Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Theory
Culture Society 2006; 23
The critique of Eurocentrism has gone through
several rounds. The first round was primarily a critique of Orientalism.
Edward Said and Martin Bernal, among others, focused on cultural bias
and racism in Eurocentric history. Others addressed Eurocentric biases
in development thinking (Samir Amin, Paul Bairoch, Stavrianos) and
historiography (Eric Wolf, James Blaut, Jack Goody).
Subaltern Studies made
further contributions revisioning history from the point of view of the
global South. A further strand, global history, generated critical
historical studies that document the significance of, in particular,
Asia and the Middle East
in the making of the global economy. Janet Abu-Lughod focused on the
Middle East, Marshall Hodgson on the world of Islam, K. N. Chauduri on
South Asia, André Gunder Frank on East and South Asia, Kenneth Pomeranz,
Robert Temple and Bin Wong on China, Eric Jones on Japan, and Anthony
Reid on South-east Asia, along with many other studies. This body of
work not merely critiques but overturns the conventional perspectives
and implies a profound rethinking of world history that holds major
implications for social science and development studies.
Arguably this body of
literature converges on a major thesis: the Orient came first and the
Occident was a latecomer. Frank’s
ReOrient settles on
1400–1800 as the time of ‘Asian hegemony’ (1998: 166). ‘The two major
regions that were most “central” to the world economy were
India
and China.’
This centrality was based on ‘greater absolute and relative productivity
in industry, agriculture, (water) transport, and trade’ and was
reflected in their favorable balance of trade, particularly of
China
(1998: 127). Pomeranz’s The
Great Divergence offers
meticulous comparisons of developments in China
and
Britain
and Geoffrey Gunn (2003) draws attention to
South-east Asia
as a ‘first globalizer’.
In general outline, the
Orient-first thesis runs as follows. Global connections may go back to
3500 BCE or earlier still, but 500 CE may rank as the start of oriental
globalization and 600 as the beginning of the big expansion of global
trade. This timing is based on the revival of camel transport between
300 and 500. At the time the global economy was centred on the Middle
East with
Mecca
as a global trade hub. In 875
Baghdad
ranked as a ‘water-front to the world’ linked to China
(Hobson, 2004: 40). The Middle East remained the ‘Bridge of the World’
through the second millennium, but by 1100 (or later by some accounts)
the leading edge shifted to China
where it remained until the 19th century. In China’s ‘first industrial
miracle’ ‘many of the characteristics that we associate with the
eighteenthcentury British industrial revolution had emerged by 1100’
(Hobson, 2004: 50) with major advances in iron and steel production,
agriculture, shipping and military capabilities. From
Japan
to the Middle East, the East was the early developer – far ahead of
Europe
in agriculture, industry, urbanization, trade networks, credit
institutions and state institutions. Several historians note that ‘none
of the major players in the world economy at any point before 1800 was
European’ (Hobson, 2004: 74). The East was also expansive: the Afro-
Asian age of discovery preceded Columbus and Vasco da Gama by about a
millennium (Hobson, 2004: 139).
Europe was a
late developer. Eastern ideas and technologies enabled European
feudalism, the financial revolution in medieval Italy
and the Renaissance: ‘oriental globalisation was the midwife, if not the
mother, of the medieval and modern West’ (Hobson, 2004: 36). In
Hodgson’s words, the Occident was ‘the unconscious heir of the
industrial revolution of Sung China’
(in Hobson, 2004: 192). Hobson dates
China’s
central role earlier and extends it later than Frank does. According to
Hobson, in shares of world manufacturing output, China outstripped
Britain until 1860 and ‘the Indian share was higher than the whole of
Europe’s in 1750 and was 85 percent higher than Britain’s as late as
1830’ (2004: 77, 76). In terms of GNP, the West only caught up with the
East by 1870; in terms of per capita income, a less representative
measure, the West caught up by 1800.
I will discuss three
specific critiques of Eurocentrism that this literature contributes and
then give an assessment of this literature. One of the cornerstones of
Eurocentrism is the idea that
China
turned away from maritime trade and that this caused its gradual decline
and opened the way for the expansion of European trade in
Asia.
The revisionist literature argues that the closure of China
(and Japan)
is a myth and the diagnosis of decline is likewise mistaken. It is true
that China
did not choose the path of maritime empire, but Western historians have
mistaken the official Chinese imperial legitimation policy of upholding
the Confucian ideal and condemning foreign trade with the actual trade
relations which continued and flourished. That
China
remained the world’s leading trading power shows in the ‘global silver
recycling process’ in which ‘most of the world’s silver was sucked into
China’
(Hobson, 2004: 66; Frank, 1998: 117).
Another cornerstone of
Eurocentrism is Oriental despotism (and variations such as Weber’s
patrimonialism). In contrast, the revisionist literature argues that
states such as China and Japan had at an early stage achieved ‘rational’
institutions including a ‘rational-legal’ centralized bureaucracy,
minimalist or laissez-faire
policies in relation to the
economy and democratic propensities, while the European states during
the 1500–1900 ‘breakthrough period’ were far less rational, more
interventionist and protectionist, and less democratic: ‘eighteenth
century China (and perhaps Japan as well) actually came closer to
resembling the neoclassical ideal of a market economy than did Europe’ (Pomeranz,
2000: 70). Light taxation and
laissez-faire
attitudes to enterprise were common in the East long before the West and
trade tariffs were consistently far higher in the West than in the East
throughout the period of comparison, which shows that the Oriental
despotism thesis is faulty.
The centrepiece of
Eurocentrism is the judgement that other cultures lacked the European
commitment to enterprise and accumulation. Weber highlighted the
Protestant ethic and described Islam and Confucianism as obstacles to
modern development. But many observers have noted the penchant for
commerce in the Islamic world. Viewing Confucianism as an obstacle to
development involves historical ironies too: what ranked as an obstacle
in the early 20th century was recast as the Confucian ethic hypothesis
to account for the rise of the Asian Tigers in the late 20th century. An
additional irony is the influence of Confucianism on European thinking.
That behind Adam Smith stood François Quesnay and the Physiocrats is a
familiar point, but the Physiocrats’ critique of mercantilism was
inspired by Chinese policies and the philosophy of
wu-wei
or
non-intervention, which
goes back to well before the Common Era (Hobson,
2004: 196). Thus, Confucius
emerges as a patron saint of the European Enlightenment.
What is the significance
and status of oriental globalization literature at this stage? There are
echoes of dependency theory in this body of work for if it wasn’t
European genius or other endogenous factors that turned the tide, the
role played by colonialism and imperialism in changing the global
equation must be greater than is acknowledged in Eurocentric
perspectives. One thinks of Eric Williams’s work on slavery, Walter
Rodney on
Africa
and other studies. But dependency theory was structuralist while the
recent revisionist history rejects a global structural approach (such as
world-system theory) and reckons with contingency and devotes attention
to agency and identity formation: ‘material power in general and great
power in particular, are channeled in different directions depending on
the specific identity of the agent’ (Hobson, 2004: 309). Dependency
thinking came out of the era of decolonization while the allegiance of
revisionist history is to global history rather than to history viewed
through the lens of a particular region and time period. It looks past
Fernand Braudel and his ‘Mediterranean world’ and past world-system
theory and its preoccupation with the
Low Countries
and the Baltic, to wider horizons in the tradition of William McNeill’s
global history.
At times there is a
rhetorical surcharge to this literature which reflects its character as
a polemical position. This comes across in a recurrent problem: though
the portée
of its findings is that the East–West
divergence is a fiction and is really a continuum, the oriental
globalization literature reverses the current of Eurocentrism by
marginalizing the West and centring the East; thus it replays East–West
binaries. Taking global history beyond East–West binaries is the thrust
of another body ofnstudies (Lieberman, 1999, 2003; Whitfield,n2003).
The oriental
globalization literature is unevennin that it represents a kind of
retroactive Sinocentrism and Indocentrism; for various reasons
China,
India
and the Middle East
have been more extensively studied and are more salient than other
areas. There is frequent mention of the ‘Afro-Asian global economy’ but
the African part remainsnsketchier than the Asian side. Also South-east
Asia,
Central Asia
and the Mongol Empire often fall between the cracks of the world’s major
zones. The oriental globalization thesis needs to integrate
finer-grained regional histories and studies such as Hoerder’s (2002)
work on world migrations during the second millennium. Janet Abu-Lughod
also suggests triangulation with local histories but notes, ‘We can
never stand at some Archimedean point
outside
our cultures and outside our locations in
space and time. No matter how
outré we attempt to
be, our vision is also distorted’ (2000: 113).
While the oriental globalization literature
has grown rapidly and is increasingly substantial, it is by no means
dominant. Mainstream thinking continues to view the West as the early
developer and the East and the global South as laggards or
upstarts. At the turn of
the millennium – following the Soviet demise and the Asian crisis and
neoconservative belligerence in Washington – Western triumphalism,
though increasingly hollow, sets the tone as part of an entrenched
‘intellectual apartheid regime’. The Washington
consensus is as steeped in Orientalist stereotypes and historical myopia
as the neoconservative mission to bring freedom and democracy to the
world. Eurocentric economic history
à la
David Landes (The
Wealth and Poverty of
Nations) and Roberts (Triumph
of the West)
rhymes with Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations, Bernard Lewis’s
account of Islam (What Went
Wrong?),
Fukuyama’s
ideological history (The
End of History) and
Mandelbaum (The Ideas that
Conquered the World). This
general mindset informs IMF and World Bank policies (economics without
history or anthropology) as well as American aspirations in the Middle
East (politics without memory), as if development and democracy are
virtues that the West chanced upon first and only. Besides plain
ignorance and arrogance, there is something deceptive about
Eurocentrism-aspolicy, a trait that Ha-Joon Chang summed up as
Kicking Away the Ladder
(2002). In the 19th
century free trade was used as a means to deindustrialize colonial
economies and now WTO statutes and free trade agreements that uphold the
intellectual property rights of multinational corporations short-circuit
industrialization in the global South. Institutionalized amnesia and
intellectual apartheid are instruments of power.
As the oriental globalization literature
overtakes the self-indulgent west-centric view of globalization, perhaps
the global realignments that are now gradually taking shape will catch
up with the material side of American supremacism.
This diagnosis of the ‘global confluence’
arrives on the scene at the time that China, India and East Asia are
re-emerging as major forces in the global economy; historiography
catches up with the present just when the present is coming full circle
with past trends in the world economy. A synthesis that is yet to take
shape is that of the historical oriental globalization thesis with the
cutting edge of contemporary globalization in the making.
Jan Nederveen
Pieterse
is at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, specializing in transnational sociology, and is the
author of several books.
.
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