspectives not because they exhaust the range of possible approaches to theorising the transition or because we think other perspectives have nothing to offer. Rather, we centre our attention on them because the Marxist tradition has arguably examined and debated the subject of capitalism's genesis more than any other social theoretical tradition. For these reasons, our critical examination of other important perspectives to capitalism's origins is in later chapters – Smithian approaches in Chapter 5, new institutionalism in Chapter 7, and neo-Weberian historical sociology and the California School in Chapter 8.

The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines World-Systems approaches to the origins of capitalism, particularly through an engagement with the works of its most influential representative and 'founder', Immanuel Wallerstein. While highlighting the important contributions that World-System Theory (WST) has made to the study of capitalism's genesis over the longue durée, we nonetheless argue that this approach – especially Wallerstein's rendition of it – remains hamstrung by two particularly debilitating problems: the unwitting reproduction of Eurocentrism that erases non-European agency; and the inability to provide a sufficiently historicised conception of capitalism.

The next section investigates the 'Brenner thesis' and the theoretical apparatus (Political Marxism) that Robert Brenner's works on the transition to capitalism have engendered. We focus on three particularly problematic and interconnected issues in their theorisation of capitalism's inception: first, their commitment to a methodologically internalist and concomitant Eurocentric (or Anglocentric) analysis of the origins of capitalism; second, the resulting deficiencies in their examination of the relationship between the making of capitalism and geopolitics; and third, their highly abstract and minimalist conception of capitalism.

In the third section, we consider the merits and problems of post-colonialism. The inclusion of postcolonial studies in our overview of the different approaches within the transition debate might seem unusual given that postcolonial scholars have predominantly focused on the experiences of modernity outside – and subsequent to – the emergence of capitalism in Europe. The existence of capitalism is then something largely taken for granted by postcolonial studies – a point that we argue limits their ability to fully 'provincialise' Europe. We nonetheless also draw out the important methodological and theoretical contributions postcolonialism offers in the study of capitalism's origins – contributions that we seek to take up and further develop in the chapters that follow.

The 'Commercialisation Model' Revisited: WorldSystems Analysis and the Transition to Capitalism

The Making of the Modern World-System: The Wallerstein Thesis

The most systematic exposition of WST can be found in the works of Immanuel Wallerstein, who sought to bring together longue durée history writing with the anti-hegemonic politics of the 1960s Third World movements. From dependency theorists Wallerstein took the importance of colonisation in order to explain unequal regional differentiation between the capitalist core and periphery. From Sweezy and Braudel came the emphasis on the 'world-system' as the unit of analysis, and relatedly the importance of trade and exchange. Finally, Wallerstein emphasised the historical specificity of the crisis of feudalism and the collapse of world empires as a precondition for the emergence of the capitalist world-system. This was because Wallerstein was additionally concerned with how to denaturalise capitalism, and so explore the possibility of its eventual demise. At the heart of this project was then establishing the historical specificity of capitalism by:

reopen[ing] the question of how and when the capitalist world-economy was created in the first place; why the transition took place in feudal Europe and not elsewhere; why it took place when it did and not earlier or later [and]; why earlier attempts of transition failed.

The specificity of the capitalist world-system is explained through a negative comparison with the social form that preceded it, world empires. The latter were integrated systems of political rule which controlled and exploited differentiated communities on a regional and sometimes inter-regional basis. According to Wallerstein, world empires restricted economic development because large state bureaucracies would absorb surpluses appropriated from agrarian production, hindering or precluding the accumulation of capital and (re)investment in production. The collapse of world empires was a precondition for the emergence of capitalism, for it released profit-seeking commercial activities from the fetters of overarching imperial states. Now unrestrained, production would be 'constantly expanded as long as further production is profitable', and capitalists would 'constantly innovate new ways of producing things that expand their profit margin'. Consequently, trade tended towards constant expansion and subsumption – 'an expansion of the geographical size of the world in question' – which created a capitalist world economy by progressively 'incorporating' greater proportions of economic activity into its own 'logic'. This subsumption of 'non-capitalist zones' into the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745336159
• ISBN 13: 9780745336152
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland