So China rather than Europe was the foremost world trader and producer and was able to resist Western incursions as well as dictate terms to the European traders. Chinese choose not to initiate imperialism, and assimilation of Chinese technologies and ideas enables British industrial revolution. Pi Sheng, invents the movable-type printing press (1095); Koreans invent first movable metal-type printing press (1403). The Chinese (c. 9th century/, Polynesians ~c. 3rd century) sail to the Cape and East coast of Africa. Britain only reverses the trade deficit by pushing drugs in China. Tokugawa Japan remains tied in with the global economy. Independent Tokugawa development provides a launching pad for the subsequent Meiji industrialisation, Japan as an 'early developer'.

China initiated a silver currency and next as the world's foremost producer/trader, provides a strong demand for Europe's silver plundered from the Americas. Europeans failed to defeat the Asians and hence remained dependent upon them for a slice of the lucrative Eastern trade: Afro-Asian age continues Chinese 'military revolution' - the technological ingredients of which came to underpin the European military revolution.

Asking the wrong questions, either explicitly or implicitly) begin by asking two interrelated questions:

What was it about the West that enabled its breakthrough to capitalist modernity, and what was it about the East that prevented it from making the breakthrough, are questions that once informed Max Weber's research.  But whether intended or not, these questions are implicitly loaded against the East. First, they lead the scholar  to impute an inevitability to the rise of the West, by taking the present dominance of the modern West as a fact, but then extrapolate back in time to search for all the unique Western factors that made it so. Conversely, by taking the subordination or backwardness of the present-day East as a fact, such scholars similarly extrapolate back in time to search for all the factors that prevented and ideas that enabled the Western industrial revolution.

Asking such question however would require an appraisal of the East's achieve­ments only in terms of Western criteria - In the process the East is robbed of any progressive economic capacity, thereby confirming that economic progress is and always has been the monopoly of the West.

Or to express it differently, there are entwined consequences that follow from such misleading  questions: first, the imputation of an 'iron law of Western development' and an 'iron law of Eastern non-development'; second, the assumption of the 'proactive European subject', counterposed to the 'passive Eastern object', of world history. And third, the rise of the West is understood through a logic of immanence: that it can only be accounted for by factors that are strictly endogenous to Europe. The net effect of all this was that the West is selected in while the East is selected out of the progressive story of the rise of the modern capitalist world. And, whether intended or not, the upshot of this is to view the rise of the West as a triumphant and miraculous virgin birth - the very essence of the Eurocentric myth of the pristine West. But although Max Weber asked these questions long before WWII started, what are such questions and answers still doing in history books of today?

By definition these question/answers posed at the beginning of the 20th century prevented the researcher that time from discovering the point that not only has the East achieved significant economic progress but that this in turn significantly enabled the rise of the West. In short, this alternative point cannot logically be captured by a question that leads the researcher to treat the rise of the West and the tragedy of the East as two separate stories on the one hand, and directs analytical attention to the progressive factors that exist only within the West on the other.

Alternatively, we should really ask, how did Sung China make the breakthrough to industrial production and intensive (per capita) economic growth while Europe remained mired in a backward agrarianism and a relatively weak commercialism?

And in that case based on the available facts we might offer the following explanation. China embodied unique properties and institutions that were absent in the West. China enjoyed a strong state, which created a stable and pacified environment and actively promoted the background conditions neces­sary for capitalism. By contrast, Europe was fragmented into a plethora of states, none of which was strong enough to promote a sufficiently pacified domestic environment to enable capitalism to develop. More­over, while China had solved its internal problems as early as 221 BCE and was peaceful thereafter, Europe was in effect a realm of warring states. In addition, China enjoyed a strong work ethic con­tained in its uniquely rational Confucian religion. Europe, by contrast, was held back by Catholicism, which specified respect for authority and a long-term fatalism that prevented the emergence of parsimony, hard work and rational restlessness. Perhaps a book would have been written entitled, The Confucian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which would definitively demonstrate why Catholicism was inimi­cal to economic progress, and why only Confucianism embodied the correct set of virtues that made significant economic progress inevitable.

The obvious problem here is that in explaining Islamic or Chinese success and European failure, we necessarily end up by ascribing permanent causes to a situation that has always been fluid. Sim­ilarly, were we to sit down say in 1900 and enquire into the West's rise to prominence, it would be no less problematic to stand the pre­vious theory of Islamic or Chinese superiority on its head. But that is exactly what has happened. Thus we find in all mainstream Western explanations of the rise of the West a tendency to ascribe permanent attributes to the West that rendered inevitable its breakthrough to modern capitalism (i.e. the Eurocentric 'logic of immanence'), while simultaneously presupposing a backward East that was permanently incapable of progress. But given that the East had pioneered signifi­cant economic progress after 500 and that it was more advanced than the West up to 1800, it is clear that such an analysis would be entirely fruitless. And it should be clear by now that such a fruitless exercise would necessarily flow from the question that Eurocentrism begins with.

The major problem with the question -'why Europe not China?' or, 'why the West not the East?' - is that these are absolute questions that demand absolute answers; that is, answers which attribute permanent positive characteristics to the West and permanent nega­tive features to the East. It is this that leads to the marginalisation of the East in the progressive story of world history. What we need, therefore, is a question that is temporally relativist. It must avoid the trap of ascribing permanent features to any one region. This is important precisely because ascribing the West with unique and permanent attributes inevitably obscures the alternative Eastern story that this book has sought to uncover. In short, a temporally relativist question will allow us to bring the East back from the marginalised edge or dark ghetto that it was consigned to by Eurocentric world history.

We also could ask as  Jack Goody did in The East in the West, 1996(plus in his upcoming Capitalism and Modernity), how and why did the leading edge of global economic power shift between the East and West between 500 and 1800 to eventually culminate with the breakthrough to cap­italist modernity?

As we have seen, the East enjoyed the lead in both global intensive and extensive power between 500 and 1800 before the pendulum finally swung to the West in the nineteenth century. Many of the vital technologies that enabled the European medieval agricultural revolution diffused from the East, Chinese agriculture remained superior to Europe's until the nineteenth century (as even various Eurocentric scholars have con­ceded). And an interrelated point is that China's long-held lead was due to the fact that Chinese agricultural technologies enabled far greater levels of intensive power.

As another example, the Chinese had developed the curved iron mouldboard plough, which was far superior to the clumsy medieval European square wooden mouldboard plough. And it was only during the eigteenth century that the Europeans began to catch up, in large part because they assimilated the Chinese curved iron mouldboard plough. So what is clear is that the superior achievements of the West can no longer should be seen as permanent or even long-standing features of those cultures but as the result of one of the swings of the pendulum .

In short then, the Afro-Asian-led global economy as it emerged after 500 (pioneered mainly, though not exclusively, by the Middle Eastern Persians and North Africans and later on by the Muslims). However Eurocentric historians in the first part of the 20th century dismissed the global origins of the rise of the West on the grounds that before and after 1500 European trade with the 'periphery' was only marginal. Even if that was true (which it is not), the crucial point is that the global economy's ultimate significance was that it provided a ready-made set of communication-arteries that linked up most of the globe, and simultaneously constituted a conveyor belt along which the major Eastern 'resource portfolios' diffused to the backward West between 500 and 1800. And particularly important was the Islamic Bridge of the World along which many of these portfolios passed on their journey from East to West.

The basic claim here is that at every major turning point of European development, the assimilation of superior Eastern ideas, institutions and technologies played a major part. And the technological dominance of Western culture is not merely characteristic of the modern world: it begins to be evident in the early Middle Ages and is clear by the later Middle Ages.

The crucial technologies - the stirrup, the horse-collar harness, the water­mill and windmill, probably the iron horse-shoe and perhaps the medieval plough - diffused across from the East to thereby enable the European medieval economic and political revolutions. Moreover, the global flows of Eastern migrations that hit Europe in successive waves after 370 helped prompt the creation of the feudal political structure. The next phase of Europe's development concerned the var­ious 'proto-capitalist revolutions' - commerce, production, finance and navigation - that were allegedly pioneered by the Italians after 1000. And the major impetus for the Italian financial was not an innate relationship between imperialism and superior material power, for what ultimately made Europe imperialist, in contradistinc­tion to China, was its specific identity.

None of this is to say that material power or material factors are unimportant. For they are vitally important. Indeed, the diffusion (and appropriation) of material resources from the East to the West is a vital aspect of my overall argument. A critical point of note was that material power in general and great power in particular, are channelled in different directions depending on the specific identity of the agent. Let us now consider the genealogy of European identity and how this informed and guided the actions that the Europeans undertook, and how these in turn enabled the rise of the oriental West.

In the early medieval period the Europeans constructed their identity negatively against the Islamic Middle East. Islam was chosen as the 'Other' in part because there was nothing intrinsic to Europe which could be harnessed to create a single identity. The point here is that this negative sense of identity led to the construction of Christendom, which in turn played an important part in both consolidating and reproducing the European feudal system as well as prompting the 'first round' of Crusades (1095-1291). Without these Christian ideas the highly inegalitarian social structure of European feudalism would have failed to gain legitimacy and might, there­fore, have imploded. Had this occurred Europe might have regressed back into the Dark Ages (though equally it is possible that the Euro­peans might have been rescued from such a fate by the energising impact of Eastern trade/resource portfolios that passed in principally through Italy and Spain via the Islamic Bridge of the World).

After 1453 the Catholic Europeans felt especially threatened by the so-called 'Turkish menace'. And it was this that prompted the 'second round' of Crusades after 1492/1498 initiated by Columbus and Da Gama.

The subsequent 'American and African experience' was vital in enabling the reconstruction of European identity. Crucial here was the transmogrification of European Christendom into Europe-as-the advanced West.. While under feudalism the Europeans had defined themselves negatively against Islam, it was nevertheless an identity that rested on insecurity. After the fifteenth century, Europeans began for the first time since 500 to imagine themselves as superior to the Black Africans and indigenous Americans, who were imagined as pagan savages. Eurocentrism was now beginning to emerge (even though it rested on various Christian conceptions of difference). It was this attitude that furnished the Europeans with the moral self-justification for undertaking both the imperial appro­priation of American resources and the super-exploitation of indige­nous Americans and, above all, the Black Africans. Initially, the major economic benefit derived from the plundered gold and silver, which enabled the Europeans both to finance their trade deficit with Asia and engage in global arbitrage. At the same time, Western Europe began to crystallise as the embodiment of advanced civilisation as the Eastern Europeans, alongside the Ottoman Turks, were imagined as 'barbarians', although the Chinese and Japanese said the same about the Europeans.

It was however especially the 1500-1750/1780 'American experience' represented the transition phase from an emergent 'Christianised Eurocentrism' to a fully developed conception of Western Europe as superior to the whole of the world. Crucially, after 1700 European identity was now reconstructed along implicit racist grounds (down to about 1840) and explicit racist criteria after then. The upshot of this reconstruction was the prescription of imperialism as a moral duty. Paradox­ically, conceiving of the Eastern peoples as decidedly inferior had the effect of making the exploitation and appropriation of their resources bland, labour and markets) appear as entirely natural or legitimate. In turn this significantly enabled Britain's industrialisation. This included first, the appropriation of land-saving agricul­tural products from the Americas and guaranteed raw cotton supplies through Black slave production. Second, the commodification of Black slave labour yielded profits that significantly boosted investment in the British economy (what I call the 'large ratios thesis'). Third, Black slavery also provided an enormous stimulus to British finance capital. Fourth, the Navigation Acts and the imposition of free trade in the empire enabled the increase in Western exports which in turn nour­ished Western industrial development. And fifth, the West reorganised the East as centres of industrial raw material supplies which were appropriated and exploited to service for example British industrial needs.

Also notable was that in the process many Eastern economies were held down through 'containment', thereby maintaining Britain's economic lead. Finally, imperialism also entailed the attempted 'cultural con­version' of the East (i.e. ethnocide), given that the West felt threatened by so-called 'Eastern cultural deviancy'. And at the extreme, genocide and social apartheid were also meted out by the Europeans.

In sum, three points are noteworthy here. First, it was Europe's racist restlessness rather than 'rational restlessness' that enabled the later phase of the rise of the West. Second, the obvious link between my emphasis on global structure and identity lies in the fact that the latter has always been constructed within a global context. And third, the Eurocentric assumption of a European iron logic of immanence which made the rise of the West inevitable is rendered problematic by the fact that without the plundering and exploitation of Eastern resources - land, labour and markets - Europe would have failed to break through into industrial modernity. Moreover, the Eurocentric logic of immanence is also undermined by the fact that Europe was extremely lucky to have made the breakthrough. Or as Michael Mann put it echoing the importance of contingency: 'So world-historical development did occur, but it was not "necessary", the teleological outcome of a "world spirit", the "destiny of Man", the "triumph of the West" or any of those.

In one sense the rise of the West could indeed be explained through contingency, for the Europeans needed a great deal of luck given that they had been neither sufficiently rational, liberal-democratic nor ingenious to independently pioneer their own development. The first, and probably most fortuitous piece of luck that came their way was that the East had pioneered significant economic progress through an inven­tive capacity, which in turn furnished the Europeans with the many different 'resource portfolios' that underpinned the rise of the West. Second, had the Asians not also created a global economy, then many of their more advanced innovations would simply have failed to arrive in Europe in the absence of oriental globalisation.

A third piece of good fortune was that the more powerful Eastern societies did not seek to colonise Europe and absorb it into their cultural orbit (as the Europeans would subsequently do to them). For one the Mongols turned their back on conquering the heartland of Europe and turned on China instead. Paradoxically, the Europeans were extremely lucky that the Mongol empire was created. For it delivered both goods and Eastern resource portfo­lios to the West via the northern route of the global economy (the Pax Mongolica). Also the Muslims probably were not really interested in conquering medieval Western Europe, even if they conducted many raids across this continent. And Europe was ultimately blessed by China's forbearance in that it chose not to universalise its 'standard of civilisation' through imperialism. Though China's benign forbearance was later punished by Europe's imperial campaign of drug-pushing, warfare and the assault on China's very identity some four hundred years later.

A fourth aspect derived from the fact that the Spanish stumbled upon the Americas where gold and silver lay in abundance, the aim of Columbus’s travel. This was highly fortunate in the first instance, because Columbus was supposed to have arrived in China. But he blundered. Had he not blundered he would have ended up by performing the kowtow to the Chinese emperor - a very different scenario from the one that unfolded in the Americas. In China he would have been received as a primitive tributary, and the bullion resources in the Americas would have been untapped. Without the appropriation of American bullion, the Europeans probably would have been unable to maintain their presence in Asia in the 1500­1800 period (since it was this money that financed their trade). Accordingly they would have been 'unable to redirect their economic energies towards Africa, India and the East Indies'. And when American Natives had inadequate immune systems to counter the Eurasian diseases that were imported, it considerably eased the process of European settlement.

The English East India Company happened to be in India at the time when the Mughal polity began to disintegrate of its own accord into various competing factions. Thus what defeated the Indian army was not superior British military power but a series of internecine rifts. And after 1757 the British succeeded in gaining an imperial hold only by playing off the different political factions. It was only later on that European guns succeeded in consolidating Britain's hold over India.

Moreover, had the Indians not been gracious and willing hosts to the East India Company ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, the British would neither have enjoyed a presence there, nor would they have been able to expand their power base once the Mughal polity had begun to autonomously disintegrate.

So the story of the rise of the oriental West cannot be related in terms of the immanence of the European social structure. The leading edge of global power resided squarely within different parts of the East right down to about 1800. Between about 500 and c.1000 the leading edge of global power lay in the Middle East. By 1100 the 'pendulum' began to swing eastwards with China enjoying the leading edge of global intensive power and, by the fifteenth century, grasping the leading edge of global extensive power. After about 1500 the pendulum began very gradually to swing back westwards as the Europeans engaged in imperialism and simultaneously intensified their linkages with the East.

We cannot know whether the East would have made the final transition to modern industrialism in the absence of Western imperialism. For the West's economic containment strategies stymied the growth potential of many Eastern economies (though Japan was an exception that fits the anti-Eurocentric rule given that it successfully industrialised in the absence of European colonisation). So modernisation is a continuous process and one in which regions have taken part in leap-frogging fashion. No one is endowed with unique [inventive] features of a permanent kind that enable them alone to invent or adopt significant changes such as the Agricultural [or Industrial] Revolution.

The Chinese international tribute system was radically different from Western imperialism, more voluntary than forced, and China's identity was more a defensive construct that was designed to both maintain Chinese cultural autonomy in the face of potential 'barbarian' invaders (e.g. the Mongols) and reproduce its domestic legitimacy in the eyes of its own population. But Europeans constructed a Great Divide between West and East. Defining the East as inferior and incapable of self-development while simultaneously defining the identity of the West as independent, proactive and paternal, so it is obvious that by about 1800 the West had managed to take the lead in terms of material-military power. But there was nothing inevitable about the imperial role that the Europeans chose to undertake in the world. And their actions were significantly guided by their identity that deemed imperialism to be a morally appropriate policy.

 

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