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Goody, Jack.

Capitalism and modernity : the great debate / Jack Goody.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7456-3190-8 (hb : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-7456-3191-6 (pb : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-7456-3800-3 (Single-user ebook) - ISBN 978-0-7456-3799-0 (Multi-user

ebook)

1. Social history. 2. Capitalism - History. 3. Industrialization. 4. Civilization, Modern.

I. Title.

HN13.G66 2004 306-dc22 2003016235

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A cknowledgem ents

If I were to list all those who have helped to focus my attention on the problems discussed in this book, the manuscript would be very much longer than it is, and it would include a number of the names whose work has been the subject of my comments. For it is an essay by a generalist, intended for the general reader, and I am therefore especially indebted to friends, acquaintances and, above all, people’s books. I would like particularly to thank those associated with the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure, in particular the late Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley, as well as my former colleague Alan Macfarlane. The help I have received on China from Joe McDermott and Francesca Bray is obvious, as is that on Venice from Deborah Howard and on Bologna from Carlo Poni; Christine Oppong (nee Slater) took me to the early Slater mill near Providence, Rhode Island. Keith Hart gave me valuable comments on chapter 6. I am very grateful to Juliet Mitchell for her help with this and all my recent publications.

I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for Polity Press whose comments were most helpful. The chapter on Malthus (chapter 4) is based upon a paper contributed to the conference of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population in Florence in 1999 which was devoted to assessing developments in population studies covering the last millennium; it is being published by them in the conference proceedings. The section on Landes was based upon an article in the Neha-Jaarboek (Amsterdam, 2001: 61-74). Those on Andre Gunder Frank and Kenneth Pomeranz were based on pieces in the Times Higher Education Supplement (23 October 1998, p. 28, and 3 November 2000).

Bologna, Easter 2003

Introduction: the Notion of Capitalism and the Rewriting of World History

Every nation ... , whether Greek or barbarian, has the same conceit that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life.

Vico, The New Science, 1744, Axiom 125 Throughout the world historians and social scientists are involved in the debate about modernization, industrialization and capitalism. All recognize that Europe (including Anglo-America) has outstripped all other continents in economic growth since the nineteenth century; now some others are catching up. But there consensus rests. The timing of this initial occurrence and the reasons for the delay in other areas are the subject of great debate. Before turning to the timing and nature of European advantage, let us consider what is understood by the large-scale processes of capitalism, modernization and industrialization by which it is often characterized.

The contemporary world has been seen as marked by the advent of these overlapping but not identical features, the claims for which I want to try to examine (and to disentangle) from a broad comparative point of view. My approach includes some acquaintance with other Eurasian cultures and their history but also derives from a very different type of experience as a field anthropologist in Africa.

Let me begin with capitalism, a concept that has been used in many ways. Pirenne defines capitalism in very general terms as ‘the tendency to the steady accumulation of wealth’ and sees this as a characteristic of European merchants of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,¹ that is, as a feature of the revival of the economy. That notion fits with de Roover’s account of the development of banking. Somewhat more specific are the definitions in terms of the ‘market society’ by some economists, of ‘continuous growth’ (Rostov’s take-off) by others, or even as ‘democratic society’ or as the ‘free enterprise system’ by politicians. But these concepts are vague and unsatisfactory. Markets are found even in the simple agricultural societies of Africa,² where capitalist activity has been discerned by the comparative economist Polly Hill and by the economic anthropologist Keith Hart. As for free enterprise, at least in the context of labour, the labour discipline required by early industrialization is a far cry from the relative freedom of other productive systems.³ Freedom is not a quality invented by the modern West, whatever readers of Adam Smith may conclude, nor yet is the ‘rule of the people’ (democracy), though the particular type of numerical election system used for consulting them is.

Heilbroner writes of ‘capitalism’ that ‘the wage-labour relationship appears not as means for the subordination of labour but for its emancipation, for the crucial advance of wage-labour over enslaved or enserfed labour lies in the right of the working person to deny the capitalist access to labour-power.’⁴ I have elsewhere told the story of showing an African ‘chief or ‘headman’ round Pye’s factory in Cambridge (now Philips), where women were lined up assembling radio sets. On the wall hung a clock where the workers punched in the times of their coming and their going. My companion turned round to me in surprise and asked in his native language, ‘Are these slaves?’ He was used to a much more individualized form of work organization, where he himself decided when to go to and when to leave his farm. So it is not capitalism that institutes freedom but the absence of oppression, whether political or economic. That situation can well exist under other regimes.

The other feature attributed to capitalism has been the development of a form of rationality based on the calculation of the means-end relationship. It is true that mercantile groups are necessarily much given to the calculation of profit and loss, and rationality of that kind may be less characteristic of earlier elites. Nevertheless the idea that farmers, for instance, however simple their techniques, do not make ‘rational’ calculations is unacceptable and part of discredited views of the irrationality of earlier, especially ‘primitive’, societies.⁵

Another aspect of the culture of capitalism has been seen as the pluralism of capitalist ideologies as against the earlier monolithic character of belief, especially in allowing for the demystification of the world and the growth of scientific explanations. Both these processes are amply evident in Europe following the Renaissance and the growth of humanism. While the tempo of such processes undoubtedly increased at this time, such features existed earlier. I have argued that an element of disbelief, of agnosticism, is found even in the simplest societies.⁶ Moreover China and ancient Greece were certainly more pluralistic, more humanistic, than medieval Europe. Even with the monotheistic religions Islam too had periods or movements of humanism, as Zafrani⁷remarks, and Judaism its Enlightenments and its Golden Ages. To this important point I will return later, but we may perhaps see these cultural changes, innovatory in character, as being largely independent of the process of rapid accumulation known as capitalism which they preceded.

That judgement, however, depends very much on what system of periodization we adopt, and here I am concerned with industrial capitalism. Periodization was discussed by the German economist Werner Sombart (1863-1941), who drew a distinction between early capitalism, high capitalism and late capitalism (1916-27, 1930). High capitalism corresponds to the coming of the Industrial Revolution, which he dates around 1760. Late capitalism follows the First World War, later than what others have called the Second Industrial Revolution (about 1880) and later too than Lenin envisaged by imperialism; some have spoken of late capitalism as state capitalism. The limits of the early period, in which Sombart was interested in the role of the Jews and Italians, are always vague. Some characterize it as ‘late mercantile’ or ‘pre-industrial’, some see it as going back to the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration in Europe, whereas others go back to the Middle Ages, some further back still to the classical period. Yet others have seen the shoots of capitalism not only in the East but more surprisingly in the market and artisanal activity of Africa, societies which had not even experienced the Bronze Age. Since my enquiry is directed to the Eurocentric roots of the debate, I will begin with the claim for early Europe.

Economists often prefer to use the term for new forms of amassing wealth, as in The Communist Manifesto, where a distinction is drawn between the surplus created in earlier societies and ‘invested’ in specific use-values (public monuments, for example) and the wealth that is typically accumulated in capitalist societies as commodities produced for sale rather than for direct use by their owners and partly reinvested in production. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx were impressed by the great expansion in commodity production that had taken place at the time they were writing. For Smith, labour was ‘productive’ if it created goods for sale to enlarge the national fund of capital. Marx took a similar view about the exchange of capital for commodities and of commodities for capital. These considerations traditionally gave rise firstly to a concern with motivation, often defined as ‘utility maximization’, for improving our condition of life, in Smith’s terms. Secondly, capitalism was associated with specific social institutions such as private property, especially in the means of production. That, however, is unacceptable in that regimes certainly had comparable systems of property.⁸

The origins of capitalism as a regime based on the continuous accumulation of capital is often attributed to the merchants that emerged after the fall of the Roman Empire, who were dominated by feudal lords in the ninth and tenth centuries, developed into an estate with political influence in the twelfth and thirteenth, and were then transformed into a capitalist class whose situation was legitimated in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and in the French Revolution of the eighteenth. That change of status was encouraged by the heightened development of exchange relations and by the increased use of money, especially following the import by Spain of South American gold and then silver in the sixteenth century.

In more abstract terms historical evolution of capitalism is seen as associated with the development of a propertyless labour force and with the separation of the state and market activity (‘the formation of the two realms’). That is to take a singularly modern European view of history. Mercantile exchange, and indeed a merchant estate, was a feature of many early societies, and I have described the existence of such a group of traders among the Gonja of northern Ghana. Undoubtedly the existence of such groups was widespread and, although they rarely obtained dominant political power (ancient Carthage and the Phoenician colonies were perhaps exceptions), they did develop their own mercantile culture, in Japan, in China and in the Arab world and elsewhere, acting partly independently of the political power. The two realms existed long ago, with the emergence of specialist merchants whose activities were never totally dominated by the state.

Equally a propertyless element in the rural workforce, always providing potential recruits for urban life, was brought into existence by the inegalitarian systems of land tenure that emerged with the use of the plough and animal traction during the Bronze Age (c.3000 BCE). Where, with the aid of additional labour, one person could farm larger areas of land, others would have minimal land and had to provide their labour. As I have argued, this form of socio-economic stratification did not appear in Africa nor in other areas where hoe cultivation predominated and dictated a broadly egalitarian distribution of land.⁹ While in all post-Bronze Age societies a dispossessed component of the labour force, dependent on wage labour or other forms of support, was present, it certainly grew much more significant in the eighteenth century with the process of industrialization, the decline of the cottage industries and the rise of manufacturing ones. Like the divorce between the political and the economic, the situation became more pronounced with the extensive growth of mercantile exchange and with the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, but such activities were significant features of earlier societies. What are seen as innovatory changes represented increases of scale, but increases of scale that nevertheless changed the whole system.

Modernization

Modernity, pre-modernity and post-modernity are current work-horses in the humanities. From the standpoint of everyday usage, the terms do not make much sense, since modern, like contemporary, is a moving target and cannot represent a periodization or a style, except in a fleeting and ambiguous sense. What is modern at one moment becomes pre-modern the next. Yet the social sciences have tried to give analytic weight to the concept of modern. Has this attempt been successful?

Modern has generally been opposed to traditional, which is unfortunate because it suggests that we moderns do without tradition, whereas the only tenable position is that we are (or may be) less tied by what has been handed down to us (and hence ‘more dynamic’), not that we do is without a transfer; clearly our basic means of communication, language in its oral and its written forms, involve just such a commitment to the conventions of the past in order to render interchange possible.

Modernity has also been identified with the rise of capitalism, and connected with the growth of rationality and of secularization, more recently with urbanization and industrialization.¹⁰ For socialist regimes modern meant industrialization without capitalism. Thus for economists, and in ‘modernization theory’, the concept has been associated with the notions of development. It has also, following Weber, been taken up by sociologists concerned with wider relationships. In the Parsonian tradition of sociology Smelser entitled a symposium ‘The modernization of social relations’. There he discussed the emergence of the nuclear family unit in relative isolation from the kinship system, a notion that requires some qualification.¹¹

Ruth Coser ranges more widely and sees the intellectual flexibility and complex mental operations of modernity as being related to the complexity of social relations. In urban societies where these are highly differentiated, the actor has to take into account a larger number of ‘alters’, of others, with whom he or she interacts, than in rural areas, and that interaction enables him or her better to understand the segmentation of people’s lives - for instance, that imposed on immigrants by American society; as an example Coser contrasts the adaptation of immigrants from an Italian village with that of Jews from Eastern Europe, the latter finding the process much easier coming from a more complex background.

One might suggest that the case of the segmentation of roles Coser cites is more directly related to industrial activity (capitalist activity for some) in which work is separated from the home, leading to the dominance of so-called rationality in the workplace. But ‘the plurality of life worlds’ (of role sets and status sets) extends beyond work. As a result, argues Berger,¹² modern society ‘forces the individual into reflection’, pertaining ‘not only to the outside world but also to the subjectivity of the individual’. Hence ‘modern identity is peculiarly individuated.’¹³

The plurality of roles, Coser maintains, is not so much a source of alienation (as Berger and others have maintained), that is, of exclusion, but of role articulation and individual enrichment, that is, of inclusion. A process of individuation exists when an array of relationships with their different demands requires a person to make an effort to differentiate between them and at the same time to synthesize the differences. In societies with simpler sets of roles, ‘the lack of a basic source of disturbance is also a lack of a basic source for reflection.’ Restrictions on this segmentation of roles can even exist in complex societies, usually at the bottom levels, ‘where workers are not offered the opportunity for multiple and complex social relationships.’¹⁴ The poor are thus limited in their opportunity to develop abstract thought, and, for example, to become great writers.

Is this argument altogether different, in essence, from Adam Smith’s contention that ‘the individual whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations’ cannot extend his understanding and is thereby ‘mutilated and deformed’?¹⁵ Clearly the division of labour, including that between the degree of literate skills required, has some influence on cognition,¹⁶ but it is important not to exaggerate these effects; the argument has significant implications for democracy, as John Stuart Mill on the one hand and elitists such as George Bernard Shaw on the other were aware.

If Coser’s position were correct, it is a largely mechanical individuation, reflecting the extent of the segregation of roles and of their segmentation (Goffman’s multiplicity of actors) and the number of relationships in which individuals participate. That is seen as affecting the nature of cognitive processes. Coser claims that ‘the multiplicity of expectations faced by the modern individual ... makes role articulation possible in a more self-conscious manner.’¹⁷ Apart from the home/work separation, this feature is a difference of quantity rather than of kind, and is seen as a consequence rather than a cause of modernity. But we should not read too much into this question at a general level; individualism itself is not at stake. That phenomenon was present well before ‘modernization’ or ‘industrialization’; Fortes pointed out forcefully for the Tallensi of northern Ghana how every lineage member was differentiated from his fellow members by his maternal filiation (what he called ‘complementary filiation’) and how every individual was also singled out spiritually by his own ‘destiny’ and his attachment to specific yin shrines. There has never been any question to a participant observer that in the ‘simpler’ societies (e.g. pre-industrial) each individual has his own identity, her own life history, his own narrative, defined among other things by progeny, ascendants and spouses; kinship ties differentiate. What Coser is arguing is that the very multiplicity of roles in more complex (urban) society makes its members more aware of individualism, of differentiation.

The traditional-modern dichotomy has been central to much recent sociology, especially that derived from the works of Max Weber.¹⁸ Giddens regards himself as living in a ‘post-traditional society’,¹⁹ that is, ‘in all realms of social action people have to exercise individual choice, whereas in pre-modern societies tradition provided a relatively fixed horizon of action.’

Tradition is what has been handed down, what many mean by culture (‘learned behaviour’). Are we then in a post-cultural society where the ‘new individualism’ reigns supreme, where choices are quite open and not influenced by the social life around us? No. Previous societies were not structured in a fashion that demanded unquestioning obedience to ‘tradition’. Choice existed, decisions had to be taken -about where and when to hunt for game, when to sow and when to reap - decisions on which life itself depended. As we have seen from the example of my Ghanaian friend, some might see individual life in the West as much less ‘free’ in certain respects.

I do not wish to fall into a loose relativity. Some social systems are more constraining than others, but the situation has to be examined sector by sector. Constraint in one area does not necessarily mean constraint in another. And there is certainly no unbreachable barrier that divides ‘traditional’ (conformist) from ‘modern’ (individualist) society. Even in religious matters members of earlier societies were not unquestioning believers, as I have argued with regard to a variety of beliefs that contained their own contradictions and raised doubts in the minds of some, if not all.

Durkheim proposed that in simpler societies, such as the Kabyles of Algeria, solidarity was ‘mechanical’; each individual had interests approximating to those of the next man or woman, whereas in societies with an advanced division of labour, solidarity was ‘organic’ between the differentiated parts. Mental dispositions related to social relations. Broadly speaking that difference holds. But there is no sharp break between types of societies, as both Durkheim and Adam Smith supposed; rather, there is a gradually increasing complexity of the division of labour over time.

The most active exponent of modernity among recent social scientists has been Giddens, whose approach, rooted in Weberian thought, goes well beyond the economic to the supposed social factors involved. ‘Modern institutions’, writes Giddens,²⁰ ‘differ from all preceding forms of social order in respect of their dynamism, the degree to which they undercut traditional habits and customs, and their global impact. However, these are not only extensional transformations; modernity radically alters the nature of day-to-day social life and affects the most personal aspects of our experience’; in other words, it is a transformation of self. Modernity thus becomes a ‘sociological’ actor: ‘the connections between sociology and the emergence of modern institutions have long been recognized’, he announces somewhat enigmatically. Or does he simply mean that sociology, as a named discipline, is a recent phenomenon?

What is questionable about this claim is not only the notion of ‘modernity’ as a sociological actor (more mysterious than, say, capitalism) but the idea that in other systems social life and self were not transformed in a parallel way - for example, by the advent of industrial capitalism. Both Weber and Marx would have made this claim. There may be degrees of difference, which are certainly worthy of examination, but was there a difference in kind, the dynamism of which undercut traditional habits? The notion that traditional societies (whatever they may be) were static, lacked dynamism, has long been shown to be quite unsatisfactory.

While one should not deny the incremental nature of the pace of social change (dynamism, global impact), this feature should not be made the focal point of difference, associated with a cataclysmic shift, as implied in the concept of (high) modernity. Giddens criticizes Foucault’s thesis that there was a more or less straightforward path of development from a Victorian fascination with sexuality through to more recent times.²¹ That is in keeping with his general point that the term ‘modernity’ is not just a description of the contemporary, which is inevitably a moving target, but of a radically different phase in the development of human societies. I want to concentrate here on one of the specific grounds for his disagreement with Foucault, namely that, while there was a substantial medical literature on sex in Victorian times, sex was not ‘widely represented’ in sources available to the mass of the public. Consequently many married women went into marriage with no knowledge of sex. The first statement adopts a singularly literate view of representations and the transmission of information (though the increase in the volume of information and fiction circulating was undoubtedly important); the fact that most of the population were not even literate does not mean that they had no knowledge of sex or sexuality. What does he think happens in non-literate cultures? And in literate ones, too, even the illiterate can acquire some knowledge of information developed in texts.

We are constantly told of ‘profound transformations due to sexual equality which make negotiation the order of the day’. ‘Women no longer go along with male sexual dominance. Personal life has become an open project, creating new demands and anxieties. Our interpersonal existence is being thoroughly transfigured, involving us all - in what I shall call everyday social experiments'— Using the work of Lillian Rubin, Giddens notes the ‘change of almost staggering proportions in relations between men and women over the past few decades’.²³ From her personal testimony Rubin recalls that she was a virgin at marriage during the Second World War. Here she is referring to the earlier onset of sexual unions, which, from the standpoint of la longue duree, is not so much an aspect of modernity as a reversion to the earlier practices of much of mankind. Late marriage, late sex, as the demographers remind us, was a feature of Western patterns of marriage and few others.

The notion of a quantum jump to modernity, cutting off ‘traditional’ habits, seems to deny any active part to culture (or history, of which culture is one aspect), to transmitted roles, beliefs, habits, or techniques, or even to the syntagmatically continuous narratives of the participants who are engaged in living as parents and children during the quantum jump. Or, to make the position more credible, when given a choice his approach tends always to play down these aspects (for example, in the discussion of Foucault and sexuality, or of romantic love), and it ends up by selecting the choice that emphasizes the break with what went on before.

Empirically and theoretically that is less than entirely satisfactory. Human societies consist of chains of interlocking generations that both transmit and innovate and human cultures consist of chains of interlocking communications; innovation would be impossible unless language remained substantially the same over time, enabling inter-and intragenerational communications to take place. And communication necessarily involves a level of understanding the other, so that the new is almost always in a sense

the transformation of the old, carrying along its own ‘traces’.

Take the family. There are many trends within contemporary Europe that are crossnational, though in different places they proceed at slightly different paces. These trends can be described in terms of ‘modernity’, though they are all obviously linked to what went on before. The problem of transformation is intrinsic to the existence of such ‘figurations’, as Elias insists in his criticisms of structural-functional sociology. On the other hand there are other aspects that remain the same over time.

Once again the modification, not the disappearance as Giddens suggests, of the notion of perversion (radical in some quarters, marginal in others) is seen as not so much part of the battle for self-expression in a liberal-democratic state as ‘part of a broad-based set of changes integral to the expansion of modernity’.²⁴ Modernity, he explains, ‘is associated with the socialization of the natural world - the progressive replacement of structures that were external parameters of human activity by socially organized processes.’ Reproduction was once part of nature but sexuality is now an integral part of social relations. It has become ‘socialized’.

However, if there was any process that has marked the whole of the long course of human history, it has been ‘the socialization of the natural world’, both in the external sense of turning nature into culture and in the further sense of internalizing that process. Neither implies the rejection of nature, as distinct from its modification, above all in reproduction. This very general description does little to characterize the specific contributions of the contemporary nor yet to contribute to the notion of modernity as a form of social life. Indeed, in setting aside the discussion of Foucault or the contribution of Freud, Giddens appears to be neglecting the dimension of historical time in favour of a cataclysmic view of the modern in which all is ‘utterly changed, changed utterly’. Does this process, which he describes as ‘structural interpretation’ of the phenomenon, really represent our experience of the present?

Giddens is committed to the idea that the rise of the ideals of romantic love is an aspect of modernity, as is ‘the emergence of sexuality’.²⁵ It is not that there are simply two types of relationship, romantic love and what he calls congruent love, into which one can enter. If romantic love involves distance and idealization, it is clearly a feature of the initial phase of a relationship, something that is more or less bound to fade with its persistence. An addiction to romantic love alone would mean one was changing one’s partner every five years or less; hence it is a recipe for the long-term instability of relationships. It runs contrary to the evident desirability of maintaining a steady contact during the childhood of one’s offspring, that is, until they are sixteen in Western societies, giving a periodicity of twenty years for a socially successful union. The doctrine of freedom of choice implies the ability to choose again if and when the first relationship falls flat, unless some other component is recognized - congruent love, loyalty. That runs against the ideal of romance, which is destructive as well as constructive of particular relationships.

Romantic love is a feature of the courting phase, which is much reduced in extent when marriages are arranged by the senior generation, or given in the kinship system, as in Levi-Strauss’s elementary systems. There is little room for selection or for idealization, although the latter may be minimally involved in any process of sexual exploration. However, congruent love is clearly the dominant form of the love relationship, which may be more stable over the long term since it cannot fade to the same extent - or any fading may merge into loyalty or habit(uation).

As for the historical dimension, the thesis accepted by a number of English historians that as a generalized phenomenon love was a development of the eighteenth century, and in England, seems increasingly unacceptable, not only for its ethnocentricity. Emotions of jealousy, which are in some ways the counterpoint of love, existed earlier in Europe²⁶ and yet earlier too in ancient Israel.²⁷

One major problem about discussions of modernity, not to speak of post-modernity, is their failure adequately to define the object of discourse or to propose any adequate mechanism for the asserted changes. Undoubtedly one factor, although one that indicates progressive rather than cataclysmic change, has been the modes of communication - for example, the expansion of literacy - the reflexivity of which leads to an increasing complexity in the concept of self. The eighteenth century in Europe saw a huge expansion in books and reading. The book trade had experienced a gradual growth ever since the invention of printing, but it received a great boost in Britain by the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act, passed in 1662. This change meant the loss of the legal monopoly of the Stationers’ Company over printing and publication, so that printing then began to flourish in the provinces as well as in the capital. Booksellers proliferated; so too did circulating libraries, subscription libraries and book clubs. Male literacy improved from 10 per cent in 1506 to 45 per cent in 1714 and 60 per cent by the midcentury; the comparable female literacy rates were 1 per cent, 25 per cent and 40 per cent. Books were available as never before, at least in Europe; in the Muslim world, and probably in China, books had long been more available, as we shall see. The effects on people’s consciousness were wide-ranging. Brewer claims that ‘stories that recounted heroic and moral actions ... were now rivalled by other tales that emphasised psychological complexity, the fraught relationships between outward appearance and inner feeling. The number of possible narratives, ways of understanding and describing oneself enormously increased; the issue of who or what one was rendered much more complex.’²⁸ Such a discussion leads us away from the cataclysmic concept of modernity towards a more developmental account of the contemporary scene, which we are not yet in a position to characterize as ‘late’ or as ‘post’. The periodicity, like its description,

remains to be resolved.

The third member of the trilogy with which I set out is industrialization. Some marginal form of the factory mode of production existed in ancient times;²⁹ developed manufacturing, involving a complex division of labour, was to be found in the production of ceramics in China,³⁰ as well as with cruder ware in Europe, both in Rome³¹ and elsewhere, and with textiles in Elizabethan England.³² The factory allowed for greater supervision of work and work discipline. Hours of work in Britain increased dramatically, giving an advantage as against overseas competition. But it also allowed for the collective use of energy, whether water power, as in much of the eastern United States, or steam. The use of energy, especially of water power, greatly expanded in Europe in the late Middle Ages and was an important factor of production in other parts of the post-Bronze Age world, such as the Islamic. But from the seventeenth century many British factories depended upon coal, which was used to replace charcoal; fossil fuel substituted for the limited supply of wood.³³ Coal was also used in the smelting of iron, which increased substantially in Europe as in China. These various processes came together in the Industrial Revolution that took shape in English textile production in the latter half of the eighteenth century and spread to other spheres and other countries, often with remarkable speed. Was it this that brought about European advantage or was that development based upon long-standing characteristics of the people of that continent?

European advantage

The notion that Europe has been advantaged since classical times is a belief that has been strongly held by scholars of Greek and Roman society. Some have seen this advantage as based upon the unique contribution of Greece to intellectual life, whether in the form of rationality, justice, democracy, forms of proof, the use of mathematics, or its substantial contribution to medicine. The notion is almost intrinsic to humanistic studies and has been embodied in analyses of the role of the (Greek) alphabet³⁴ or of their modes of proof,³⁵ to name only the most credible of these attributions.

But the classical civilizations were followed by a decline and fall, in the economy, in the polity and in broader cultural matters, leading to the emergence of feudalism, often analysed in purely rural terms. From there the transition takes place - the transition towards capitalism, to industrialization, to modernity. When that began is the subject of the Great Debate. There is the question firstly of timing, secondly of causes. As far as timing is concerned, and apart from the classical debate, European economic advantage, which bears upon military superiority and upon educational achievement, hence upon political matters, has been seen as already in place from, say, the year 1000;— others would go back even further, to the advent of Christianity³⁷ or to the German woods.³⁸Yet others see European advantage as born in the advances in agriculture and the technologies developed in the Middle Ages.³⁹ More frequently the advantage is seen as lying with the period of the Renaissance and the expansion of Europe, bringing in precious metals from the Americas and encouraging mercantile enterprise with the East.⁴⁰ Others would postpone the Great Divide to the Enlightenment (especially philosophers and sociologists such as Habermas⁴¹ and Giddens⁴² concerned with the intellectual changes), more frequently to the Industrial Revolution (many economic historians) or to an even later period in the early nineteenth century.⁴³ All these are candidates for consideration.

As for causes, the range is equally wide. Those who look to earliest times favour the Christian religion,⁴⁴ individualism,⁴⁵ the climate⁴⁶ or the European heritage more generally.⁴⁷ For the Renaissance, we find some scholars concentrating on the effects of colonization and empire, on the impact of American bullion or of the Eastern trade, or indeed of American agricultural production - sugar, tobacco, cotton, later meat and grain. Some have turned to the consequences of the Reformation for the development of the economic ethic of saving and investment, others to the intellectual advances in science and of thought more generally in the Renaissance and after, with the major turning points as being the scientific revolution, epitomized by Francis Bacon and by contemporary continental scholars, the adoption of the printing press and the educational changes it promoted,⁴⁸ and the Enlightenment itself, with the supposed triumph of rationality.⁴⁹ But the majority have concentrated upon the Industrial Revolution that occurred from 1780 onwards, with its development of factory production and its use of coal as a fuel and of steam as providing power. Those who focus on the nineteenth century see the fulfilment of these technological advances in the steam age of that period.

What follows is basically a long essay originating in a particular point of view. It is not intended to be comprehensive. The word ‘debate’ in the book’s subtitle is very deliberate. I am considering the present state of discussions about the origins of capitalism, modernization and industrialization, especially regarding the nature of the priority that most Western commentators give to the West. The debate has been going on for a long time, and I have not dealt in depth with earlier contributors, concentrating on what has been written recently and upon the great shift of emphasis that is beginning to take shape. Every reader will call to mind some other thinker, some other argument, I have not considered. The particular point of view from which I write is that of someone who has spent time working on secondary material from various parts of Eurasia, mainly from India and China, as well as from Africa, where I spent a number of years doing work in the field as well as in the archives. So inevitably I look at the problems of the European past and present from a different perspective than those whose intellectual and personal lives have been bound up with the West and its books.

Notes

1 Hilton 1976: 145.

2 Bohannan and Dalton 1962.

3 Parthasarathi 2002: 292.

4 Heilbroner 1987: 349.

5 Goody 1977.

6 Goody 1998.

7 Zafrani 1996.

8 Goody 1962.

9 Goody 1971.

10 Weiner 1966; Lantz 1981. For a recent literary treatment of the return to modernity, see Prendergast 2003.

11 Smelser 1966.

12 Berger et al. 1973: 78-9.

13 Coser 1991: 20.

14 Coser 1991: 26.

15 Quoted in Rothschild 2001: 225.

16 Goody 1977.

17 Coser 1991: 20.

18 See Bendix 1960.

19 See the chapter in Giddens 1996.

20 Giddens 1991: 1.

21 Giddens 1991: 23.

22 Giddens 1991: 8.

23 Giddens 1991: 9.

24 Giddens 1991: 34.

25 Giddens 1991: 34.

26 See G. Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); M. O’Neil, Magical healing, love magic and Inquisition in late sixteenth-century Modena,

in S. Haliczer (ed.) Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1987, 88-114); M. H. Sanches Ortega, Sorcery and eroticism in love magic, in M. E. Perry and A. J. Cruz (eds) Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, 58-92). For these references I am indebted to Dr U. Rublack.

27 A. Destro, The Law of Jealousy: Anthropology of Sotah (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989).

28 Brewer 1997: 201.

29 Woolley 1963.

30 Ledderose 1992.

31 Whittaker and Goody 2001.

32 Deloney 1619.

33 Wrigley 1988; Parthasarathi 2002.

34 E.g. Goody and Watt 1963.

35 Lloyd 1979.

36 Landes 1998.

37 Dumont 1977, 1986.

38 Macfarlane 1978.

39 White 1940, 1962; Brenner, in Aston and Philpin 1985.

40 Wallerstein 1974; Marx 1970; Weber 1946.

41 Habermas 1971.

42 Giddens 1991.

43 Pomeranz 2000.

44 E.g. Dumont 1977.

45 E.g. Macfarlane 1978.

46 Jones 1981.

47 E.g. Landes 1998.

48 Eisenstein 1968, 1979; Ong 1958, 1971.

49 Gellner 1992; Habermas 1971.

Culture and the Economy in Early Europe

As I have noted, discussions of the contribution of early Europe to the growth of capitalism, industrialization and modernization centre upon variables that we may vaguely call the cultural and the technical. Some authors of course argue that the advantages of Europe were derived from geographical factors. Many concentrate on long-standing cultural differences that go back to the classical period, to the Christian religion, or to the Germanic inheritance. To other cultural factors I will return, but first I want to discuss the work of two authors concerned with the medieval period who have concentrated upon technological achievements, of which there were many. The historian Lynn White was convinced that the roots of the modern world lay in the technical inventions of the European Middle Ages: ‘both modern science and modern technology are distinctively OccidentalAnd those achievements can be traced back to the late thirteenth century, when ‘Europe had seized global scientific leadership.’² ‘World dominance ‘began in the Middle Ages and took shape particularly in agriculture with the development of the heavy plough, the introduction of the horse collar (and the stirrup for warfare), and the three field system.’ These inventions, the result White claims of a uniquely European inventiveness, produced in the West, and in the West only, an agricultural as well as a concomitant political revolution that led to feudalism.

In commenting on Eurocentric approaches, the geographer Blaut criticizes White for his technological determinism, which he regards as failing to analyse the causes of the technology. That objection seems to me only partly valid; one can certainly regard technological achievements as a proximate cause of events. To reject that on Blaut’s grounds stands in danger of becoming involved in an infinite regress to supposed ultimate causes.

White’s proposals should rather be criticized, as Blaut also does, for their exclusively European focus, even where evidence for the origin of an invention is dubious (as with the horse collar and the stirrup). Inventiveness was certainly no exclusive prerogative of the Europeans, nor did the Judaeo-Christian tradition (characteristically excluding Islam, which has the same roots) have the liberating effects he supposes - as providing the faith in perpetual progress or in the separation of man and nature, with the latter being inert without spirit. His orientation is virtually exclusively European, and he sees

‘modernization’ as embedded in the unique European past and in that alone.

One persistent element in the analysis of the rise of capitalism in Europe has been the thesis that its development originated in the crisis in feudalism. And this crisis produced a form of capitalism in the agricultural revolution before it did in commerce or manufacture. However, the term agricultural revolution, like agrarian capitalism, has been subject to much debate. Croot and Parker see ‘the real agricultural revolution’ as ‘a long-continuing process of good husbandry, hard to detect where farmers left no records’.³ Cooper queries the whole notion of agricultural capitalism.⁴ Agricultural revolutions are by no means uniquely Western; the introduction of rice produced dramatic changes in the south of China, and of India, and of South-East Asia; it was the same with the advent of tropical crops and agricultural irrigation to Muslim Spain. The introduction of paddy fields and of terraced farming required an enormous input of capital; so too in Europe. The whole notion of a crisis in feudalism as a result of agricultural changes leading to capitalism has been recently expounded by Brenner⁵ and by Bois.⁶ The idea of putting ‘the seeds of capitalism’ so early (and yet from another point of view so late) was bound up with Marx’s Hegelian notion that one mode of production (capitalism in this case) emerged out of the contradictions of another (here feudalism). He did of course see mercantile capitalism as preceding the industrial variety, but it was mainly the contradictions in the base of feudalism, which was dominated by seigneurial production, that resulted in capitalism. That idea is elaborated in the work of Brenner, Bois and others. A different trend in medieval studies saw the ‘contradictions’ as arising out of the growth of towns,⁷ of artisanal activity, of commerce and of trade, with a number of later commentators, especially Wallerstein, Frank and Blaut, emphasizing overseas trade and expansion (‘the expansion of Europe’), with its consequent booty production. Following others (including Weber and Marx) Hilton sees ‘the independent urban commune’ as ‘an important component of the special features of European, as distinct from other feudalisms’.⁸ The distinctiveness of early European towns has been a dominant theme in the discussion of medievalists and others. The ‘commune’ township was far from widespread in Europe, but it has served as a model for the European in contrast to the Asian town. Its rule of law and its ‘liberties’ are thought to mark it off as a centre for the development of the market. It was Braudel who commented: ‘capitalism and towns were basically the same thing in the West.’⁹ That seems to imply either a very broad use of the term ‘capitalism’ or a very narrow one of towns. In fact the European town was in no way unique as regards the development of the market. Recent accounts of Chinese and other Asian towns show that they provided more than adequate environments for the growth of commercial exchange.

A somewhat wider approach has been taken by another economic historian, Joel Mokyr,— in his book on The Lever of Riches, subtitled Technological Creativity and

Economic Progress. It begins by referring to ‘the appalling poverty’ in most of Africa and Asia. The West’s opulence is the result of ‘Western technological superiority’. That is not a new phenomenon but has ‘deep historical roots’, going back ‘centuries, even millennia’. Technology was the lever of its riches, and depended, like science and art, on ‘human creativity, that rare and mysterious phenomenon’ .—

Mokyr begins his story with classical antiquity, but sees European society as showing ‘the first signs of what eventually became a torrent of technological creativity’¹² around 700 CE. At that time Western technology drew from ‘three sources: classical antiquity, Islamic and Asian societies, and its original creativity’. Since he is studying Western technology as the lever of riches, it is perhaps inevitable that it is the West that is credited with the ‘technological creativity’ that drives economic progress and makes some rich and some poor. But what about the other traditions that at least contributed to this superiority in the shape of printing, gunpowder and the compass, to take the Baconian trilogy, and to neglect many other features, including advanced agriculture and the artisanal activity of the Bronze Age, did not these too require creativity?

Nor does Mokyr recognize the possibly temporary nature of this advantage, which other societies have experienced at other times. He sees Islam as being marked by technological creativity in the early Middle Ages but as running ‘out of steam’ around 1200, by which time the economies of Western Europe had absorbed most of what the Orient had to offer and begun to ‘pull ahead’.— China too had its day before 1400. But a string of brilliant inventions between 1200 and 1500 ‘prepared the way for Europe’s eventual technological leadership’. He goes on to claim that the ‘unique character of European technological change was determined both by the ingenuity displayed in making production more efficient, and in the speed with which some of those innovations were diffused throughout Western Europe.’ However, he also declared that, ‘in mechanical engineering, from water mills to clocks, the Moslems were for centuries far ahead of the West.’¹⁴ Why was this advance not due to a unique ingenuity too, and was the speed of diffusion through the vast Islamic world, from Cordoba to Lahore, not a feature of that society? The West may have moved ahead at this later time. But are the reasons he adduces really relevant?

The inventions through which Mokyr sees Europe as ‘pulling ahead’ included the windmill (though this was probably imported from Islam). Wind power was also developed in connection with ships, where the traditional lateen sail of the Mediterranean was complemented by the addition of a foremast and mizzen mast; the three-mast rigging known as a carrack gave speed as well as manoeuvrability against the wind. Such manoeuvrability was needed for Atlantic travel and for the voyages of exploration around Africa. It was helped by the introduction of the rudder, possibly from China. At the same time ships became lighter by means of the ‘carvel’ technique, where boards were placed edge to edge, with caulking in between. Navigational aids also improved, not only charts but the compass, known in China, then in Islam, and first mentioned in Christian Europe by Alexander Neckham about 1180. It took until about 1300 for this instrument to develop into a recognizable compass, perhaps later until it was widely used. Much of this improvement came from the adaptation of classical, Hellenistic and Islamic instruments - the use of latitude and longitude was derived from Ptolemy’s Geography (translated 1409), the Hellenistic astrolabe was adapted for use on ships around 1450, the simplified version of the quadrant invented by Muslims (who of course led the great Chinese expeditions to Africa) was employed in navigation.

The third area of progress was in metallurgical engineering, with improved furnaces, especially blast furnaces at the end of the fifteenth century, that permitted the casting of iron, which had been long since known to the Chinese. Cast metal type was used in the new printing press, another ‘invention’ that had long been present in China.

So a number of these products of a supposedly uniquely European technical creativity originated in or were stimulated by the East. While there were certainly some differences in national or continental traditions, many of these inventions took place in a wider context of international creativity. Take, for example, the important advances in the measurement of time. Both in Europe and among the Arabs, complex water clocks (clepsydra) had been created, but the invention of the verge and foliot mechanism (‘clockwork’) meant that the force of a falling object could be transmitted to a clock; the weight-driven mechanical clock appeared at the end of the thirteenth century and was then produced and adapted throughout Europe. That development has been said to have brought in new standards of accuracy in people’s behaviour and in the manufacture of machinery. In that particular form it was a Western invention, but it was part of a long and much wider search for more accurate ways of measuring time, which made progress in the Muslim world in astronomical observations and calculations as well as in the methods for the regular distribution of irrigated water.

A similar history occurred with spinning and weaving. The Chinese invented complex looms for the weaving of silk which were taken over by Islam; later developments took place in Italy, leading eventually in Britain to the series of inventions in the mechanical weaving of cotton and wool which resulted in the Industrial Revolution. The case of gunpowder and guns is an even more striking example of transcontinental developments.

This progress, it has been claimed, was in technology without science. It has been remarked that, in science, Europe in 1500 knew less than Archimedes, but the continent made some progress in technology. By 1500, Mokyr maintains,¹⁵ Europe had achieved technological parity with Islam and the Orient. That technology was essentially practical, as indeed was the case with China, of which Needham wrote that ‘the world owes far more to the relatively silent craftsmen of ancient and medieval China than to

the Alexandrian mechanics.’¹⁶

However, between 1500 and 1750 Mokyr suggests Europe was marked by ‘the absence of discontinuous breakthroughs’.¹⁷ Ideas flowed but practical applications did not always follow. The most important technological change was ‘the new husbandry’ (another ‘agricultural revolution’?), modifying practice in many parts of Europe, beginning in the Low Countries and introducing new crops, the stall feeding of cattle and the elimination of fallow. The modern seed-drill appeared around 1700, new iron ploughs at roughly the same time. Wind and water power improved, but by the midseventeenth century coal became a major source of energy, although Holland continued to use peat; coal was imported. These developments were the precursors of the Industrial Revolution itself, undoubtedly a European phenomenon, but it seems doubtful, given the cosmopolitan background, whether it is correct to envisage any unique European technological creativity.

The alternative idea that technical progress was due more to a ‘technological dialogue’ or an ‘inventive exchange’ throughout Eurasia has been developed by Pacey;— techniques were not only transferred but invention was stimulated. His major example is the exchange of developments in hydraulic engineering and machines between China, Iran and the Islamic world. He suggests that significant differences between Europe and Asian technology arose from ‘the greater stress on mechanical invention in the West as compared with the emphasis on large-scale hydraulic works in much of Asia’.¹⁹ These were more vulnerable to damage from outside. The advance of the nomadic Mongols and Turks from the north was clearly a threat to hydraulic agriculture, both in China and in Baghdad, leading to greater discontinuities. From Baghdad many Islamic scholars fled to Delhi, where the invaders from the north had already become settled. But nevertheless the initial attacks from that quarter destroyed many centres of learning, especially Buddhist ones in Bihar and Bengal, as a result of which that religion virtually disappeared from India.

Parallelisms in technological development between different regions are frequent. There was the important example of spinning wheels and winding machines, which were valuable, in different forms, whatever fibres were being used. It may have been an Indian invention, but we have the first clearest illustrations of this machine from Baghdad (in 1237), China (c.1270) and Europe (c.1280), all within about forty years. Likewise developments in the technology of astronomical instruments and of clocks took place both in China and in Islam. Al-Muradi designed a clock driven by a water-wheel about the same time that Su Song was constructing his great clock in China (c.1077). There seems to have been little possibility of a direct connection between the two; the convergence Pacey sees as arising out of a similar background of technological development and of parallel motivation. Regarding the measurement of time, the notion of a weight-driven device with gears to drive ‘clockwork’ was of great interest in Europe at the time, and much was learnt from Islamic sources. As we have seen, the European contribution to the clock was the escapement device, the verge and foliot mechanism to regulate the rate at which the wheels turned. Europe was in a position to adapt the technologies of others because it already had its own achievements, especially in the use of non-human energy - water-wheels for corn mills, for pulling and later for paper - but much had transcontinental roots, especially in the manufacture of paper, and in the broad scope of its technology Europe had a lot to learn from its contacts with Islam. These contacts came through southern Spain, Andalusia, but also through the Crusaders, who were the means of transferring some technology, especially of a military kind regarding fortifications and weapons. But also new foods and processing technologies were transferred, especially to Italy: for example, pasta itself seems to have come first to Sicily and then passed northwards.

Those technologies belonged to the late medieval and early modern periods and were seen as preparing the way for subsequent developments. Important as they were, they do not indicate any unique European capacity for invention or creativity. Often enough they represent achievements to which a number of regions have contributed. But the following period of the Industrial Revolution did witness unique events that have had a great influence on the world: the factory system of power-driven machinery, involving a highly controlled labour force paid by results.

Discussing more general questions of supposed European advantage, I begin with an account that attempts to reach back to the year 1000 and that has received wide acclaim, namely the study of the economic historian David Landes on why some societies are rich, others poor.²⁰ I also turn to Landes because his account, as well as going back to the earlier period, raises most of the questions concerning especially Western European advantage over the rest of the world in a very explicit way. Explanations that trace causes back over centuries usually look towards the continuities involved in the concept of culture to justify their approach, and Landes frequently resorts to this mode of explanation.

Since this topic of culture is a highly debated one I need to say something of my own approach. When I use the word I do so in a general anthropological way, not in the popular sense where the word refers to ‘high culture’, and sometimes by extension to parallel ‘artistic’ activities at a more everyday level (‘popular culture’). But I do not confine the term, as many American anthropologists do following the usage of Talcott Parsons, to belief systems, systems of meaning. Instead I follow the line of most British anthropologists and European scholars, as the virtual equivalent of the ‘social’ in the Durkheimian sense, which again is roughly the same as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s ‘learned behaviour’. In other words, it is an inclusive concept that follows the definition of E. B. Tylor in 1871 and includes ‘material culture’ as well as ideologies, beliefs and family structure. When I claim to be writing about the history of human culture, I do so in this wide sense, ignoring the distinction between the social and the cultural that is embodied in much of American social science²¹ as well as between social and cultural history (the former sometimes seen as concerned with the collective, the cultural with the individual).²² The insistence on the independence of the cultural by American anthropologists and of the social by French sociologists was part of the ‘professional’ attempt to establish those fields as independent of other disciplines. The concepts are set up to define one’s own activities in opposition to those of others which are considered to neglect topics with which one wants to deal. That was perhaps seen most clearly in the establishment of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard in the 1940s. The social system was divided into four sub-systems, one concerned with the economy, one with the personality (psychology), a third with the social (sociology), the fourth with the cultural (anthropology). To the last was loosely assigned beliefs, values and symbolic behaviour, a less than satisfactory division for myself and for most European social scientists.

Landes’s study represents one of the most systematic and prominent attempts to introduce culture as a variable into economic history. The work carries the subtitle ‘Why Some [nations] Are So Rich and Some So Poor’. In the final chapter (29) Landes summarizes his answer. For over a thousand years ‘the key factor - the driving force -has been western civilization and its dissemination’ - the knowledge, the techniques, the political and social ideologies. He strongly regrets the line of thought that attempts to modify this position (by asking whether Europe really had a comparative advantage in 1000 AD, whether all development was in fact diffusion, and who contributed the gunpowder and the printing press). And his thesis boldly returns to the position of Max Weber both in hypothesis and in approach.

If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference. (Hence Max Weber was right on.) Witness the enterprise of expatriate minorities - the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews and Calvinists through much of Europe, and so on and on. Yet culture, in the sense of inner values and attitudes that guide a population, frightens scholars. It has a sulfuric odour of race and inheritance, an air of immutability. In thoughtful moments, economists and social scientists recognize that this is not true, and indeed salute examples of cultural change for the better while deploring changes for the worse.²³

To such an approach he contrasts not only ‘anti-Europeanists’ but technicians who ‘would rather do: change interest rates ...’ If culture changes, as surely it must, how then is it an explanatory variable? What is it that changes, what persists? In looking at this question critically, we are clearly down to more specific factors. In itself culture is no more significant than the social, and both are inclusive of the economic as well as the ideological. The problem here is simply one of meaning. From my standpoint, ‘culture’ is a meaningless variable, since it is all-inclusive and its use pre-empts the resort to more particularistic factors.

Landes does recognize one major criticism of culture as an explanatory variable. If it does so much, ‘why does it not work consistently?’ Why have the Chinese ‘long been so unproductive at home and yet so enterprising away’? The answer is that ‘culture does not stand alone; the same values thwarted by bad government at home can find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the special success of emigrant enterprise.’ So ‘culture’s response to economic enterprises’ is limited. In Thailand young men nowadays spend less time in monasteries; business calls, illustrating ‘culture’s response to economic growth and opportunity’.²⁴ The reverse is also probable - cultures may work against enterprise, as in Russia, though some elements are ‘enterprising’, especially among nonRussian minorities.²⁵

What do we gather from this summary account? Culture seems to be resistant to economics, and refers specifically to ‘inner values and attitudes’, such as the Protestant (Calvinist) ethic. It can support or limit ‘enterprise’, as can governments. It is not unchanging, yet it is of long duration - Europe had it right from 1000 CE, but Britain ‘lost out’ entrepreneurially in the Second Industrial Revolution. While Landes speaks of inner values, he writes of the achievements of South Korea and Taiwan that they ‘reflect ... the culture of those societies: the family structure, work values, sense of purpose’.²⁶Family structure would certainly be in the realm of the social in the Parsonian scheme of things. With regard to the achievements of Holland, he comments that that is where culture came in: ‘it defined patterns of recruitment, avenues of opportunity, and sources of satisfaction.’²⁷ Again, recruitment would be ‘social’. Britain’s ‘abdication’ from its earlier greatness at the time of the Second Industrial Revolution was the result of ‘want of knowledge, imagination and enterprise’. Some, he explains, have sought to explain these shortcomings ‘by exogenous factors, notably culture’,²⁸ by the triumph of antibusiness. So this vague notion of culture gives but it also takes away.

Elsewhere, especially regarding the East, the problem of the lack of development is seen as having partly to do with the ‘social’ fact that all those countries are despotisms;²⁹ here Landes resorts to the nineteenth-century view of oriental despotisms which paid little attention to the existence of alternative methods of consulting the people, nor yet of pockets of republicanism. However, the trouble also lies ‘with the culture’, which he argues ‘(1) does not generate an informed and capable work force; (2) continues to mistrust or reject new techniques that come from the enemy west (Christendom); and (3) does not respect such knowledge as members do manage to achieve.’³⁰ Arab failings in these respects ‘go way back’,³¹ but how far? How far back does culture go? In Egypt, of which Landes studied aspects of its modern history, the primary problem of development lay in ‘its social and cultural incapability’.³² It is difficult to see something as all-embracing as culture, however defined, acting in this way. While some of these strictures may have a measure of validity for limited spheres and at specific periods, they are clearly wrong at others. ‘Culture’ does not help. Otherwise how would Iran have developed an oil industry or Iraq weapons of mass destruction? It is not the total culture that is characterized by ‘incapability’, even if it could be claimed that certain sectors are. The whole discussion is pitched at an unacceptable level of overgenerality.

As a recent commentator has noted, ‘Marketing has not ... been freed from culture. Bureaucracy, liberty and credit cards are as much cultural phenomena as quaint market squares.’³³ That obvious point would not have to be made if economics as a ‘discipline’ had not claimed conceptual independence and closure as well as analytical autonomy after the period of Adam Smith and Condorcet, as Emma Rothschild³⁴ convincingly argues.

If culture is exogenous, as Landes claims, what constitutes the endogenous system? Given that he is an economic historian, he is presumably erecting the same system boundaries as economists; outside the economy, every other factor is ‘social’, in his case usually cultural. Marx’s variables would fall within, Weber’s outside. One can perfectly well understand that a group of specialists may want to place limits on the variables they wish to consider in any situation or situations, but such a decision is either pragmatic or formalistic; to set aside all other variables as social or cultural is therefore without much meaning and represents an avoidance of rather than an approach to the process of analysis. The approach appears to offer an explanatory framework (‘culture intervenes here’) but in fact does nothing of the sort. The concept lacks specificity.

Culture is usually seen as a set of long-enduring background variables. Not that it cannot change - as we have seen, Landes admits of this possibility.³⁵ But the concept refers to ‘social’ rather than ‘individual’ factors. The Japanese resistance to foreign imports came from ‘deep-rooted, culturally determined consumer preferences’. It is difficult to imagine what consumer preferences are not to some extent ‘culturally determined’ unless we are referring to idiosyncratic individual choices, but they are not therefore deep-rooted. While the author admits that cultural factors can change, he only too often stresses its deep roots and talks, as in the case of France, of national traditions going back to Colbert.³⁶ Again he quotes with approval the comment that the Japanese ‘national character’ is strikingly marked,³⁷ a notion which again refers to long-standing, indeed primordial, tendencies. The argument for the early cultural advantage of Western Europe seems to me countered by the evidence of ‘more developed Islamic and Byzantine economies in Carolingian times’.³⁸

In a recent book Partha Dasgupta adopts an eclectic view of ‘culture’ as a variable in economics, referring specifically to Landes’s work. Culture is defined more directly as ‘a community’s shared values and dispositions’.³⁹ But he also remarks that culture can be regarded as ‘patterns of behaviour of differentiating groups’,⁴⁰ patterns that modify ‘the most efficient mode of organization’. These differences are grounded in beliefs, including the beliefs people hold about one another, so that culture can be looked upon simultaneously as common behaviour, shared beliefs, and common values and dispositions,⁴¹ but always outside ‘the most efficient’ (i.e. economic) form. In that sense it is residual.

To the archaeologist, like the anthropologist, culture is a general attribute of man, what L. A. White called ‘man’s extra-somatic means of adaptation’,⁴² including the economic, while a culture is the specific adaptation of a human group to the particular problems of its environment.⁴³ In both these senses, it can hardly be a variable since it is inclusive. A consequence of using it as such is that one may tend to overlook the more specific factors that are concealed under this general rubric. For example, Landes gives too little attention to knowledge industries and to the modes of communication with which they are so clearly associated. Yet the rapid dissemination of knowledge through printing in an alphabetic script was undoubtedly of major importance in its spread and accumulation in Renaissance Europe,⁴⁴ just as the widespread use of paper had earlier been in the Islamic world.⁴⁵

In conclusion, in approaching the question of culture as a variable in economic analysis, we are struck by the yawning gap between the usage of economists and that of other social scientists, especially anthropologists. For the former it is a residual category of variables exogenous to economics; for the latter it is inclusive and often comprises the totality of human behaviour of which economics is part. As we have seen, the sociologist Parsons’s social system comprised four sub-systems of which economics was one (the adaptive). Parsons thinks of culture (as distinct from the social) as being itself another of these sub-systems, concerned with beliefs and values, an area which he, like Geertz, sees as the special province of the anthropologist. Many Europeans closer to classical sociology would disagree.

Let us now turn to Landes’s more specific arguments. Most social and economic historians, even the most enlightened sociologists such as Max Weber and Immanuel Wallerstein, begin with the self-evident truth that Europe today is better off than other parts of the world. The problem arises in their attempts to explain and position this

advantage. Landes sees the division between two power blocs, East and West, as having subsided; today the challenge is not even between North and South but between the West and the Rest. The West has substantially higher income per head than any other part of the world; even 250 years ago it was considerably ahead of China and India. That gap is still growing and is manifest in the better health (with the consumption of more animal protein) of the West, and in its greater control over population: ‘They [the rest] try to ensure a secure old age ... by having lots of children.’⁴⁶ The latter point certainly needs querying. In the first place having more children could also be a measure, like the standard of living, of a society’s success. In any case, the great expansion of population occurred in recent times in Europe, and never until very recently in Africa, the original home of mankind and still much less densely populated than the continents to the north and west (even than the ‘New World’). That continent ‘controlled’ its growth better than any. One may argue with Malthus that this was mechanical or natural rather than moral restraint, but that is certainly not true of China, as Lee and Wang⁴⁷ have effectively argued. And elsewhere, too, people generally took account of any continuing disparity between population and resources.⁴⁸ Moreover, it is now clear⁴⁹ that the demographic transition, once thought of as unique to Europe, has commenced throughout the world, even in Africa. And that process necessarily involves ‘moral’ restraint.

To those who look more widely and argue that at this level the West-Rest contrast is simply false, Landes does not limit himself to the contemporary scene but replies that, ‘for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity.’⁵⁰ That proposition seems an exaggeration for many spheres of human activity, the written and printed word, for example. Moreover, the contrast he makes with China and India is almost entirely economic in a very limited sense and does not take into account the depth of civilization in other respects, the quotient of sunshine, the standard of cuisine, of clothing and similar factors. It is undoubtedly true, for example, that the majority of Chinese have eaten much better (though with less animal protein!) than most of the British.⁵¹ But to those who say his claim is Eurocentric, he replies that he prefers ‘truth to goodthink’. But along with Pilate we must ask, what then is ‘truth’?

In looking around for the reason for what he sees as the long-term difference between rich and poor countries, Landes searches for discriminating features of the West that might have contributed to the Industrial Revolution. Those features he sees as going back much further in time. One of the more recent that he seizes upon is the scientific revolution of the early modern period. He refers in a footnote to Needham’s work on science in China and to similar enquiries about other traditions. Of both these traditions and their students he is curtly dismissive. He suggests that such scholars would be better employed in asking why Chinese science ‘failed’, that is, had not continued as it had earlier promised. But that is a question we could as well apply to the achievements of Greece and Rome, or even to the scientific, technological and industrial activities of Great Britain in the nineteenth century. There was no continuous tradition in Europe going back to classical times; the coming of Christianity set back some of these areas of intellectual activity for at least 1000 years. Even in the Renaissance, Galileo had his problems in being able to propose what he saw as the truth, and similar impediments continued through to the time of Darwin. Even today the difficulties have not altogether disappeared in the West, especially in the American South, though anti-science, and even ‘anti-business,’ takes different forms.

Part of the present economic superiority of Europe clearly has to do with the Industrial Revolution. Why, Landes asks, did it take place only there? Indeed, even the majority of Europe - Italy in the Renaissance, Holland in the Golden Age - is excluded from consideration. ‘It happened in Britain.’ Why? Firstly ‘I would stress build-up - the accumulation of knowledge and know-how; and breakthrough.’⁵² Islamic and Chinese civilizations made improvements but the process came to an end, whereas ‘we have continuing accumulation.’ However, that was not always the case. The West certainly fell back in the early Middle Ages (the Dark Ages) after the achievements of classical Mediterranean society. It is true that more recently it has experienced a growing autonomy of intellectual enquiry, the creation of a language of proof, the utilization of research and increased speed of communication. Nevertheless, in the nature of the hard sciences, these changes that took place, going back in the case of proof to Aristotle and even further to the ancient Near East, were not products of the Western European (let alone British) psyche alone. Self-congratulation on the wider front is out of place. In any case may we not lose that lead (again) to the East? Indeed have we not in Britain (and possibly the West) already done so in some technological spheres, although speed of communication and the further advance of technology, science and knowledge generally may have reduced the chances of a total change of direction? Not our psyche, not our culture, but world culture.

At the time of the Renaissance, European science thrived on institutionalization, on the formation of academies - the first in Rome in 1603. In publications, ‘nothing like these arrangements and facilities for propagation was to be found outside Europe.’⁵³Certainly Europe made an important contribution, especially with the adoption of printing adapted to movable alphabetic type. But the East did the basic work in some of these fields, of which printing was one and paper another, and it is an exaggeration to say they experienced ‘nothing like’ these developments, if one looks, for example, at the encyclopaedias of the Sung period in China or the much larger libraries of Islam, using paper instead of imported papyrus or parchment (local skins). Institutions of higher learning developed not only in Europe but in the madrasahs of Islam and similar schools in other written cultures. To this important question we return later, but it is a great mistake to project the undoubted strengths, and indeed superiority, of European knowledge systems, post-Gutenberg, back into the more distant past, in terms of the interrelated spheres either of education or of book production.

Europe had a certain advantage regarding industrialization. As we have seen, Landes finds that advantage as lying more specifically with England and not only in scientific knowledge. The ‘first industrial nation’ ‘trained a factory labour force and accumulated capital as it went.’ Its industry ‘diffused’ elsewhere, through spies, emigrants and learners. But he writes as if it was the first time such diffusion had happened in world history, when it had after all been the same story with printing and before that with Italian textile machinery, and with silk and cotton themselves. Indeed ‘diffusion’ tends to take place wherever an individual or group has achieved some breakthrough, some advantage in knowledge or action. Obviously the inventor or ‘improver’ often tried to prevent others gaining the knowledge that gave him a competitive advantage. But in the long term he could not succeed; no group, no country, no culture, is an island.

Landes becomes hyperbolic on this subject of British advantage so that his argument often runs away with him. By the eighteenth century, he maintains, Britain was well ahead - in cottage manufacture (putting-out), the seedbed of growth, in the use of fossil fuel, in the technology of those crucial branches that would lie at the core of the Industrial Revolution: textiles, iron, energy and power. Then there was the efficiency of Britain’s commercial agriculture and transport. Landes’s comment on the French Revolution is that it ‘brought political turmoil, interrupted communications and imposed a time-out’⁵⁴ while England got on with the job. That is not how Wordsworth and many of his contemporaries saw it; French ‘political turmoil’ changed the world. More specifically, the whole industrialization of food owes much to French inventiveness in this period.⁵⁵

These British advantages (those that existed) were a recent development. Commercial agriculture had been more ‘advanced’ in Holland and Italy, from which two countries England learnt a lot.⁵⁶ Textile production was certainly more developed on the continent until the eighteenth century, and the production of silk, an important leader in this field, was more complex in Andalusia, in Italy (Lucca and Bologna) and in France (Lyons); from these countries England greatly profited. And ‘improvers’ in these spheres were yet more widespread and existed in many other places, including China, where agriculture and for a time textile production had been more advanced than in the West.⁵⁷Nevertheless, Landes sees ‘the early technological superiority’ in England in general terms as ‘the result of work, ingenuity, imagination, and enterprise’.⁵⁸ In England and not elsewhere? Was the earlier supremacy of Italy, or of the Arab world, or even of China, not due to similar factors? Were these ‘non-material values [‘culture’] and institutions’ absent in other countries? Did only Britain possess the attributes leading to modernity? Britain was, he claims, nearest to the ideal case of a social system, which turns out to resemble closely the contemporary United States of America. Once again Landes goes on about his ideal society in a hyperbolic vein: ‘This society would value new as against old, youth as against experience, changes and risk as against safety. It would not be a society of equal shares’⁵⁹ - which sounds rather like the USSR. However, it is not surprising to find him concluding that ‘the first industrial nation came closest to this new kind of social order’,⁶⁰ soon to be followed by America.

It was not only the Industrial Revolution that gave Europe the advantage. Landes sees the major change as coming much earlier in the period 1000-1500 CE, based on the medieval economic revolution in agriculture and energy. How far, he asks, should we push back ‘the origins of English social precocity’?⁶¹ England sometimes stands for Britain. Here he goes back to its ‘culture’. Following Macfarlane, he discerns the roots of individualism sprouting there in the Middle Ages and attributes much to the Magna Carta of 1215, which gave political and civil freedom first to the nobles, after which these benefits were extended to the common folk, although that took many centuries. Compared to inhabitants on the continent, ‘Englishmen were free and fortunate’,⁶²perhaps eventually; Landes sees England as one of the first nation-states, founded well before the Industrial Revolution and of course before the Italian Renaissance, and one whose freedom he finds so different from ‘the dumb submission of the Asian ryot’.⁶³Has he not heard of subaltern studies, of the resistance of dalits, of the activities of Chinese bandits on the water margins, and of the many more organized rebellions in those parts, including that of Islam? Were they more submissive than the European peasantry of feudal times? That would be an impossible judgement to make. Certainly there was no question of ‘dumb submission’.

Fortunate they were as well as free because, according to Sir John Fortescue in the 1470s, Britain’s neighbours drank water instead of beer, wore no wool and ate brown bread. What then had happened to the wine of France (not to speak of the beer of Germany), to the wool industry of the north, to the silks of the south or to the abundance of wheat (not oats or rye) in that region? The comparison is not to be taken as anything but an ethnocentric declaration that neglects such preferences as those for rye bread (found even in American sandwich bars).

Following the work of historical demographers, mobility is seen as another of the attributes of the Western European family, specifically with the English and their high proportion of in-living servants who necessarily had to move from a different establishment. Of course, all service, whether in-living or on a daily basis, involves mobility, involves working in other people’s houses, on their farms or in their workshops. But there was a considerable degree of mobility (transhumance) in other pastoral and mountain communities, in Europe and elsewhere, and it is perhaps no accident that the Basques (like the Scots) were great travellers or that the colporteurs of Oisans came from a mountain village in the Alps.⁶⁴ Even farmers in the Lot and Aveyron drove their cattle to the high hill pastures of Aubrac for several months in the summer, while many peasants from the Rouergue left for Languedoc to take part in the grape and olive harvests in the Mediterranean areas.⁶⁵ The farming of cereals is less encouraging of mobility, but, with plough cultivation, animals are required, and mixed farming breeds other animals for food as well as traction. And animals necessarily involve a degree of movement. So there are few communities that were completely sedentary in a static sense. Mobility was certainly not the sole prerogative of the English. Braudel has maintained that mountain territories provided emigrants in larger numbers. The terrain allowed less room for demographic expansion, the seasonal variations were more extreme, living conditions were rougher. Many emigrated, even today, as Albania has shown; in earlier times, as Braudel insisted, they often became soldiers, as with the Swiss Guard at the Vatican or the Highland mercenaries in the Wars of Religion.

Landes’s Europhile, indeed Anglophile, prejudices invade all spheres. In discussing the prevalence of AIDS in Africa, ‘originally overwhelmingly in heterosexual contacts’ and affecting men and women equally, he mentions the suggested causes as being ‘widespread and expected male promiscuity, recourse to anal sex as a technique of birth control, and the persistent wound of female circumcision... . , intended as a deterrent to sexual pleasure and appetite.’⁶⁶ Where did these suggestions come from? There is no evidence of greater male promiscuity in black Africa and certainly not for greater anal intercourse. It is true that a recurrent accusation of Renaissance Europeans was that Moors and Turks engaged in ‘unnatural vices’. However, these were condemned in the Qur’an as energetically as in the Bible and, while open homo-erotic relationships were more common among the Moors and Turks, there is no satisfactory evidence that sodomy was of greater occurrence. And however this may have been for Mediterranean societies, there is even less for those south of the Sahara. It was a denigrating accusation made by Europeans wishing to stress their (questionable) moral superiority.⁶⁷

For Africa and the Near East, we may well ask, what does male promiscuity mean in a polygynous society, which on the contrary may make it possible to confine sex to marriage to a greater extent than in the case of European monogamy? As for anal sex as a technique of birth control, that is pre-suming Africans wished to control births and that if they did they had no other means. And while it is possibly true that cliterodectomy limits sexual pleasure for some, I know of no evidence that it was intended to do so any more than was male circumcision, also a European and Mediterranean practice, but which does not rate a mention. Indeed, in my experience, cliterodectomy was often ‘intended’ to promote childbirth and motherhood. In any case, what has circumcision to do with AIDS? As in so many other contexts, Landes is assiduously searching for ways in which Europe and European practices triumphed in a struggle for existence that left them on top. But that was not always the case; social evolution works in quite a different manner from ‘natural’ selection and has been characterized by many changes in who takes the lead in human development at any specific juncture. Clearly Africa did so at the beginning, when it provided a favourable climate for man’s early development as well as for his burgeoning work ethic.

That ethic counters Landes’s claim about the advantages of ‘work in a cool climate’. From the standpoint of geography, he argues, ‘The unevenness of nature shows in the contrast between this unhappy picture [in the tropics and in dry lands] and the far more favorable conditions in temperate zones; and within these, in Europe above all; and within Europe, in western Europe first and foremost.’⁶⁸ For him even the great advances of the Bronze Age in the dry lands of the ancient Near East apparently count for little or nothing. The tropical climate promoted many early developments of mankind, not only in early Africa but later in the Neolithic agricultural revolution and after. The tropics and the dryer regions made the major contribution to the repertoire of cultivated crops in the Neolithic era when agriculture was first developed, and it was the drier regions of the ancient Near East, of Egypt, of north India and of north China that led the way in the immensely important urban revolution of the Bronze Age and saw the invention of writing, the wheel and so much else on which we daily depend. Where were the colder climes, regarded as so stimulating for the work ethic, when all this happened? In savagery? The preferences of his friend the Bangladeshi diplomat for cooler conditions, of which Landes makes so much,⁶⁹ have little to say for world history over the long run.

As we have seen, Landes’s book takes up many of the extreme positions of Jones in The European Miracle, although Jones later qualifies some of these in a subsequent volume, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History,— which dismisses cultural factors and concentrates on the economic and the environmental; what was different about Europe was recurrent growth. Landes’s earlier book, however, was strongly attached to the notion of Europeanness, defined in contrast to the qualities of Asians and Africans; the latter are seen as servile (subject to despotic rule), lazy and uncreative,— where ‘copulation was preferred over commodities’.⁷² These extraordinary statements owe a lot to the Malthusian tradition and the idea of the absence of (rational) restraint, which I discuss in chapter 4. But Europeanness also involves great environmental benefits (including rain-fed agriculture), a unique urge to explore and discover, a market economy adapted to the rise of capitalism, and a propensity for freedom-loving democracy as opposed to despotism. The factors of individualism, rationality, the nuclear family, are all aspects of Europeanness as distinct from what exists in less favoured parts of the world. Landes regards the superiority of Europe as not only lying in the economy, in learning and in climate; that continent is also said to have unique political advantages. In characteristic Eurocentric fashion, he opposes democratic Europe to the despotic ‘Orient’, an invidious distinction that appears in the European literature as early as the Greeks, who were ‘democratic’, except for slaves, and the Persians, who were ‘despotic’, except for forms of representation, and who also promoted private property as opposed to those states in which ‘ruler owns all’,⁷³ a system said to characterize not only the Near East, India and China, but also those medieval invaders from Scandinavia (the Normans), the Asiatic Hungarians and the Muslims. This contrast is far too crude both at the political level and at that of land tenure. There have been plenty of ‘democratic’ regimes in the East. Oppenheim- reports ‘republican’ institutions in Mesopotamia; Thappar⁷⁵ does the same for ancient India. Every ‘despotic’ regime has some consultative procedures, every democratic one some authoritarian ones. The stark opposition is equally unacceptable in terms of land tenure, where we are always dealing with a ‘hierarchy of estates’, as Henry Maine⁷⁶ insisted. Some rights may be vested in the ruler, others in the local landowner, others in the resident or cultivator. That is as true today as it was in the medieval period. Indeed for the medieval period in Kerala, south India, a contrast has been drawn between the high concentration of local rights in that region as compared with European landholding.⁷⁷ Clearly, in every state system, some rights must rest with the sovereign power and some with the user of the land; a division is criti-cal and universal, though the balance differs.

In political terms European exceptionalism (discussed in chapter 3) is seen to be based on the democratic commune (following the thesis of Pirenne and others) which guaranteed the law and opportunities for commercial enterprise. Landes claims those features were not to be found elsewhere, and in a footnote⁷⁸ dismisses Rowe’s analysis of Hankow⁷⁹ and Perdue’s of Hunan,⁸⁰ which made a case for such features to be found in the Asiatic city (which had earlier been denied by Weber). That dismissal simply will not do, for the failure to recognize the commercial character of the Asiatic city overlooks the very extensive economic achievement of the Chinese, Indians and others. On the one hand Landes does recognize that Chinese agriculture was the most successful in the world, above all in encouraging the reproduction of humankind, although he tends to reverse the causal sequence in favour of a Malthusian sequence, early marriage leading to masses of children, leading to the need for food. He says nothing of their trade, to Europe and America, for example. And he sees the Chinese bureaucracy (an institution praised by Max Weber as a key to modernization) as an aspect of despotic rule, in which all property was owned by the elite. He asks, rhetorically, ‘what did ordinary people exist for, except to enhance the pleasure of their rulers?’⁸¹ And he continues: ‘Certainly not to indulge a will of their own.’ The unsurprising but quite mistaken conclusion is that, ‘in these circumstances, the very notion of economic development was a Western invention.’⁸² ‘Aristocratic (despotic) empires ... did not think in terms of gains in productivity.’ However, in China it was partly the government that promoted the double cropping of rice.⁸³

The European commune with its supposedly unique virtues is attributed to the competitive contest for power among independent societies, providing a government by merchants with ‘exceptional civil power including its ability to confer social status and political rights’, which was ‘crucial’ to business and to freedom from interference. Surely all governments could be said to confer social status and political rights, though the latter will differ depending on the type of governance. In fact communes were never altogether free from interference from governments and outside forces, and their freedom (in a ‘feudal’ society) was made more precarious by the constant competition between states which Landes praises (and which is presumably the model for the free market) but which resulted in many wasteful wars of conquest and destruction. In Europe war raged frequently until the middle of the twentieth century (though often exported to the ‘colonies’ in the latter years) and rages again even today; world wars were European inventions which balanced the vaunted advantages of fragmentation. In conclusion, whatever differences existed between cities in the East and the West were shaded and never of the absolute kind that Landes, Weber and other Europeanists suggest.

The idea that because the Chinese defined themselves and their empire as lying at the centre of the world, with everywhere else lost in barbarian darkness, meant they had ‘no other place to go’,⁸⁴ were not interested in expansion, is highly questionable. In the first place most people have in the past defined themselves in similar terms, and, if that had meant a reluctance to travel among ‘barbarians’, America would never have been colonized. In any case there was certainly a Chinese expansion, not only within and around its borders but into Indonesia and Indo-China, and later much further afield, despite the restrictions that were imposed over this huge country from time to time. And size was important, since it provided many resources and a large potential market; colonization became of less significance than to smaller states.

Landes sees these non-European empires in contrast to the European as characterized by brittleness. But what about the Roman Empire and all the later colonial ones - Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, British, not to speak of those of Hitler and Mussolini. Europe had no unique safety valve to protect its many empires. Nor were her exploiters less exploitative, in the Americas, for example. The development of industrial capitalism was significantly assisted not only by ‘Protestant savings’ but by the not inconsiderable amounts coming from ‘booty production’, from the exploitation of

American silver, from the acquisition of local treasures and from the sale and labour of African slaves.⁸⁵

Landes considers the republican ideal (here he is a good American) as being established in the classical world and as dying hard, always waiting in the shadows (of which there were many) to be revived. With the fall of the republic came the collapse of property rights, which owed their later revival to the renewal of the classical legacy, to nomadic German custom and to the so-called Judaeo-Christian tradition.⁸⁶ Then why does not the same apply to other nomads in the north of China, to the classical legacy in the Near East and Central Asia, and to the Muslim branch of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (with very similar legal systems) throughout Asia?⁸⁷ Eurocentrism can hardly provide a clearer example of selective attribution than this. Republicanism is presumably selected as being more ‘democratic’, as allowing merchants more scope and as encouraging entrepreneurship. But Britain was not a republic during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, although personal rule was certainly modified by constitutional arrangements. In any case ‘republican’ institutions existed in parts of India, China and the Near East, while historical and sociological analyses show that despotism was rarely if ever of the extreme kind envisaged by Marx, Wittfogel, Landes and other European authors; men and women elsewhere succeeded in having something to say in the running of their lives, especially if they were merchants.

Alternative assumptions, arising from a self-congratulatory vision based on an indisputable series of recent achievements, make nonsense not only of the past but of the present too. For example, there was no European monopoly of inventiveness, seen as related to these property rights and to competition, in earlier times, as Needham’s magisterial study of Chinese science and technology clearly establishes, although it is true that at a certain point in time (probably later than Landes suggests) the tempo of European invention became more rapid (as a result of the scientific and then the Industrial Revolution) than had previously been the case.

Landes is aware of the objection that Europe too has experienced the emergence of despotisms (and of kingdoms as well!); indeed, they ‘abounded’ but were mitigated ‘by law, by territorial partition and ... by the division of power between the centre (the crown) and local seigniorial authority’,⁸⁸ a situation that he sees as giving rise to competition. In other words even European despotism (and dictatorship) were to be distinguished in a general way from all others. However, the idea that law was to be found in Europe and not elsewhere is untenable; even on a strict definition of the concept, codes existed under Hammurabi and Asoka and in other empires. So too conflicts between the centre and the periphery were intrinsic to all centralized polities; they were especially strong under feudalism, which was more characteristic of the West than the East, but with the coming of feudalism went the decline of the more complex classical ‘civilization’ and the accompanying culture of cities. The advantages and disadvantages of smaller political units have been much debated. As I have argued, competition also encourages warfare and can therefore clearly be destructive as well as constructive; the larger markets of China (as with the USA or the EU) had many advantages over smaller units in the development of manufactures and of internal trade generally. But all Landes’s assumptions privilege the direction of European advantage to the detriment of others.

Following the same line of argument, the fall of Rome is seen as ‘Europe’s great good fortune’;⁸⁹ the consequent fragmentation is held to have placed a brake on centralized political oppression. Landes also sees power in Europe as being restricted by the division between church and state. Of the religious claims to power or the control of power, Landes writes, ‘All of this made Europe very different from civilizations around.’ Contrary to Europe, in Islam ‘religion was in principle supreme’, with government being that of holy men,⁹⁰ whereas Christianity recognized a split between the secular and the religious. That recognition meant that ‘Europe was spared the thought control that proved a curse in Islam.’⁹¹ In China, which was religiously freer, the mandarinate and the imperial court played a similar role, stifling innovation and producing ‘a centrally and intellectually homeostatic society’.⁹² By contrast the Judaeo-Christian tradition (interpreted as excluding Islam) came to the aid of Europe, though no consideration is given to the possibility that the relative ‘backwardness’ of that continent in the early Middle Ages could be related to the dominance of the Christian church. In fact there was extensive ‘thought control’ in medieval Europe and later where education was under ecclesiastical dominance, and on the other hand there were also enormous innovations elsewhere, in ‘homeostatic’ China, for example.

In furtherance of this same line of thinking Landes sees the idea of property rights as going ‘back to biblical times’ and as transmitted by Christian teaching, once again the Judaeo-Christian tradition (excluding Islam). The notion that property concepts were radically different from those of the surrounding kingdoms⁹³ and hence paved the way for Europe and civil society is quite unsustainable. What are all those written tablets in Mesopotamia about if not property? Property rights in Judaic times were clearly related to those of Near Eastern contemporaries and predecessors, including those Persians he regards as being the epitome of Asiatic despotism. The tablets of Assyria and Sumeria are replete with transactions of rights in goods and land, despite the ‘hydraulic’ (read ‘despotic’) nature of their societies.

Finally Landes has a simplistic but widespread view of development. ‘Every country has its own resources and capabilities, and if it permits reason and the market to rule, its economic development will follow.’⁹⁴ In Europe each ‘developed its own path to modernity’ - in accordance with reason and the market. It is not too difficult to see what he means by the market, even if in a substantive sense it is often regulated by the political authorities. But what is meant by reason? Perhaps economics without culture? But that situation is chimeral; one is always forced to take account of socio-cultural factors that are bound to impinge upon the economy as well as upon the operation of rationality (always subject to cultural considerations), since all are part of the same social system.

As with other attempts to introduce culture as a variable, the analysis gets obscured by generalities. Culture is not separable from economics, which is part of it and its ration-ality. To make any progress with the great questions that Landes raises we need to do two things: firstly to set aside as far as possible Eurocentric prejudices (where, in the extreme case, our culture is something others cannot by definition attain) and treat other socio-cultural variables in as precise terms as we would economic ones; and secondly to avoid using the concept of culture as a way of indicating deep-rooted thoughts and practices, especially those that promote the West at the expense of the Rest. The possible variables in this process have to be considered systematically and comparatively, and not ego- or Eurocentrically.

Is there then any use in the concept of culture for social and economic historians? Very little, I would suggest, if it is simply employed as a residual category, a blanket term for the non-economic aspects of social life. Clearly we need to consider those aspects, which may be highly relevant to economic action, including economic rationality and performance, as well as (depending on context and problem) the contribution of ‘high’ culture and of the more personal sources of information to which some ‘cultural historians’ have drawn attention. But we need to do so in terms not of a global concept of culture but of the consideration of particular socio-cultural factors, seen as endogenous to the system. In any sociological or anthropological analysis, the economy is part of the social system, part of culture. As a sub-system it has its own logic, which is the domain of economists. And it is affected by factors that can be analytically located in different sub-systems - for example, the increase in the demand for silk with the shift from sumptuary consumption to fashion, la mode. But to see the economic as opposed to the social, to the cultural, is simply a piece of misplaced drawing of academic boundaries.

In a recent essay entitled ‘Theory in anthropology: on the demise of the concept of culture’, Yengoyan claims that ‘culture is the subject matter of anthropology’;⁹⁵ indeed, for him, it is what holds its diverse fields together. He admits this is not true of ‘British anthropology’, nor is it the case in most of Europe. Some see it as ‘a guiding yet vague principle’, others as a fiction, yet others as a spurious issue. Yengoyan himself sees the concept as threatened on the one hand by ‘positivistic scientism combined with behaviourism’, involving a move from ‘the concept of culture as an explanatory framework’ to a concern with ‘cultural specifics’; on the other hand it is threatened by the notion of ideology as distinct from culture (‘axioms ... we do not question’). Culture, however, is a concept which, like others, we certainly have to question as an explanatory variable and, considering the use of it as a residual category by some social scientists - especially economists and including Landes - it seems preferable to take a hard analytical look at the situation and to opt for ‘cultural specifics’. Whether inclusive or residual, the general concept does not take the reader very far.

The concept of culture is not the main problem with Landes’s analysis but it is relevant. It encourages him to look holistically at the European, or often the English, situation as contributing, in all its aspects, to their achievements, and hence to play down those of others; the advantage covered the whole gamut of socio-cultural activities, beginning as far back as 1000 CE and drawing upon the Judaeo-Christian tradition well before that.

Notes

1 White 1982: 29.

2 White 1982: 82.

3 Croot and Parker 1985: 80.

4 Cooper 1985: 138ff.

5 Brenner, in Aston and Philpin 1985.

6 Bois 1984.

7 E.g. Pirenne 1969.

8 Sweezy et al. 1976: 18.

9 Merrington 1976: 172.

10 Mokyr 1990.

11 Mokyr 1990: vii.

12 Mokyr 1990: 31.

13 Mokyr 1990: 44.

14 Mokyr 1990: 42.

15 Mokyr 1990: 55.

16 Needham 1970: 58.

17 Mokyr 1990: 58.

18 Pacey 1990: 8.

19 Pacey 1990: 18.

20 Landes 1998.

21 See, for example, R. T Smith 1988: 24.

22 For example, Scribner, in Hsia and Scribner 1997.

23 Landes 1998: 516.

24 Landes 1998: 517.

25 Landes 1998: 518.

26 Landes 1998: 437.

27 Landes 1998: 447.

28 Landes 1998: 458.

29 Landes 1998: 410.

30 Landes 1998: 410.

31 Landes 1998: 411.

32 Landes 1998: 405.

33 Muldrew 1993: 183.

34 Rothschild 2001.

35 Landes 1998: 447.

36 Landes 1998: 469.

37 Landes 1998: 351.

38 McCormick 2001: 726.

39 Dasgupta 1999: 373.

40 Dasgupta 1999: 375.

41 Dasgupta 1999: 379.

42 White 1959: 8.

43 Renfrew 1972: 4.

44 Eisenstein 1979.

45 Goody 2003a; Bloom 2001.

46 Landes 1998: xx.

47 Lee and Wang 1999.

48 Goody 1976: 86ff.

49 Reher 2001.

50 Landes 1998: xxi.

51 Fortune 1857; Goody 1982: 105ff.

52 Landes 1998: 200.

53 Landes 1998: 205.

54 Landes 1998: 235.

55 Goody 1982: 157ff.

56 Ambrosoli 1997.

57 Elvin 1973.

58 Landes 1998: 215.

59 Landes 1998: 218.

60 Landes 1998: 219.

61 Landes 1998: 219.

62 Landes 1998: 220.

63 Landes 1998: 220.

64 Fontaine 1984.

65 Whittaker and Goody 2001.

66 Landes 1998: 12.

67 Matar 1999.

68 Landes 1998: 17.

69 Landes 1998: 15.

70 Jones 1988.

71 Landes 1998: 161-7, 231.

72 Landes 1998: 15.

73 Landes 1998: 31.

74 Oppenheim 1964.

75 Thappar 1966.

76 Maine 1861.

77 Matthews 1996.

78 Landes 1998: 528.

79 Rowe 1984.

80 Perdue 1987.

81 Landes 1998: 32.

82 Landes 1998: 32.

83 Bray 1984.

84 Landes 1998: 36.

85 See, for example, Frank 1998, who takes a very different line from Landes, as do a number of the New World historians, for example, Pomeranz 2000 and Blaut 2000.

86 Landes 1998: 33.

87 Mundy 1988.

88 Landes 1998: 36.

89 Landes 1998: 3.

90 Landes 1998	38.
91 Landes 1998	38.
92 Landes 1998	38.
93 Landes 1998	34.
94 Landes 1998	236.
95 Yengoyan 1986: 373

The Sixteenth Century

While a number of authors have seen European advantage as being rooted in the very soil and culture of that continent, others have taken a more specifically historical approach and linked its later achievements to transforming events that took place there and nowhere else. The transforming events are often characterized as ‘revolutions’ of one kind or another. We have already come across Lynn White’s notion of revolutionary changes in European, in particular English, agriculture. Lane¹ has spoken of a ‘Nautical Revolution’ and then the Commercial Revolution in relation to Venice in the late Middle Ages, and it is certainly true that advances in ship-building and navigation were important in the ‘Age of Exploration’, enabling sailors to open up the sea-routes to the Americas and later to India and the East, as has been chronicled by many authors but in particular by Cipolla in Guns and Sails.² The gun was equally important in overseas conquests, either as cannon mounted on caravels or as hand-guns held by the invaders. But along with the essential compass, gunpowder was in fact one of the imports into Europe from the East, although the gun was certainly developed and the compass improved in the West. In this way the East contributed to the expansion of the West and to its own undoing.

Others look for more general factors from the same period, but in commerce rather than in the spiritual domain chosen by Max Weber. The question raised by Lis and Soly in their book Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe is framed within the aims of the series, edited by G. Parker, on ‘why a total social transformation took place in Europe - and nowhere else - in the four or five centuries before 1850.’³ They concentrate on ‘the long sixteenth century’, which witnessed the triumph of commercial capitalism, and on the century after 1750, characterized by ‘the gradual but irresistible growth of industrial capital’. While we can agree with the uniqueness of the latter, there must be grave doubts about that of the former, even though it has proven a theoretical convenience for many to assume that the Industrial Revolution must have had deep roots in European society.

When historians of Europe such as Lis and Soly break down capitalism into commercial and industrial, they see the latter as taking place in the century after 1750 but the former transformation occurring in the long sixteenth century. That was Marx’s

view, but clearly not that of Pirenne and others, some of whom have seen the take-off as early as the Carolingian period. If we were not held in check by later European history, we might view such activity as occurring earlier in the Roman period, which saw the institutionalization of banking and of trading systems. These were systems not unlike those later discussed by de Roover as emerging in medieval Europe, and also as occurring, not only throughout the Mediterranean, as in Goitein’s detailed account of medieval Cairo, but elsewhere too. Mercantile ‘capitalism’ was never confined to the West but flourished equally in the East.⁴

Various events that occurred during this period have been considered to have upset the earlier balance between East and West, giving the advantage to the latter. Firstly there was the Renaissance itself, the renewal of learning, leading particularly to a measure of secularization and to the scientific revolution. Secondly there was the Reformation of the established religion which, according to Weber and others, gave a decisive boost to ‘the spirit of capitalism’. Thirdly, there was the ‘expansion of Europe’, which promoted mercantile capitalism in the West, increased the volume of seaborne trade through its mastery of ‘guns and sails’, and led to the acquisition of precious metals from the Americas which were used to finance largely luxury imports from the East, as well as sugar, cotton, tobacco and, later, food from the Americas.

The spokesmen for the uniqueness of the scientific revolution in the West now have to take into account the publication of the magisterial work by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (1954-), which has helped to put European inventiveness in a wider perspective. The author himself tried to account for some of the advances in Europe after the sixteenth century by attributing these to the closer collaboration that took place between scientists and craftsmen, which was clearly a more satisfactory and concrete way of approaching the problem than appealing to doubtful variables such as inventiveness. He remarked that, in early maritime contacts between Europe and Asia, ‘our forefathers were quite sure who the “heathen” were; today we suspect these were not the less civilized of the two.’⁵ Like other writers, sociologists and historians have tried to link scientific advance to the advent of Protestantism, but this controversy has not led to any definite conclusion.⁶ Nevertheless there was certainly a growth of knowledge following on the Renaissance, if only because the rebirth followed a death, or at least a period of stasis during which the progress of secular science had been partially impeded by the particular ideologies of the Catholic church concerning the Creation and the world in general. There was a return to the comparative intellectual freedom of secular learning under Greece and Rome; humanistic traditions increasingly modified religious ones. This opening, epitomized in the achievements and difficulties of Galileo and his observations, led to definite advances in knowledge. The initiation of the scientific revolution could be seen as a result of this freedom, the demand for wider education and more information combined with the great advantage of printing using an alphabetic script - that is, the mechanization of writing which meant that the gateways to knowledge began to be prised open.

The problem of ‘education’ is central. Schools in the sense we know them existed ever since the adoption of writing some 3000 years before the Common Era. Since much early writing was devoted to a religious understanding of the world, it was religious practitioners who were in general responsible for organizing the instruction and transmission of the written word, a central part of which was involved in the handing down of their holy texts that dominated much of the educational context. That restriction was not true, or certainly less so, in Greece and in China, but elsewhere the link between school and religion was very strong. In Judaism, the aim, unusually, was that all children should receive a school education, at least until the bar-mitzvah, and that was essentially directed towards strengthening the faith. The same direction was true of Islam, with a few exceptions, as during the Golden Age of Judaeo-Muslim culture in Andalusia. But essentially the religious component continued to be dominant in those forms of education virtually until today. In Christian Europe too it remained so effectively up to the Renaissance and the coming of ‘humanism’, a term that has also been used of the Golden Age of Andalusia, which similarly experienced an intellectual effervescence. Even the extension of education under Protestantism had distinctly religious aims.

Although schools were based on the written word, in some respects these religious traditions regarded the oral as having greater value. Islam had a saying, ‘De la bouche des maitres et non de leurs ecrits’⁷ - ‘from the mouths of the master and not from their writings’. However, what this meant in practice is that the written word was committed to memory so that it could then be repeated orally to show it was really known, properly internalized.

According to Zafrani,⁸ while Muslim education normally gave preference to religious knowledge, in Spain and the Maghrib first place was given to the secondary sciences, called speculative, and they therefore practised a certain ‘humanism’. That was evident in the parallel lives of Averroes (1126-1195) and Maimonides (1135-1204), both originally of Cordoba. The first was a grand qadi as well as being a philosopher, explaining Aristotle, and acting as royal doctor. Maimonides, his Jewish counterpart, filled the same three roles.

Schools were never totally confined to religious education. Some pupils were destined for administration, others to be merchants, activities that had their own demands. Moreover education always had a hierarchical division, for there was always more to learn about beyond the primary stages. In the West, Greek knowledge was so important precisely because it did go beyond the level of commenting on religious texts.

Institutions for dealing with advanced forms of knowledge existed, especially in the classical world. In Islam there were the madrasahs developed in Baghdad in the eleventh century, often with medical facilities attached, which spread to Muslim Spain in the thirteenth century, producing what has been called Europe’s first ‘university college’.⁹ Soon afterwards the first universities appeared in Christian Europe, in Bologna in 1115, and later in Paris, Padua, Oxford and Cambridge.

Higher education was based on books, which were in short supply in Europe compared with Islamic countries, where the early advent of cheap paper from China had made possible the huge libraries of the Near East and Cordoba, enormous compared with those in the rest of Europe. That was to change with the spread of paper technology to the north, beginning in the twelfth century in northern Spain, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth in Germany and England respectively, where it coincided with the development of printing with movable type and alphabetic writing. Printing itself had been developed in China since the sixth to ninth centuries.¹⁰ Knowledge systems could then make great steps forward, with the possibility of the rapid and inexpensive circulation of information.

In Christian Europe the revival of learning had already begun by the time of the discovery of America and the influx of bullion from the Spanish colonies, an event on which both Frank and Blaut place great emphasis for the growth of capitalism in Europe. What then did the Renaissance itself contribute to the European take-off? It meant above all a return to those ‘pagan’ cultures and a breach in the intellectual dominance of the Christian church which had already been weakening for some time. Forms incorporating other than Christian themes, especially classical ones, now became more acceptable in painting, in drama, in literature generally. A tradition of dissent, always present in subterranean ways, began to assert itself more openly, even in religion, where humanism was followed by the Reformation, the advent of Protestantism and a rejection of the authority of the papacy, and, with the Enlightenment, of the Book itself for an increasing number of people.

The importance of the Renaissance in European history cannot be doubted. Burckhardt saw it as the beginning of civilization, others as the onset of modernization. As its name implies, it was a rebirth, a rebirth of classical art and knowledge, but it was also the birth of a new art and knowledge. In Christian Europe there had been earlier rebirths from the tenth century, but this was the major breakthrough that established classical learning and went on to experience a take-off of knowledge, boosted by the developments in the fields of education and communication, in the mercantile economy, including the production of textiles, and later of industrial capitalism.

If there is a rebirth, there must (in the Van Genepian scheme for rites de passage) have earlier been a death. The death of course was of classical civilization, not simply politically under the impact of ‘feudalism’ (which could be viewed as arising from the breakdown of centralized government) but of the body of knowledge which it had accumulated. This was most marked perhaps in the abandonment of the tradition of Greek and Roman sculpture and painting, but also in the shift of knowledge from secular to sacred, in particular the sacred of the centralized Christian church constrained by its ecclesiastical canon.

The great German sociologist-historian Max Weber also looked at changes in the realm of ideas at that period, particularly those promoted by the Protestant Reformation, which he saw as being linked to the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’. His thesis has had a powerful influence on historians and social scientists alike, and has been taken up in a number of major works in cultural history, such as Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society, L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson and, in a less central way, I. P. Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Weber also made serious efforts to compare the situation in Western Europe with that in other major world religions,¹¹ in which he drew heavily on contemporary European scholarship on the East. However, his comparisons have turned out to be flawed, partly because of the deficiencies of his sources but more generally because they began by assuming the advantage of the European economy after the Renaissance, and the argument was always weighted in favour of its promotion by the Protestant religion. Subsequently many studies have appeared that have pointed to elements of the ‘Protestant ethic’ among Jains in India, who were great traders, and the Confucians in China, who were highly restrained in their behaviour and who constituted the literati and again sometimes adopted puritanical positions, together with the Wahabis of the Near East and North Africa, as well as others elsewhere following different creeds. Robert Bellah— has discussed in detail the functional equivalents of the Protestant ethic in Japan, but he did not appreciate how many equivalents were to be found around the globe. So the link of Protestantism to capitalism is no longer seen as either close or unique. In any case, to much of the ‘early capitalist’ activity, discussed by Sombart, the Catholics and Jews contributed significantly, in particular to Mediterranean trade and to the development of banking, double-entry book-keeping and other tools useful for the expansion of industry and commerce.

At least in some of his writing Karl Marx also looked back to the sixteenth century and saw the pre-eminence of mercantile capitalism in Europe as occurring in the period of European expansion. While there appears to have been little difference in trade and commerce between the East and the West before that time, Marx and the world-system theorists, including Wallerstein, see the gains from intercontinental trade and the colonization of the Americas as being crucial some three centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Marx put more emphasis on endogenous factors, the world-system theorists on exogenous ones - that is, on the input of America’s bullion into Europe. But if we take Marx’s theory of commodity production seriously, then it is clear capitalism could not emerge before ‘the stage of development’ involving the advent of ‘machino-facture’, of machine production under factory conditions with the worker becoming a ‘living appendage’, a member of the proletariat. Schumpeter’s views on capitalism were similar to those of Marx, but he tended to stress the role of the entrepreneur in capitalist activity.

Wallerstein argues for the continuity of a fully fledged capitalist, world ‘market’ system from the sixteenth century. He rejects the distinction between mercantile and industrial capital, which he regards as ‘unfortunate terminology’,¹³ and compares Europe and China regarding their readiness for capitalism in the sixteenth century. He is very sceptical about earlier economic or cultural differences, even ideological ones, and plays down the latter in several ways. For example, individualism also emerged in the late Ming in the doctrines of Wang Yang Ming, and Wallerstein quotes de Barry, who claims this doctrine constituted a ‘near-revolution in thought’. But it failed to develop further and was even used as ‘the weapon of the Confucian mandarins’;¹⁴ in other words, unlike the case in Europe, the ideology was directed against the bourgeoisie. The whole situation, he suggests, casts doubts ‘on the too simple correlation of the ideology of individualism and the rise of capitalism’ .—

Wallerstein concludes: ‘It is doubtful if there were any significant differences between Europe and China in the fifteenth century on certain base points: population, area, state of technology (both in agriculture and naval engineering).’ Differences could not be used to account for the rise of capitalism in the West. Moreover, differences in value systems seem grossly exaggerated, and he is sceptical about the role of religion more generally, and follows Braudel, who regarded it as the pretext, not the cause, of the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain and of the Huguenots from France. Religious enthusiasm is seen as rationalization of other forces,¹⁶ an approach that takes too little account of the actor’s point of view and of the deep seriousness with which such beliefs are held. Indeed, China was if anything better placed for the take-off in certain ways. But it was burdened by an imperial political sector, and by the ‘rationality’ of a value system that denied the state the leverage for change that European monarchs found in ‘the mysticality of feudal loyalties’.¹⁷ That is why Europe, ‘but not elsewhere’, was the setting ‘for the creation of a capitalist world-economy’.

The notion of their ‘rationality’ setting aside mystical attachments is original but seems questionable. As elsewhere ‘rationality’ co-existed with a multitude of mystical beliefs, in subordinate deities as well as in the emperor. In fact Wallerstein considers more differences than just that; he discusses Weber’s contrast between feudalism in the West and despotism in the East, as well as White’s claim of Europe’s more advanced medieval agriculture, Chaunu’s question of why there was no Chinese Christopher

Columbus,¹⁸ the fact of the Portuguese motivation and possibly of exploration, as well as the ‘violent, almost exponential’ growth of scientific advances after 1450 following Galileo and the Renaissance.¹⁹ In this he places too much emphasis on the expansion from Europe. What of earlier Asian explorers of the Silk Route, or those many voyagers who sailed between the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Gujerati and Kerala coasts, not to speak of those who ventured further afield to China and the Spice Islands, as many enterprising Muslim traders did in previous centuries. Above all there were the renowned voyages of Zheng He, himself a Muslim, probably of merchant origin, who sailed westwards from China, through the Malacca Straits, to Sri Lanka and then across to Africa. He was surely the Chinese Columbus.

In looking at the timing of the European overseas voyages, Wallerstein follows Marx in seeing the capitalist system as deriving from the creation in the sixteenth century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market.²⁰ That is the point at which capitalism became the dominant mode of production. But, as Braudel has remarked, there was more than one form of capitalism, and some have seen that form of production as emerging only with the Industrial Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century - and yet others as going back to the early Near East. The sixteenth century corresponds to the European penetration of world markets, with the expansion of Europe, with its colonization and with the advent of American bullion, which is treated more fully in the discussion of Andre Gunder Frank in the next chapter. Certainly that expansion was very important, so too were the Renaissances, but did this period really transform the economy or social life in the ways suggested by the discussion of the growth of capitalism, of industrialization, of modernization? Did it create a new world system?

It could well be argued that India and China had engaged, long before, in at least an Asian world system. While trade with the West declined after the fall of the Roman Empire, merchants continued to travel between India and China, often accompanied by Buddhist monks. Chinese coins and Tang and Song porcelain and stoneware are distributed widely in the region; Indian textiles and other products were traded in SouthEast Asia as well as in East Africa. Arab and Persian communities were established, even along the coast of China. The maritime empire of Srivijaya in Sumatra arose in the seventh century. In Fukien, China itself built ocean-going ships and gradually replaced the Arabs as the chief carriers of the trade in the China Sea and Indian Ocean. The Eastern seas were vibrant with commerce and with merchants. The Europeans were largely strangers to this trade until the sea-route was opened and they became part of this wider network.

It was clearly not only a question of the geographical expansion of the West, important as that was. Wallerstein speaks of the demographic growth, the increased agricultural production and the ‘first industrial revolution’. It was Europe that created ‘a new form of surplus appropriation, a capitalist world-economy’,²¹ which it did as the result of the way the feudal economy contracted at three levels, geography, commerce and demography, in the period 1300-1450, thereby producing a crisis. In explaining the origin of the crisis Wallerstein sees this development as ‘a conjuncture of secular trends, an immediate cyclical crisis, and climatological decline’, a conjuncture that proceeded and made possible ‘the enormity of the social change’. The new mode of ‘the appropriation of surplus was based on more efficient and expanded productivity (first in agriculture and later in industry)’ .—

Wallerstein firmly promotes Europe’s firsts, but he is not primarily concerned with industrialization so much as with ‘a new form of surplus appropriation’, which he calls capitalism. While that form was undoubtedly important in the Industrial Revolution in England, was it really all that new or essential? Family and other groups (firms) had operated in this way from earlier times, in Assyria, for example, or in the form of the Mediterranean commenda which preceded the joint stock companies so significant in the overseas commerce of Holland and Britain. In industry and manufacture, the state too had played an early role in Mughal India as in China, as it was later to do in Japan and the USSR. So this form of economic activity, perhaps more widely defined, was neither new nor essential. It did of course become much more widespread with the Industrial Revolution and with the extension of commerce that preceded it. But economically the distinct qualitative difference between East and West came only with industrialization.

A similar Eurocentric approach is found in the two recent discussions of the emergence of a new ‘economic culture’ on the one hand²³ and ‘the first modern economy’ on the other.²⁴ In his recent account of the ‘economy of obligation’ Muldrew begins with Weber and goes on to argue for the importance of the ‘economy of reputation’ and ‘the culture of credit’,²⁵ in which there was a ‘reordering of notions of community relations towards a highly mobile and circulating language of judgement.’ And the origin of this culture began in about the mid-sixteenth century and was a result of rapid economic change combined with the spread of classical writings on economic ethics. I would argue that the rapid economic change was a matter of degree rather than of the kind to create a new ‘culture’ of credit. Indeed credit existed as long as exchange transactions, and was given a boost by paper money in China and bills of exchange in India and elsewhere. Once again a European historian is writing about ‘origins’ without an adequate explanation of theoretical practice or the empirical data from other civilizations. While such a ‘culture’ may have come into being for the first time in sixteenth-century Europe, which I doubt, that would only indicate the backwardness of that continent relative to the rest of Eurasia.

It is a similar story with de Vries and van der Woude’s The First Modern Economy,— which discusses only Dutch material between 1500 and 1815, just as Muldrew confines himself to sixteenth-century England. It is true that the economy of Holland was more important than that of Britain in this period; it has been seen as the ‘top performer’ before the Napoleonic wars, although writers such as Braudel and Hobsbawm have seen it as locked in the past. Nevertheless, to call it the first ‘modern’ economy without examining any other is to fall into the usual ambiguity of discussions of modernity that I discussed in the opening section; without any explicit definition, the usage is empty. North and Thomas see it in more precise terms as the first country to achieve sustained economic growth, but once again the definition is so narrow as to render the statement of little value. Certainly the tempo of growth increased over time, but not in a way that ‘the first’ can be reasonably isolated.

What the Eurocentric historians do not allow for is the occurrence of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ led by merchants and by ‘professionals’ (specialists whose work depends on written procedures, such as lawyers, doctors, teachers) in other parts of the world that had seen a mercantile expansion. Of China we will speak later. But Goitein, the great historian of the medieval Jewish communities of the Geniza in the Cairo of the eighth and ninth centuries, writes of a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was marked by the presence of the scholar-merchant, who sought both knowledge and fortune, spreading down both lines of communication, between North and South and between East and West. The intellectual aspects had already been present in the Near East when the Arabs and Jews discovered Greek learning, long before the Western Renaissance. Later, bourgeois revolution also took place in Islam and, suggests Zafrani, was marked by the emergence of a completely new society, very different from medieval Christian Europe. In this context Jews became major figures in public life, in administration, in commerce, in manufacture, in finance and in the liberal professions. Disposing of leisure and resources, they claimed a higher spiritual life, like Muslims and Christians of the same rank, in knowledge, in poetry and in artistic activities. There was a period of ‘effervescence intellectuelle’ of Jewish life in Cordoba and Granada in the tenth century.²⁷ There was also the extraordinary birth of activity following the reconquest of Toledo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under the reigns of Alfonso VII and Alfonso IX, when the school of translators, largely Jewish, was created, translating works of philosophy, medicine, astronomy and mathematics from Arabic into Latin, and then into vernacular languages, making them available to the rest of Europe. To concentrate on these developments only in the Western European case is a grave error.

Notes

1 Lane 1973.

2 Cipolla 1965.

3 Lis and Soly 1979: xiv.

4 See Goody 1996a.

5 Needham 1970: 58.

6 See Merton 1973.

7 Zafrani 1996: 96.

8 Zafrani 1996: 87.

9 Vernet 1994: 949.

10 See pp. 135ff below.

11 The social psychology of world religions, in Weber 1958.

12 Bellah 1957.

13 Merrington 1976: 187.

14 Wallerstein 1974: 61.

15 Wallerstein 1974: 62.

16 Wallerstein 1974: 48.

17 Wallerstein 1974: 63.

18 Chaunu 1993.

19 Needham (1963), in Wallerstein 1974: 53.

20 Capital 1967, 1, ch. iv, p. 146.

21 Wallerstein 1974: 37.

22 Wallerstein 1974: 38.

23 Muldrew 1998.

24 De Vries and van der Woude 1997.

25 Muldrew 1998: 3.

26 De Vries and van der Woude 1997.

27 Zafrani 1996: 51.

The Other Side of the Coin

The attack on these Eurocentric approaches has come from a variety of authors, most recently and most prominently by J. M. Blaut. In his book Eight Eurocentric Historians } Blaut aimed to nail down the arguments of ‘Eurocentric’ authors in their approaches to the ‘European miracle’. That is no mean task, as so many historians and social scientists are involved. No sooner has the critic dealt with one argument about European cultural superiority than, Hydra-like, a multitude of others arise in its place. Why? Because essentially we are dealing with a profoundly experienced problem, not only among Europeans but among many non-Europeans too, the problem of why Europe (Western Europe, in particular England) witnessed a take-off to modernity, industrialization or capitalism before any other part of the world.

Blaut had written an earlier work on the subject of the European view of the modern world, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, published in 1993. This begins with the declaration that its purpose is to undermine the widespread belief that ‘European civilization - “The West” - has some unique historical advantage, some special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gives this human community a permanent superiority’ over all others.² He describes this belief in Eurocentrism as a case of ‘diffusionism’.

Blaut’s conception of diffusionism is a special one. He uses it for the notion that everything is diffused from Europe, or from Greater Europe, which includes the ‘Biblical lands’. He sees this idea as excluding independent invention and as being crystallized, as an ideology, with the coming of European colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as appearing in classical form in the 1870s with the undisputed dominance of colonial rule. It should be added that that is not at all how Eliot Smith and the later nineteenth-century anthropologists, or even writers more generally, used the term. And the problem about the concept of diffusionism in this context is that it becomes an umbrella term for a ‘belief system’ (held by an ‘ethnoclass’) in which elites have a ‘common interest’. Diffusionist ideas form one component of this system, brought together in the group’s ‘ethnoscience’ (forming ‘an encyclopaedia’).³ While that corpus may include contradictory beliefs, the way these

terms are consistently used implies homogeneity in the ideas; the beliefs have to be validated (involving the notion of compatibility and ‘conformality’), with all of them being interrelated. This holistic notion underplays the role of dissonance, of contradictions, of rejection, in cultural action.

Blaut puts his earlier book forward as a critique of diffusionism. In a brief concluding chapter he sees this notion as exemplified in philosophical dualism, a Big Bang theory. For example, he sees the suggestion that AIDS may have originated in Africa and diffused from there as an example of European thinking that the bad comes from outside, the good from inside. The AIDS hypothesis may certainly be an example of such thinking in which any group may, indeed does, engage. Equally there may be some credible evidence that AIDS originated in Africa, as BSE did in Britain; that question seems an empirical matter, and what is wrong is not the application of the idea of diffusion per se but only an ethnocentric or xenophobic notion of the process.

Eight Eurocentric Historians is the second of a proposed trilogy. The projected third volume was intended to put forward a non-Eurocentric historical model of the period from late medieval times to the nineteenth century and also to discuss ‘a number of theoretical issues in the critique of Eurocentric history, among them matters of Eurocentric Marxism, Euro-Environmentalism, and Malthusianism’.⁴ Regrettably Blaut died before he was able to complete the ambitious project.

Blaut had already discussed some of these historians in his earlier book, notably E. L. Jones (The European Miracle),⁵ Max Weber, Lynn White (Medieval Technology and Social Change),⁶ John Hall⁷ on the rise of the West, Michael Mann⁸ on power, and Robert Brenner⁹ on the agrarian roots of capitalism. Now he adds David Landes’s The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,— a book that had appeared subsequently. And he is prepared to extend his critique to ‘Euromarxists’ such as M. I. Finley and to the neo-Malthusians associated with Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group of historical demographers.

Blaut seems to me right in seeing most European historians as ethnocentric, especially with regard to modernization, capitalism and industrialization. Modernization is not a very helpful concept which can be applied everywhere and nowhere; capitalism in the larger sense was certainly to be found world-wide, at least in mercantile forms, that is, in what he calls proto-capitalism. Industrialization too had its precursors, but modern factories developed largely but not exclusively in the English textile industry in the latter third of the eighteenth century.

Essentially Blaut’s thesis is that, before 1492, ‘Europeans had no superiority over non-Europeans.’⁴¹ Any European ‘miracle’ was the result of overseas colonial conquests and the acquisition of gold and silver. Of course not only capital flows were at stake but also the expansion of trade and employment, as well as other factors mentioned below. That is to put a very different gloss on the development of the European capitalism than that of those who look to the Protestant ethic, to long-standing family structures or to ‘evolutionary’ developments of capitalism. Before 1492 Blaut sees elements of the transition from feudalism to capitalism as present in the East as well as in the West. What happened in 1492 was that Europe gained access to the precious metals and could use these metals to finance her growing economic capacity, as well as obtaining other produce from the rest of the world. It is a thesis which has been expanded recently in Andre Gunder Frank’s study ReOrient,— and he, along with Janet Abu-Lughod, Samir Amin and to a limited extent Immanuel Wallerstein, is among Blaut’s recognized heroes.

When did Europe overtake the East? While some Eurocentric authors see the advantage of the West as being embedded in their cultural or even racial genes, others with more knowledge of the East consider it as happening at a later period. Abu-Lughod¹³ views the rise of Europe as taking place after 1350, Samir Amin¹⁴ regards Europe as having no advantage over Asia and Africa at the end of the Middle Ages, Blaut (like Frank) links it with the discovery of America in 1492, many other economic historians see the advantage as coming with the Industrial Revolution in the 1780s, while the most recent contributor to the debate, the economic historian of China, Pomeranz, considers the major regions in the East and West to have been level pegging until 1800. One of the problems here is that some scholars are referring to industrial capitalism, whereas others (Blaut like M. Dobb) are obviously speaking about the genesis of a certain form of mercantile capitalism.

While these authors are right to conclude that a number of major societies outside Europe were roughly equal (but not in detail) in terms of cultural history, Blaut’s attempt to place Africa on the same level is a misapplication of Third Worldism, or rather One Worldism, what he refers to as ‘uniformitarianism’. That claim seems unhistorical and overlooks great differences of development, either renouncing the notion of difference altogether or seeing the differences as insignificant.

Blaut admits to theorizing well beyond the available evidence’,¹⁵ but he does not stop to ask the reasons for Asia’s greater ‘development’ over the centuries compared with Africa, the virtual absence of manufactured exports, the restricted nature of its knowledge industry, the recent failure to develop ‘little Tigers’, let alone a Japan. He fails to see that the absence of evidence from pre-1472 Africa is not simply due to the fact that it was ‘buried in colonial slumber’,¹⁶ but because, outside Ethiopia, subSaharan Africa had never developed or adapted writing systems for local languages, though it eventually did so for Swahili along the Arab-influenced eastern coast and for Hausa in the partly Islamic western savannahs. Islam, Christianity and Judaism did come equipped with such systems, but these were largely devoted to religious texts. So it had virtually no written history, except for North Africa, to provide evidence about its past, apart from archaeological. However, the author pays little or no attention to the wider archaeological evidence for socio-cultural development. For example, he sees pre-capitalist ‘modes of production’ throughout the Old World, including Africa, as being tributary or feudal. Whereas classes existed in Africa in a political context (I prefer the Weberian term, Stande, estate), that continent, south of the Sahara, differed profoundly in its economy. Ruling groups of course always demanded something from the land, but the difference between systems based on simple shifting agriculture and those involving the plough or advanced water control are enormous in terms of the surplus available for investment in production, in luxury goods and for specialist activities outside the sphere of primary production. Indeed Blaut sees agriculture as one single mode of operation; he writes: ‘the plough and other inventions had probably diffused by this time to all parts of the agricultural landscape where farmers found it desirable to use them.’¹⁷ That is uniformitarianism gone astray. Africa was and largely is different; the material concerning the plough in Africa is taken from Hopkins’s inadequate discussion,¹⁸ and ignores all agricultural production in the African savannahs during the twentieth century, as well as contrary opinions about the past.¹⁹

Leaving aside Egypt and North Africa, Ethiopia and the coastal Swahili towns of East Africa, all with strong Near Eastern connections, the rest of Africa (south of the Sahara) in no way matched the technological, agricultural, commercial or literate levels of the major states of Eurasia. Blaut’s alternative claim is quite wrong and leads to a weakening of his main (and largely acceptable) arguments as well as to some misleading conclusions, for example, concerning irrigation in Africa (south of the Sahara) and his broad attempt to substitute for the notion of a Roman era that of a Roman-Ghanaian-Mauryan-Han era. That notion may have its attraction to those attempting to combat ethnocentrism, but it fails to recognize the major differences in the production systems and achievements of Ghana on the one hand and Rome, India and China on the other. Firstly we have virtually no direct historical knowledge of any ‘Ghanaian’ society during the Roman period, and the archaeological work on earlier cultures in that area does little or nothing to support his claims. On the other hand Blaut asserts that notions of Africa’s ‘primitiveness’ are wrong. That rough-and-ready concept does not lend itself to clear analysis, but his attempt to refute the claim by asserting that pre-colonial Africa had the wheel and the plough (in some areas) is certainly mistaken for the main region south of the Sahara.²⁰ So too is the denial that the African population was small (of low density) compared with those of other continents;²¹ the depredations of the transatlantic slave trade played a part in reducing density in some areas, but possibly no more than wars elsewhere (and local slavery was frequently a matter of taking rather than selling captives). Blaut writes: ‘I believe that in the Middle Ages historical progress was as intense and fruitful in Africa as in other continents.’ That is his belief; of evidence nothing is provided. I believe, on the other hand, and have tried to support this belief with evidence, that black Africa’s special difficulties in the modern world are particularly related, inter alia, to the deficit in its agricultural technology and to the absence of the wheel and plough, as well as of locally manufactured firearms; its distinctiveness in relation to the major states of Eurasia is brought out in its patterns of marriage and of property transmission.²²

Unlike Asia and eventually Europe, sub-Saharan Africa never participated in the Bronze Age, which saw the introduction of major socio-cultural changes discussed by Gordon Childe.— Most prominent in the archaeological record is the shift to plough farming, making use of animal traction. That development gave rise to a dramatic difference in landholding, since a man could now cultivate a very much larger area than was possible wielding a hoe. With a plough it becomes economically profitable for a man to have ownership rights over a greater area. More for some meant less for others, and for some none at all - creating a landless rural proletariat. Productivity was greatly increased, so too were artisanal activities. The wheel was invented and came into general use, including for transport. There were many other uses for metal technology. And of particular importance for future developments was the invention of writing. None of these inventions reached sub-Saharan Africa, except a religiously restricted use of writing coming in with the Islamic religion. I have argued that it is the socioeconomic stratification one finds in the major states of Eurasia, as distinct from the dominantly political stratification of Africa into chiefs and commoners, that influences the system of kinship and marriage towards in-marriage and direct inheritance, both of which can be viewed as ways of preserving status differences.²⁴

Whatever the view of the past, it is also the case that the problem of recent European pre-eminence remains a real question. It is not Eurocentric for Blaut or for anyone else to try to discuss the problem of European advantage after the Industrial Revolution. It is rather a question of the answers offered and the view taken of other societies that did not make it at the same time. While he is right to criticize some notions of the European miracle, he sees Eurocentrism as a fault in itself, disregarding the possibility that nineteenth-century Europeans were entitled to ask the question of why they were ahead in a number of economic and cultural achievements. Many gave answers that were not only wrong but offensive to other peoples; nevertheless the question is still worth asking. The alternative approach is not necessarily a ‘uniformitarianism’ which fails to acknowledge cultural differences of a developmental kind before the supposed beginning of colonialism in 1492 (a date which in any case neglects Chinese or Roman colonialism, or indeed Indian expansion in Asia). It seems ahistorical not to recognize well before that date significant cultural differences, even of a developmental kind, between, say, the Australian Aborigines, the people of Highland New Guinea and the rice cultivators of South-East Asia. As in the case of the contrast between the major states of Eurasia and those of black Africa, they were not all equally ready for further ‘advance’, as contemporary developments have shown. Blaut’s view is that the factor that enabled Europe to develop a more elaborate form of society, namely capitalism, was colonialism, or rather the invasion of the Americas. It was colonialism too that gave rise to ‘European diffusionism’. Why did Europe rather than another continent gain these advantages? Because of its location. It was nearer to America, Blaut argues, and its sailors already had considerable experience of the Atlantic and its winds.

His thesis echoes the thoughts of scholars in newly independent Asia in the immediate post-war period who came to reject the notions of Asiatic exceptionalism and of oriental despotism. While in a 1976 article Blaut claims priority for querying the Western origins of capitalism, the uniqueness of the Western-oriented progression from feudalism to capitalism was already being questioned by others both in the East and the West. Blaut claims that before 1492 any country in the Eastern hemisphere could have gone forward to ‘capitalism’. It is certainly the case that China, India and parts of Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean developed in ways that were roughly parallel to what was taking place in Europe, in terms of commerce, urbanization, the merchant classes, knowledge systems and various artistic activities. He somewhat collapses the timespan for these developments, which certainly began in the Bronze Age, as we see from the existence of the Assyrian caravan trade and other features of ancient civilizations. From that time on the further developments in the commercial sphere were largely self-generating, following a logic of expanding mercantile activity in urban areas, which included specialist artisanal activity and the gradual division of labour, as well as the growth of systems of knowledge, communication, and ‘leisure’ activities. Such logic was also an emergent property of ‘bourgeois’ activity in Europe and resulted in broadly similar patterns in the East as in the West; as Blaut notes, the West had no monopoly on such activities. But not only internal logic was at stake. He makes an interesting point about the development of mercantile and proto-capitalist activity. These mercantile communities necessarily had many contacts with one another, at least through their neighbours and trading partners, so that it should be of no surprise if ideas and practices were transmitted from one to the other in what he calls ‘crisscross diffusions’.— That happened with the earliest civilizations in the Near East, in the Eastern Mediterranean and between Mesopotamia and Mohendjodaro. It continued to be the case along the Silk Route, within Islam and in the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; the development of mercantile capitalism in one area influenced those developments in another.

Blaut is not content to attack Eurocentric history; he also comments on the new interest in Eurasiacentrism As Landes insists in his very different approach, there is nothing intrinsically wrong in Eurocentrism; but we may well regard it as a mistaken view of any particular problem. Eurasiacentrism is certainly not new and has been at the core of prehistorians’ discussions of the Bronze Age; that continental focus does not exclude an evaluation of the later urban revolution of Central and South America but is a necessary feature of any understanding of the growth of mercantile capitalism.

What an interest in developments across the Eurasian continent does do (and this has nothing to do with environmental determinism, as Blaut suggests) is to stress the sociocultural differences with Africa, south of the Sahara. These differences are of course not permanent but constitute matters of socio-cultural development at a given period; environmental features may certainly be involved but they are rarely dominant over time. We know from archaeological evidence of rock engravings that wheeled transport crossed the Sahara, but the use of the wheel was not taken up there (contrary to the assumptions of Blaut). Water control, using the lever principle in the shaduf, was practised in northern Nigeria, but again its use did not expand. The plough never seems to have been adopted in pre-colonial Africa, south of the Sahara, and, while it would have been of little use in the tropical forests (until these had been cut down), animal traction would certainly have been of great value in the savannahs.

One problem about dealing with the origin of particular technologies of this kind is that often enough the social context of production and use is neglected. Contemporary resistance to the introduction of the plough in parts of Africa makes it clear that its adoption is not merely a matter of importing a tool from outside and of getting rid of prejudices (‘it is a cow farming, not a man’), as with the water-mill in Ethiopia, but of establishing a whole new social organization of production. That is, it is not only a question of dispensing money for its purchase; without any local back-up organization, individuals become dependent upon a whole new set of experts and experiences (as in the contemporary West with computers). The introduction of the plough (or the tractor) encourages, indeed demands, radical changes not only in farming techniques but, to a significant extent, in the very way of life of the inhabitants - the acquisition, training and breeding of draught animals, the alteration of field sizes, shapes and boundaries, of land tenure changes and of harvest practices, as well as many other aspects of rural existence.²⁶ To make this suggestion is not to fall into technological determinism, far from it, but to recognize the fact that, if it cannot be said that ‘tools maketh man’, they can have a profound effect on his life, within of course a wider socio-cultural context. A recognition of this point does not involve adopting an insensate materialism, as is sometimes suggested, but a commonsense recognition of reality.

That point raises a further aspect regarding Europe. The process of modernization

cannot be seen in economic and geographic terms alone. The development of knowledge systems was a fundamental contribution to European ‘modernization’, especially the advance of science. In the early Middle Ages, such knowledge had fallen away, in comparative terms, from the peaks of Greece and Rome. During that period the realm of botany (and of many others) saw greater advances in China, as the encyclopaedic work of Needham and his collaborators has indicated.

If the East was roughly equal economically to Europe in 1500, that was not altogether the case with knowledge systems. We have noted the expansion of higher education in the madrasahs of Muslim Spain; there were similar foundations in the Near East, often with hospitals attached. Shortly after, the thirteenth century had seen the birth of the universities in Europe and, while the weight of the Christian church at first lay heavily on their teaching (much more so than with education in China), they eventually developed a partly secular curriculum. While schools of higher learning existed elsewhere (in Islam for example), nevertheless the seeds for their further growth had been sown in Europe. Added to this was the advantage for the development and communication of knowledge of having recently ‘invented’ printing with movable type, using an alphabetic script, as China had already done with its logographic one. This undoubtedly assisted learning, writing and reading, as well as leading to the circulation of cheaper materials for educational and more general purposes. Gradually the authority of religious knowledge was qualified by secular enquiry (‘rationality’) leading to the Enlightenment and to the cumulative, independent growth of learning, not just a temporary window of ‘humanistic’ activity, always open to fundamentalist reaction.

How far were knowledge systems stimulated by colonialism (as distinct from earlier Mediterranean contacts)? Obviously travel overseas widened the scope of a number of areas of knowledge, now as it had before (with Marco Polo, for example), and in China as well as in Europe. Such an expansion applied to the knowledge of the achievements of others as well as to that of their countries themselves. It is not easy to see other fields of Renaissance achievement as having been much influenced (it was of course by Islam and the Near East), although the advent of American (and other) riches gave a boost to cultural as well as to economic activities.

We can think of knowledge in the West as taking a step forward with the establishment of universities and the growth of education beginning in the thirteenth century; in Islam institutions of higher learning appeared yet earlier. The royal library of Cordoba in Andalusia under al-Hakam II possessed some 400,000 books at a time in the tenth century when the library of the monastery of St Gall in Switzerland had around 400.— Paper and book production was more abundant. In Western Europe a further advance in knowledge systems followed the expansion of Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, which made use of their technological advantages in sails and guns and led to the growth of mercantile capitalism and of booty production, with its many profits. The same period saw the development first of knowledge systems in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and later of industrial production at the end of the eighteenth century. Such developments were interrelated and were important as elements leading up to the decisive advantage over the East that emerged in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

All in all, Blaut’s study gives perhaps too little attention to differences outside Europe and to knowledge systems within. The former is not his strongest point. We have discussed the situation in Africa, but he also claims that most anthropologists accept the idea of a primitive mind as described by Levy-Bruhl.²⁸ However, that notion was decisively rejected as long as seventy years ago, most notably in Evans-Pritchard’s discussion of the ‘logic’ of Azande witchcraft.²⁹ The belief may have held sway longer among some psychologists; anthropologists were more committed to a discriminating cultural relativism.

And regarding external differences, if Blaut’s uniformitarianism is accepted and if so much depended upon 1492 and the precious metals of the Americas, why did that continent itself not proceed to advanced capitalism on its own? And if American gold and silver made all the difference, why did not Spain and Portugal become the spearheads of modern capitalism rather than Holland and Britain? Other factors were involved in these developments. The American treasure, says Lynch, was not productive of investment, for Spain’s manufactures were not as advanced as those of Northern Europe. It was ‘squandered in foreign wars, or used to defray the adverse balance of trade with foreign countries, or lavished on grandiose building and luxury goods. Spain’s industrial difficulties, however, can be attributed above all to the price revolution and the burden of taxation.’³⁰ None of these qualifications should be allowed to detract from Blaut’s achievements. He has made an important contribution to reconsidering the role of Europe in the history of the modern world, part of a significant movement that has gained considerable momentum in recent years.

An important part of that movement is the contribution by Andre Gunder Frank entitled ReOrient. It is a brave book, brave in the academic as well as the personal sense. In terms of personal history, Frank has long been associated with a Marxisant approach to the Third World and its underdevelopment under capitalism, collaborating with scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi. After what he now sees as ‘50 years of wandering near-blindly through the historical woods’, he has come to reject his earlier Eurocentric approach and severely criticizes the majority of historians and social scientists as well as many of the concepts in which they trade.

For Frank’s stated aim is to reorient Western and, indeed, world views about human history, at least in the period 1500 to 1800. Discovering the East to have been the centre of a world system well before that supposedly developed in Europe, certainly in the post-Roman period, Frank is led violently to reject the Eurocentrism he sees as deeply embedded not only in the works of Marx and Weber but also in those of their modern counterparts such as Braudel and Wallerstein, though the latter has recently tried to refute the accusation.³¹ Frank calls for a reorientation that he sees as having profound political as well as theoretical consequences. Politically, we need to accept the existence of one world. Theoretically he argues that, excluding some Pacific islands, there has, since 1500, only been a one-world system (which he differentiates from the hyphenated ‘world-systems’ of others) comprising Asia, Europe and Africa. There has never been any question of a takeover on the part of a world system established by Europeans, since before 1800 the centre of the world economy lay in Asia, in particular China. Europe was then a marginal player on the scene, with little or nothing to export in that direction in return for the rich manufactures of the East - silks, cotton cloth and porcelain - until it was able to put its hands on the silver mines of South America, the produce of which ended up in the ‘sink’ of China. It was only access to that money supply that allowed Europe to enter the existing world economy as actively as she did. And it was in that context that Europe developed the industrial production of cloth (and then other products such as ‘china’) in the process of import substitution.

Frank’s analysis is based upon flows of bullion throughout the world economy, for which he stresses the need for a holistic approach; by this he means the holism of a geographical system rather than the holism of a social system in a sociological sense. Indeed, he concentrates on the monetary aspects of the economy, appearing to set aside its other facets related to production, let alone considering the political, religious, kinship and other sub-systems of the society. This geographical unity of plot leads him to play down, and even deny, the relevance of different modes of livelihood (or production) in a very radical way, overturning the bases of many, not only Marxist, analyses of the political economy; as with Blaut, Africa is assumed to be a paid-up member of a Euro-Asiatic-African system, a view that derives partly from the concentration given to money flow (in this case to African gold rather than to American silver). But to neglect the basic differences in the modes of livelihood in sub-Saharan Africa and those in the major Eurasian economies leads to a serious misunderstanding of the respective roles of those continents in world affairs, both in the present and in the past - for example, on the nature of the slave trade and in the general impact of Europe and Asia on the continent. So too does the parallel neglect, acknowledged by the author, of differences in modes of destruction (or coercion) - we had the Gatling gun, they did not - and of communication and knowledge construction.

Regarding means of destruction, weaponry, Frank is convinced that Europe’s ability to participate in the world-wide market was due to its control over huge amounts of

American bullion, whereas its naval capabilities were of much less importance. But how did Europeans acquire those vast quantities if not through control of the seas, which they obtained through ‘guns and sails’, and control of the land through guns and horses? Control of the means of destruction (and communication, in the form of maps, for instance) was essential. But Frank’s is essentially a money-based interpretation. While flows of bullion were of enormous importance in the world economy, they cannot be wholly abstracted from other flows, of consumer goods, of military technology, of information and knowledge. Guns were an important export for Northern Europeans and a means of acquiring African gold. While Frank correctly draws attention to the paucity of manufactured goods available to the Europeans for export, these did exist, most significantly for later world history in the shape of muskets and military know-how; earlier there had been not only raw products but also woollen cloth, Roman glass and pottery, as well as wine. It was the possession of these weapons, and the ships to carry them, that permitted the Europeans to establish themselves on the coasts of Africa, West Asia, India, America and elsewhere, not bullion, not ‘Western rationality’, not the Protestant ethic.

Perhaps because he is so concerned with holism and money flows, Frank stresses the significance of cyclical as distinct from linear movements, referring to short, medium, long and even longer cycles. The long cycles are fifty-year movements proposed by Kondratieff— - and taken up in Germany by Schumpeter in his examination of the world economy - in the context of the New Economic Policy of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. These cycles related in the first place to the changing prices of agricultural and industrial products. He applied the same methods to other features of social life, including wars. There was a rationale behind the existence of the cycles of prices, which pertained to the changing tempo of investments needed for the periodic renewal of productive forces. Those efforts become effective only after a considerable delay and persist over time until the need and resources for major capital expenditure are exhausted. Kondratieff perceived such cycles in nineteenth-century Europe, where their existence was tied to specific socio-economic conditions; it is more difficult to envisage their working in the same way out of this context, and that is equally true of the longer cycles proposed by Frank, which seem to have no parallel rationale.

The weight to be placed upon cyclical or linear dimensions, as for example with the developmental cycle of domestic groups, is always a matter of balance and of contextual determination. So too is the weight to be placed upon wider and narrower relationships. In his attempt to stress the long-standing links in the economy of Europe and Asia after the Bronze Age, Frank tends to see concepts such as system and agency, structure and culture, as requiring binary decisions regarding their use. And he tends to play down context and difference, even when these would seem to be relevant to a more rounded, social-systems approach to the political economy. For example, he is correct to call attention to the problems involved in a Western approach to feudalism, capitalism and other ‘modes of production’; but there seems little point in merging them into one, arguing for a unity that does not stop with the insistence on one world but treats that as effectively undifferentiated regarding modes of livelihood.

Frank’s argument, put forward in a polemical style, supported by information about monetary flows in the world economy between 1500 and 1800, insists on a complete reorientation of academic and political views about the rise of the West and the contemporary or earlier decline of the East. It is an important contribution to thinking about the development of the modern world economy during those critical centuries, even if it does tend to neglect other ‘social’ features. It helps to combat a highly influential line about the East held implicitly by Adam Smith and explicitly by Thomas Malthus, both writing at the end of the eighteenth century but whose works still command attention. Worthy as they are of this continued reference, not only for historical reasons, their views of the East-West relationships regarding modernization, capitalism and industrialization require considerable modification, which they are beginning to receive. The following chapter suggests some directions such a reconsideration has to take.

Notes

1 Blaut 2000.

2 Blaut 1993: 1.

3 Blaut 1993: 33.

4 Blaut 2000: x.

5 Jones 1981.

6 White 1962.

7 Hall 1985.

8 Mann 1988.

9 Brenner 1976, 1977.

10 Landes 1998.

11 Blaut 1993: 51.

12 Frank 1998.

13 Abu-Lughod 1989.

14 Amin 1974.

15 Blaut 1993: 153.

16 Blaut 1993: 167.

17 Blaut 1993: 157.

18 Hopkins 1973.

19 See Goody 1971.

20 Blaut 1993: 69.

21 Blaut 1993: 70.

22 Goody 1971.

23 Childe 1939.

24 Goody 1976.

25 He does so in an attempt to avoid the notion of one-way diffusion.

26 I discuss this point for northern Ghana in an article on Rice-burning and the Green Revolution, Goody 1980.

27 Bloom 2001: 87 and 116.

28 Levy-Bruhl 1926.

29 Evans-Pritchard 1937.

30 Lynch 1964: 119. Among the ‘grandiose building and luxury goods’ was in particular the decorating of baroque churches.

31 Wallerstein 1997.

32 Kondratieff 1935.

Malthus and the East

Adam Smith described China as being ‘one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrial, and most populous countries in the world’.¹ But he thought it had long been stationary and that ‘it had, perhaps even long before [the time of Marco Polo], acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire’ - a somewhat fatalistic view of the fate of nations. This nature was grounded in a regime of low wages which, in the case of artisans, meant they had to run after customers instead of waiting, as in Europe, for them to call round. ‘The poverty of the lower ranks of the people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe’, an assessment that has been questioned. Turning to Malthusian topics, Smith notes that ‘marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitability of children, but by the liberty of destroying them’ (‘like puppies’), a strange description of control. But while China is viewed as stagnant, it is not declining as might have been the case according to his theories.

Adam Smith does not shed much light on China’s ‘stagnation’, except implicitly to claim that the country has not encouraged free trade in the manner of the West. But his view of the West and free trade is very rosy given the monopolistic practices then prevailing about trading with one’s colonies and other restraints on commerce. And his view of China was subject to many biases; it was his countryman Fortune,² a plant hunter for the London Botanical Society, who gained a much more positive view of the Chinese peasant in his visit to Southern China in 1840,³ and it was Disraeli who commented on the high level of infanticide on the banks of the Thames at the same period. In any case the latter gender-biased practice indicated some attempt to keep population in line with resources, which Malthus saw as a feature of European rather than of Chinese marriage.

Malthus took a rather similar line on China, one that has had unfortunate effects on contemporary historians and demographers down to today, especially in their dealings with the non-European world. The problem raised by his work and influence is not related to the economy - that is, to capitalism and industrialization - in a direct way but to modernization in terms of the control of population and the demographic transition, a factor which many have seen, explicitly or implicitly, as related to the advent of

‘capitalism’ and the supposed ‘restraint’ required for its growth. In the recent past the work of Malthus has raised the question of modernization being related to two particular factors, namely the attenuation of kinship (smaller ‘families’) and the rise of individualism (associated with entrepreneurship and the frontier spirit). These are two interconnected topics that have been central to the Westerner’s understanding (both scholarly and folk) of the processes that have led to modernization in Europe and to its retardation in the East. They have been especially prominent in discussions by demographers. Malthus is a key figure for scholarship in this domain, since many have seen his distinction between different modes of population control in the East and West as related to the nature of the demographic transition in the Occident. But his notions have also been central to the broad approach adopted by historians, social theorists and related scholars, being linked to notions of rationality (at least ‘Western rationality’), with economic maximization and with entrepreneurship.

If we consider the broad sweep of history, there has undoubtedly been a lateral attenuation of kinship ties in that wider networks and larger groups of kin, of persons recognized as related by blood and marriage, have become of less significance. What effect has the diminution of kinship ties had on ‘population’? In other words, does the existence of large kinship groups, or ranges of kin and their character, affect decisions about the number or sex of children?

Kin groups

Let us look first at the question of large kinship groups which are classified as clans or lineages, either patrilineal (as with the Roman gens) or matrilineal (as with the abusua of the Asante of West Africa), and on the other hand at various forms of bilateral kindred, as in Anglo-Saxon England. It has been claimed that kin groups such as lineages inevitably desire to extend their power base and therefore to increase their numbers, the obverse of restraint and control. That is a theoretical possibility, although quite what form this promotion would take is difficult to see, unless at the level of an ideology (or concern) being instilled in particular members and internalized by them. Decisions about reproduction necessarily involve an individual or couple, although some promptings may come from close kin or affines, or from a more inclusive lineage ideology. But even in lineage societies such pressures emerge mainly in the context of the small group, the elementary family, which virtually always is found as a core element in larger groupings.

That nesting tends to be concealed by the fact that wider kin groups often use a ‘classificatory’ terminology, which appears to imply collective identities of an allembracing kind. For example, the wives of one’s father’s brothers may be termed ‘mother’, as indeed may all the wives of members of the lineage or clan of the same generation; equally one’s brother’s wives are often one’s ‘wives’. In the nineteenth century some scholars assumed this meant collective marital or parental arrangements, but field research casts doubts on whether that was ever the case. Sexual access was sometimes permitted under special circumstances, for example, to the wife of one’s twin brother among the LoDagaa of northern Ghana, a union which was essentially comparable to the former Russian practice of an older man sleeping with his son’s wife, known as chokhatch among the Slavs. Sexual rights were nevertheless particularized, and so too with mothering. A mother’s co-wife (a ‘mother’) might breastfeed a child when asked, or might look after the child on a longer term basis if the mother was seriously ill, or did indeed die. But although a number of women would be known as ‘mother’ (or as ‘wife’), the particular mother that had borne you was always given special recognition; there was rarely any confusion of identities here.

It seems doubtful if the character of kinship groups, that is, whether they are patrilineal, matrilineal or bilateral, has much effect on population variables. In the survey carried out in Ghana by Goody and Addo⁴ there was no effective difference regarding fertility depending upon membership of such groups. Respondents seemed to be aiming at maximum fertility, recognizing the restriction on birth-spacing brought about by the post-partem taboo on intercourse; indeed this taboo seems to have been seen by the actors as a means of maximizing rather than of restricting fertility. For mortality was high, particularly among infants, so that, while Africa saw the emergence of the first Homo sapiens, its rate of increase over the millennia has been very gradual until the twentieth century, giving rise to low population densities compared with continents that have been inhabited for a shorter time span but have had different social and economic trajectories.

In most parts of the world, but especially in Eurasia, where the system of livelihood developed after the Bronze Age means that resources, especially land, are limited, pressures to reproduce will be balanced by a concern about the resources needed to establish a family, resulting in the elaboration of ‘strategies of heirship’. In China, until the Second World War, poorer families would have fewer children than richer ones since they had fewer resources to share around. Those without any resources at all may have no such constraints.⁵ Whatever wider kinship groups exist, they are differentiated regarding most personal and many other resources, and will make broadly ‘rational’ decisions on that basis.

The existence of these strategies of heirship, which in Eurasia prefer direct lineal to lateral transmission, meant that there was already a degree of individualization, a form of attenuation of kinship. Children were preferred as heirs to more distant kin; indeed daughters took precedence over the male children of close lateral kin (cousins), separating off this small unit of parents and their offspring as the unit of inheritance. Lateral kin were in the first instance excluded. A large pool of children may have been welcome from the procreative standpoint (and to offset high infant mortality) but it created problems since, before the days of individual wage-earning, access to the property required to gain a livelihood was obviously restricted; the greater the number of surviving children, the smaller the share of parental property for each, with the possibility of the children dropping in the social scale if they were unable to maintain their hitherto expected standard of living. The alternative lay in restricting births, though taking care to have sufficient to provide surviving children, after infant and adolescent mortality had taken their toll. Individuals might make different choices depending upon their particular priorities, but a degree of calculation was already present in the major post-Bronze Age societies of Europe and Asia.

That is to say, there was and is, even in pre-modern societies, some calculation of the pros and cons of increasing the number of offspring, and this strategy of heirship (and of management) was carried out not at the lineage, clan or kinship level, but at that of the domestic group or household, as Chayanov⁶ observed. In other words, in peasant societies the strategies of reproduction were not basically affairs for wider kingroups (though these might influence people’s thinking) but for the low-level functioning units, just as they are at the present day. It is true that, in peasant households, some wider kinship concerns may make themselves felt, since close kin may be closer geographically and economically in terms of having interests in the same plot of land or in sharing tools and occasionally labour. While these units were (and still are) slightly larger than those of many urban communities, what has really made the difference to individualist calculations has been the shift to paid employment for the vast majority of people, as happened in Europe in the nineteenth century and increasingly in the rest of the world; globalization in terms of consumption means paid labour. Each individual is employed on his or her own account, not (in general) because of family or lineage. And both the husband and the wife, and eventually their children, are all separately (individually) employed. Each has their own pay packet and is responsible for paying their own taxes or receiving their own benefits; each individual has his or her own personal relationship with the state and its agencies.

It is at this level that decisions concerning procreation are made, rarely at the societal or intermediary level, though pressures there may militate in favour of pro-natalist or other family policies, for example by arranging taxation benefits for married couples, paying children’s allowances or providing support for single parents. But overall these policies have made surprisingly little difference, with the notable exception of the one-child policy in China, which by and large was pushing in an already accepted or acceptable direction. There has been much discussion of the difference between pro-natalist regimes and others that stress individual choice, but with few exceptions the effects on population trends seem generally to have been small. For example, the differences in family structure between regimes pursuing collectivist (socialist) or individualist (capitalist) policies are much less marked than many theories would project. Nor has there been a great divergence between Europe (or the West), seen as pursuing the latter policy, and Asia (or the East), viewed as more attached to the former course.

Kinship

However, although wider kinship groups virtually disappear over time, it is not clear that there has been any attenuation in the ties that bind smaller groups, families; indeed, quite the contrary is often asserted by those historians who posit the growth in recent times of the affective family, of conjugal ties and even of parenthood and the household seen as features of capitalism or modernization. The data for making such an assessment are difficult to handle; while wider ties have contracted, narrower ones may have been reinforced in certain ways, even though in most cases they no longer serve as the basic relations of production they did in most agricultural communities. The absence of that link tends to release the individual couple from having to take wider family pressures into account in making decisions about marriage, divorce and procreation. The pressure may come in making a distinction between marriage and other sexual unions (concubinage in some terminologies, but the word tends to place the onus of illegitimacy on the woman), that is, in formalizing a union. On the other hand it is not clear if, for procreation, such pressures were ever very important. Parents and grandparents might express their wishes for progeny, and thus reinforce natalist propensities. Indeed that may still be a minor factor in decision-making. But it is doubtful if more distant kin were ever very significant in this context. What is more likely to carry weight is the lifestyle couples wish to pursue and, if they decide to have children, the costs in terms of finance, space, leisure and work that they entail.

Regarding Europe and Asia, the similarities in family structure and, to that extent, of population trends were many,⁷ despite the claims of Malthus and the many other radical East-West binarists that have followed his same general line. One interesting test case is to look at the difference between recent socialist and capitalist regimes, both between and within East and West, an issue we return to in considering Malthus on China. Once again the overall differences in population trends in relation to kinship are not all that striking, despite ideological predilections for collectivism (and multiplicity?) in the first instance and individualism (and restraint?) in the second. But collective production units such as farms, communes or cooperatives have not encouraged wider kinship ties;

quite the opposite. It is the unit of production that has been the focus of collective ties; within it the tendency is for the members to be treated more or less on an individual basis. One of the main functions of the family in other regimes, not only capitalist, has been the transmission of property, material and immaterial (‘symbolic capital’), over the generations. Socialist programmes have specifically set themselves the task of modifying such inherited inequalities between individuals and families, and in communist states of abolishing them altogether, not only in relation to the means of production which were no longer under the family’s immediate control. However, this programme ran counter to familial loyalties within the unit of reproduction, the persistence of which may even have contributed to the downfall of these regimes, through lowering targets for the accumulation of goods by inhibiting their intra-familial transfer. If you can’t take it with you and can’t pass it on, why bother to accumulate a surplus?

As a consequence, notions of collectivization at the level of the economy have not been paralleled by an emphasis on the larger family or the large kinship group, in the shape of either the extended family or the clan. Ideologically many socialists looked back towards a supposedly earlier state of affairs when property and pensions were held in common by large kinship groups - primitive communism as sketched out by L. H. Morgan⁸ and taken up from his Ancient Society by Marx and Engels.⁹ As far as the family was concerned, even rights in women were said to be owned in common, like land.

For the distant past we know that both these claims were imaginary. Kingroups were certainly larger in most pre-industrial societies but, as we have seen, at their core were always to be found relatively small households or ‘families’ which were the significant unit of production and more definitely of reproduction. There is little evidence that larger households (the so-called extended family) went along with these wider kingroups except to the extent that, in relatively stable agricultural communities, larger numbers of relatives inevitably stay in the same vicinity, occasionally in the same house. What did disappear in the course of time were large kingroups, many of their functions being taken over by the state or by the church.

Individualism

The other major topic, strongly associated with the first, is the perceived rise of individualism. Individualism (basically seen as a masculine attribute) has been appropriated by the West as a concept purporting to explain entrepreneurship and modernization in Western Europe and America, where it is the typical quality of the male adventurer who goes to live on the expanding frontier or in the distant colony. It is a feature seen by Max Weber as being encouraged by Calvinistic Protestantism. This branch of Protestantism was characterized by a religious individualism stemming from the conviction that a believer does not require spiritual intermediaries with God, and therefore such believers possess a mental landscape marked by emphasis on selfreliance and self-direction. Their reliance on conscience, Weber thought, encouraged risk-taking individuals, especially in entrepreneurial activity.

The association of individualism with Europe and America has been assumed by many, indeed most, Western historians. But individualism is very difficult to define for analytic purposes and its role differs in different contexts. It has politico-legal, economic, familial, and even religious facets. The political aspect is associated with the notion of democracy in opposition to oriental despotism, empires and authoritarianism; it goes back in time to the city-states of ancient Greece (even with their occasional tyrants and perpetual slaves). Allowing people to vote, or to be consulted in other ways, could perhaps be considered more individualistic. It permitted people to express their personal opinions than more authoritarian forms of government did. But consultation of some kind existed almost everywhere, since to proceed otherwise is to court disaster; democracy as we know it did not flourish in Europe alone, and then not until at least the eighteenth century. No tradition of democracy was established there following the fall of Greece, except in the minds and writings of scholars (and perhaps among pirates, rebels and similar marginal groups).

Economic ‘individualism’, entrepreneurship, is a feature of merchants everywhere, not simply a Western inheritance as in the case of Robinson Crusoe; it characterized the search for precious metals, the exchange of goods with outsiders and many other transactions on a world-wide basis. Individualism, especially when applied to Europe, is often associated with ‘rationality’ and the capacity to work out the best plan of action (which the collectivity may distort). Along with a capacity for innovation and exploration, these features are claimed by European scholars as attributes of their own societies in an attempt to explain the origins of ‘capitalism’ in the West. But rationality, like individuality, is difficult to define across the board, and in any case it is found in some contexts of action in all societies, as I would suggest is the case with individualism.

Regarding the family, the notion of individualism is tied up with that of the nuclear family or small households as against ‘extended families’ or even clans and lineages. That notion is seen as being linked to the supposedly unique Western family and originating, according to some, with the ancient Indo-Europeans. It is associated by Mann and others with rain-fed farming (rather than irrigation, which required more cooperation, even despotic organization after Wittfogel), with forests and dispersed settlement in small families, which led in their turn to private property and capitalism.

These arguments concerning the relationship of family, individualism and rationality to development, in the demographic as in the economic sphere, have been raised in the Great Debate pursued by many European scholars, and followed even by some in Asia. The demographic aspects of this concern and its implication for the history of the family are often phrased in Malthusian terms, especially in the contrast between Europe and China. Of course the idea that Europe was more individualistic in its outlook was not confined to Malthus and the demographers. As we have remarked, in America it was associated with ‘the frontier’ (as if only there did the boundary beckon). On a wider historical level it was early found in ‘democratic’ Greece and its successors, as distinct from the ‘despotic’ or arbitrary Orient, or, in ecological terms, with the rain-fed peasant agriculture of the West as against the irrigated control demanded by the arid East. Western systems were linked to decentralized feudalism where seigneurial property was moving towards full private property whereas, in the view of Weber and many others, in the East the monarch kept ownership more or less entirely in his own despotic hands.

That is the argument pursued by Mann¹⁰ in his book The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, which traces European individualism back to the Iron-Age European peasant. These Indo-Europeans, he asserts, had learnt from the civilizations of the Near East and classical world but were not held back by the same constraints. Individualism is also associated, as by the anthropologist Louis Dumont, with Christianity; that religion he claims (following Weber) promoted ‘ethical individual conduct’. These factors in his opinion made Christian Europe particularly favourable to the advent of capitalism. That theme is also central to the more ecological argument of Eric Jones, author of The European Miracle,¹ that ‘the extensive agriculture of early Europe with dispersed holdings (and nuclear families) produced the cellular, high-energy, high-consumption life-style and individualist performances of the Celtic and Germanic tribes.’¹² As a result, Europeans alone know how to conserve the gifts of their environment and not waste them ‘in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life’, as Malthus notoriously said of the Chinese.¹³ That capacity developed with their practice not of irrigation, as with the Asian civilizations, but of a simpler type of farming, on the whole an anti-evolutionary, anti-archaeological view of development.

Such schema about development have been heavily criticized in recent years, including by some non-European scholars who have uncovered ‘sprouts of capitalism’ in China and therefore of individualism and enterprise; but their influence on demographic and family studies has been slow to take effect. Even Marx took up the notion, which he saw as related to that of oriental despotism (marked by the absence of freedom which Westernization brought). The idea was also central to perhaps the most influential social scientist of modern times, Max Weber, to whose account we have referred. That too has been criticized. Commenting on his thesis, a recent Japanese historian of the samurai comments that, in the later (Tokagawa) period:

the presence of a clear sense of resilient individuality emerged in expressions of self-assertiveness combined with dignity and pride. A sense of individuality is deeply connected to capacities for courage and deliberation, which are necessary to initiate change. . . . This kind of intense sense of selfhood could, when properly connected to an appropriate social goal, serve to generate an initiative for social change.¹⁴

Comparing Weber’s analysis of the Protestant ethic with this study of samurai culture, Ikegami concludes that: ‘out of a completely different cultural matrix the Japanese samurai also constructed a society that was conducive to self-control and concentration on long-term ends, as well as an individualistic attitude that encourages risk-taking.’¹⁵Samurai were numerous throughout Japan and their ideology was widely known, especially through creative literature. This thesis cuts at the roots of the Weberian undertaking.

Malthus and the East

Such an association of individualism with the East challenges Western views of the uniqueness of their cultures. These have seen conformity rather as the dominant characteristic of Eastern societies. However, it is generally true that people see conformity to norms as a mark of the ‘other’, whereas they themselves are governed by individualistic, rational criteria. Ikegami insists that, in Japanese history, a counterculture ‘supports individualistic expressions and actions’;¹⁶ what is called ‘honorific individualism’ is frequently encountered in individuals ‘who dare to take initiatives for change while taking significant social and personal risks.’ This ‘honorific individualism’ is seen as ‘emerging as a form of “possessive individualism”, a conviction about the self that grew up among landed elites, who required a firm sense of self-possession paralleling their pride in the ownership of land’,¹⁷ thus recalling the association of seventeenth-century political philosophies of individualism with property ownership; the mode of property possession was linked to the mode of understanding selfhood.

If this is so, then, just as Ikegami has detached the notion of individualism from the Western context, applying it to other landed elites, it becomes necessary to extend it yet further to other forms of ‘property possession’, which did not emerge only with capitalism or feudalism. For many observers of ‘other cultures’ have commented upon the individualism of the people they have studied. The anthropologist Evans-Pritchard remarked upon this feature among the Nuer of the southern Sudan, and he has been followed by countless others. Not that we are dealing there with the same rapidity of change as in the European or later Japanese cases, but people are always having to adjust to some change (especially religious change, but even change as the result of the developmental cycle of domestic groups) and are never members of entirely static societies.

Malthus is much implicated in these arguments. For him the existence of preventative checks on population growth, such as he found in modern Europe, was tied to the notion of moral restraint, whereas in other societies positive checks operated through a mixture of misery and vice; the latter were largely involuntary, whereas moral restraint was purely volitional, an aspect of rational decision-making, operating on the basis of individual choice.

In their important study on Chinese demography Lee and Wang¹⁸ firmly refute the Malthusian paradigm for the East, including the binary division between positive and preventative checks, the latter being seen as based on marriage age and a moral restraint only available in the West. They point out that, while marriage may occur earlier in China than in Europe, fertility is not higher because restraint takes place within marriage. However, they continue in a binary mode to characterize the former as collective control, the latter as individualistic. The evidence they provide, apart from the one-child policy recently applied by the state, seems to run against such a dichotomy. For example, forms of Chinese marriage are rightly described as variable, varying by gender, class, birth order and individual circumstance; such a variety required individual choice to select the most appropriate strategy. That is also the case even with infanticide, the decision to kill a child (usually a female). These are not collective decisions but very much individual, or couple-determined, choices. The same too with marriage: ‘although not all Chinese plan their fertility or control the survivorship of their children, all do plan the marriage of their own children.’¹⁹ They have to ‘plan’ the marriage, since that is the point in the life-cycle at which major property transactions and residential shifts take place, at least prospectively; but this is done largely on an individual basis. If the married couple are not content with what is proposed, they may, as Wolf and Huang²⁰ have importantly pointed out, and as recognized by Lee and Wang,²¹ resort to ‘wrecking’ tactics, which means low fertility and more frequent break-down.

‘Family planning’, write Lee and Wang, ‘is associated with our increased ability to decide deliberately . . . to control reproduction’, and is linked to ‘a new sense of control over ourselves and the natural world’.— The rise of such consciousness appears

to be connected to ‘the spread of individual decision making associated with the rise of small families, the increase in literacy, the emergence and diffusion of Western individualism, and the growing penetration of market economies.’²³ Rightly seeing Europe as the cradle of the last phase of ‘modernization’, some prominent scholars perceive a European origin for the demographic transition from high to low mortality and fertility and consider that ‘the European roots of individualism and even the European development of nineteenth-century capitalism are intertwined and embedded in a European family and demographic structure that encouraged such revolutionary social and economic changes.’²⁴ But if the problem was solved in Europe, it was also created there; lower mortality and perhaps higher fertility meant runaway growth, which required restraining measures, though these have now gone beyond adjusting to growth and have led to downturn. In any case, recent data show that the demographic transition is occurring throughout the world, and at a faster rate than happened in Europe itself.²⁵

For family planning itself is no monopoly of Europe. As Lee and Wang remark of China, ‘planning demographic events has always been an important part of life.’²⁶Contrary to the opinion of Malthus, and to that of the many Western demographers who have followed him, the East was not limited to the ‘positive’ (external) checks such as famine. Family planning did go on, indeed made the demographic transition when it came about more rapid than in the West; and it worked at a household level, though these processes take place in the context of collective considerations. If in the past the Chinese controlled fertility (total fertility including marital was no higher than in the West) and killed their (mainly female) children ‘in response to the dictates of household economy, today they reduce their fertility largely in response to the perceived needs and strong dictates of the national economy [the one-child policy], and increasingly to maximize their family welfare'—

However, Lee and Wang continue to see a broad difference with the West because ‘ in China demographic decisions are never individual.’²⁸ The collective needs of family and state have to be taken into account. Marriage is ‘not a personal arrangement’ but a family one. But the authors insist that in China ‘deliberate fertility control has long been within the calculus of conscious choice’,²⁹ yet without pursuing the case for a collective consciousness they argue that the current transition is the result of ‘new collective institutions and collective goals, not of new ideas’ - in contrast to the Western situation which involved a revolutionary extension of individual decision from marriage to fertility. But all this conscious planning is seen both as traditional (in other words, China was marked by the early recognition of such checks) and as involving the family (or the community or the state) and was never, they claim, an individual prerogative as under Western individualism. Yet previously the authors have, rightly in my view, proclaimed that ‘the Chinese demographic system was characterized by a multiplicity of choices that balanced romance with arranged marriage, marital passion with marital restraint, and parental love with the decision to kill or give away children.’³⁰ They see this human agency as exercised at the collective rather than the individual level, but I query whether we can discern an effective distinction here. It is true that the recent one-family policy has been organized by the state, and this constitutes their prime example, but how different is this from Rajiv Gandhi’s India or from French or German pro-natalism in Europe? Strategies of heirship of the kind embodied in the decision to adopt or to kill children (both of them basically individual or possibly conjugal) are not made on the level of the lineage or the collective but by individuals. The application of the distinction between collective and individual to a cultural level seems to be very much part of the same binary division that Malthus made about population restraints; it is a theme I have pursued elsewhere in the context of the features of the supposed contrast between the East and the West.³¹ Individual choices related to property were included in both Eastern and Western decision-making. Each maximized their opportunities ‘within an opportunity structure defined to a large degree by collective institutions, interests and ideologies’;³² these larger structures differed (lineages in the case of the Chinese), but nevertheless in both cases human agency operated basically through individual actors.

Certainly any individual or couple in China may have to take into account the opinions of other close family members, but the final decisions are taken by individuals or couples, not by collectivities. Lee and Wang refer to ‘the close supervision of the collective family’,³³ but no evidence of such supervised decision-making is provided, and this contention is perhaps as much a ‘myth’ as the Malthusian ones. It was Chinese couples (and individuals) who in the end controlled the ‘passion between the sexes’. While the pressures may be different from those in the West, to characterize one as individualistic and the other as collective seems to fall into the same mistaken semantic and conceptual binarism as Malthus and as countless European observers. Is this not a case, as the authors point out with regard to Malthus, of Easterners taking on Western myths about their own behaviour? Is it not parallel to the characterization of one variety of a high-pressure regime (high fertility, high mortality) as ‘the Chinese structure’ which Lee and Wang take care to refute?³⁴

More generally, the politico-economic system in China, with its ‘collective’ families, is in the same vein contrasted with Europe’s ‘long tradition of individualism’. It is the case that in China unilineal clans and lineages that we have encountered earlier played an important part in social life, whereas in the West kinship groupings were organized bilaterally (as in the Anglo-Saxon feuds), and in any case these extended groupings (or ranges of kin) were whittled down under pressure from the church and from the state.³⁵But was the contrast so clear at the level of demographic decision-making? The ‘collective family mentality’, Lee and Wang assert, leads to most adoption in China being within the lineage.³⁶ But it could well be argued that for a man to adopt his brother’s son in order to make him an heir or a ‘family member’ is the opposite of a collective mentality but rather an individualistic approach to heirship. No one, as they say, should go childless, and that is calculated on a purely individual (or couple) basis, not on a collective one. The adoptive parents (or parent) are not maximizing ‘collective utility’ but individual advantage. For example, Lee and Wang note that ‘the response to economic conditions could vary greatly from individual to individual.’³⁷ So the authors conclude, contrary to one of Malthus’s and their own major contentions, that, ‘despite its size and its collective nature, [the Chinese system] was able to regulate population growth, through first family and later state control.’³⁸ They contrast family control with Europe’s ‘long tradition of individualism’. But in fact, whatever the ideological position, in Europe demographic decisions often took into account close ‘familial’ concerns, at least until the Industrial Revolution, and even subsequently they were mostly made in the context of dyadic (couple, family) relationships, although in the twentieth century individual wage-packets, state provision and family circumstance might permit some parents ‘to go it alone’. In earlier times the contrast seems less obvious, except in terms of the concomitant existence of wider clan (unilineal) groups which seem to have left such decision-making to the smallest familial (kin) groups. The authors claim that ‘the extended family and the household, not the individual or the individual couple, was the basic decision-making body.³⁹ But in the strict sense most households (and many housefuls, or dwelling groups) consisted precisely of the individual or the individual couple, and for wider involvement they offer no proof as far as demographic behaviour is concerned. Indeed the contention contradicts some of the other suggestions about individual or couple-based ‘strategies of heirship’ based upon ‘individual’ holdings.

Population growth in China in the 1960s underwent an unprecedented explosion, which Lee and Wang attribute to the collapse of the traditional unit of population control following a reduction in mortality and the acceptance of unconstrained high fertility.⁴⁰They see family authority ‘as deteriorating after the 1911 Revolution’. Parents no longer had a legal claim over children’s property, arranged marriages were outlawed, and we might also add there were pressures against marriage transfers and in favour of ‘love marriages’. With the advent of socialism these tendencies were enhanced, but at the same time, in collective work units, the rewards for participation were given mainly on an individual rather than on a family basis.⁴¹ With the coming of the communes in 1958 individuals no longer had to plan their holding of children as before; the socialization of the means of production meant that individual responsibility was abandoned. The more children you had the greater the claim on collective resources. I have heard the same rationale for unlimited reproduction expressed in Nkrumah’s Ghana when a colleague explained how he had no qualms about having more children, since the state would educate them to help themselves. So that any fertility control had then to be applied at a collective level. But that is not how, in practice, things worked. For socialist enterprise did not imply a shift of ideology from ‘the collective to the individualist at the demographic level’; both aspects were relevant. This represented the continuation of the same policies as before, although these were now freed from some resource constraints by social factors, that is until the state stepped in. But other individual restraints on time, work and leisure continued.

Collective efforts towards fertility control made by the Chinese authorities in the midtwentieth century were certainly highly successful and strongly supported, but Lee and Wang comment that there was ‘some individual family resistance’.⁴² That qualification seems to contradict the supposed dominance of the collective and the absence of Western individualism that is thought to have enabled Europe to control its population through rational calculation. Indeed, they emphasize that Chinese parents did have methods of adjusting the population that were not collective in this sense and they ‘produced and kept children only when it was to their advantage’.⁴³ That seems to reinforce the degree of convergence in decision-making. Otherwise why do the same conclusions not apply to the Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore? Why is the same not true of the collectivist Soviet Union and of post-1989 Russia? The binary division, however, pushes in another direction.

Again, ‘Whereas individualistic society required the rule of law to protect human rights, collective society requires the rule of autocracy to enforce collective goals.’⁴⁴That seems an unsound generalization to which Lee and Wang have been led by their overly binary approach to ‘comparative social structure and social behaviour’. Whatever we may think of their rules, collective society is no less bound by them. It is an error to see the West alone as following the rule of law; Hammurabi and Napoleon, hardly democratic leaders, each proclaimed their codes. The Barotse of Zambia were no less bound by ‘law’ than societies elsewhere.⁴⁵ If Malthus was wrong about adopting such an approach to demographic checks, he was right, Lee and Wang claim, about ‘the different social and political orientations of each society [East and West]’.⁴⁶ That assertion is open to much disagreement, especially as the overarching ‘collectivist’ ideology of the Chinese government comes direct from Western sources; indeed their socialist creed may be regarded as part of the spread of Western (modernizing) ideas.

In their final chapter, Lee and Wang seek to modify their binary contrast, at the same time as qualifying the views of Macfarlane and Todd about the relation between demography (and the family) and the political economy.⁴⁷ They rightly perceive collective elements in Western political thought (for example, in that of Marx!), and individualistic ones in Confucianism. For example, half the officials in the late imperial period were appointed by (individualistic) competitive examination and came from a variety of backgrounds. The rate of social mobility was higher than in Tudor or Stuart England. On the family level, the Qin dynasty assessed a multiple household tax on those with more than one residential unit, even when these were composed of sons and brothers. ‘Within two years, customs had changed to the point that “when a son reached adulthood [and married], he set up his own household with a share of the property . . . if he lent his father a rake or hoe, he behaved as if he acted magnanimously”.’⁴⁸ So the collective features of the family, even filial piety itself, had a measure of flexibility. In other words, Lee and Wang do recognize that the binary contrast can be overdrawn,⁴⁹and that contemporary approaches, including the analysis of aggregate data, militate against such large-scale contrasts. They warn that such a recognition makes the world less understandable. True, but there is no alternative in the social sciences to the recognition of complexity where this exists, even if this means querying the value of the time-honoured opposition between individualistic and collectivist behaviour with which the West has long attempted to set apart the ancient (or earlier), the oriental and the primitive from the modern (and not so modern) West.⁵⁰

The demographers wishing to modify Malthus have not had it all their own way. Arthur Wolf makes a persuasive pro-Malthusian case for China. He rejects what he calls the revisionism of Lee and Wang and others on three grounds. Firstly, they fail to explain why the Chinese chose to regulate marriage fertility rather than age of marriage. Secondly, they ignore the fact that, as compared with Europeans, Chinese peasants were ‘impoverished and miserably so’, and thirdly, that ‘late starting, early stopping, and wide spacing’ does not stand as evidence of birth control. The difference between China (and Russia, India, etc.) and Europe (Western) lay in the different socio-political regimes and their effect on household authority (patriarchy). Europe was marked by property patriarchy, with fathers trying to keep children in line through their control and distribution of property; in China, parental authority was backed by the state in its tributary form, exploiting household heads who in turn exploited children, and giving rise to high nuptiality (involving high fertility) and complex households with few inliving servants.

It is true that the revisionists do not explain the choice between controlling the age of marriage and controlling fertility within marriage; they seem to be alternative strategies, as with much in kinship matters,⁵¹ such as whether more use is made of in-living servants as against non-resident day-labourers or even public services. But it is difficult to see why ‘late starting, early stopping and wide spacing’ should not be considered to involve ‘restraint’ as much as late marriage. About the ‘impoverishment’ of the Chinese peasant, that discussion has to take into account many things, including food, climate, clothing, festivals and other matters which make the assessment far from clear.

This chapter has tried to follow up the work of Asian scholars, especially of Lee and Wang, of Ikegami as well as of the nationalist historians who have rejected the idea that in the movement to modernization the comparative advantages - familial, economic, entrepreneurial, religious - always lay with the West. In particular it has criticized the influential notions of Malthus, Marx and Weber, some of which have had a negative influence on historical studies, especially in relation to individualism and the role of the ‘extended’ family. Both in demography and the social sciences generally, these notions have tended to ‘primitivize’ non-European cultures, as for example in Durkheim’s attribution to China of ‘primitive classification’ and in Levi-Strauss’s comparison of Chinese marriage rules with those of the native Australians. In the West the new approach is certainly a minority one, though increasingly gaining support; in the East it is bolstered by much recent research and theoretical thinking. In arguing for this approach I have pursued three kinds of comparison which overlap at various points: the first involves time, earlier and later (‘modern’), the second involves space, the East and the West, and the third socialist and capitalist regimes; individualism has constantly been seen as a characteristic of the second term, collectivism of the first. At the level of the family, kin ties remain important in modern societies and are often intrinsic to capitalist enterprise, even though wider ties, rarely of great significance for reproduction, have been whittled away. As for individualism, its ‘rise’ is very problematic, given its importance in earlier periods and its questionable status in many spheres of an industrial society, which is often organized in a highly collective way in terms of work and education. The general thrust of the argument is against drawing too sharp a contrast between East and West in those features of social organization that could relate to the onset of capitalism, modernization and industrialization.

Notes

1 Smith [1776] 1895: 30.

2 Fortune 1857: 42-3.

3 The question of the level of the Chinese (or any other) standard of living is much disputed; a Portuguese Jesuit, de las Cortes, sees the peasants as being very impoverished, but were not all peasants, looked at from an ‘upper’ point of view (2001: 239ff)?

4 Goody and Addo 1977.

5 For a European example of the latter, see Tindall 1995 on the recent history of the village of Chassingolles in the Berry, central France.

6 Chayanov 1986.

7 Hajnal 1982; Goody 1990.

8 Morgan 1877.

9 Engels 1884.

10 Mann 1986.

11 Jones 1981.

12 Mann 1986: 13; my italics. But of course such extensive forms of agriculture were found in many other parts of the world, and it is highly doubtful if the practitioners can reasonably be said to be more ‘individualist’ in any overall sense than people with a more differentiated division of labour (indeed, Durkheim’s argument about mechanical and organic solidarity might suggest the very opposite).

13 Mann 1986: 3.

14 Ikegami 1995: 330. J. McDermott remarks that this description really refers to pre-1600, since during the Tokugawa period the samurai became salaried men. They could not own land but were usually bound by specific obligations to superiors, unless they were ronin, masterless samurai.

15 Ikegami 1995: 331; my italics.

16 Ikegami 1995: 350.

17 Ikegami 1995: 352.

18 Lee and Wang 1999. The population data of Lee and Wang have been questioned by some experts, who see the data as basically administrative rather than biological; the interpretation fails to take into account the full variety of Chinese families. Some also believe that this regional data, primarily from the north-east of the country, cannot serve to describe the organization and demographic structure of families living elsewhere in extremely different social and geophysical environments. To what extent, then, can one presume a single Chinese model of the family?

19 Lee and Wang 1999: 81.

20 Wolf and Huang 1980.

21 Lee and Wang 1999: 106.

22 Lee and Wang 1999: 4.

23 Lee and Wang 1999: 4; my italics.

24 Lee and Wang 1999: 5.

25 Reher 2001; Goody 2003b.

26 Lee and Wang 1999: 9-10.

27 Lee and Wang 1999: 10; my italics.

28 Lee and Wang 1999: 10.

29 Lee and Wang 1999: 96.

30 Lee and Wang 1999: 9; my italics. McDermott thinks that the authors overemphasize the aspect of romance, especially regarding marriage arrangements.

31 Goody 1996a.

32 Lee and Wang 1999: 12.

33 Lee and Wang 1999: 105.

34 By Wrigley and Schofield 1981: xxiv.

35 Goody 1983.

36 Lee and Wang 1999: 109.

37 Lee and Wang 1999: 111.

38 Lee and Wang 1999: 124.

39 Lee and Wang 1999: 125.

40 The situation has completely changed since then. The ‘demographic transition’, thought to have been a Western phenomenon, has begun to take place throughout the world, irrespective of policies (such as the one-child policy in China), irrespective of level of development. See my discussion in Globalization and the domestic group, Urban Anthropology, 2003b.

41 Lee and Wang 1999: 123.

42 Lee and Wang 1999: 21. The policy, however successful in the towns, was not strictly enforced in the countryside.

43 Lee and Wang 1999: 40.

44 Lee and Wang 1999: 135.

45 Gluckman 1965.

46 Lee and Wang 1999.

47 Lee and Wang 1999: 140.

48 Lee and Wang 1999: 140.

49 Lee and Wang 1999: 145.

50 Goody 1990, 1996a.

51 Goody 1990.

The Challenge of China

The most effective critique of Eurocentric history has come not so much from the ‘monetary’ historians of the West whom I have discussed but from those historians who have specialized in China. As we have seen, many comparative historians from the West are, unlike those discussed in chapter 1, prepared to grant China’s advance or at least equality before the Renaissance in Europe. But some historians of China itself see the advance as persisting long after that period. Francesca Bray’s thesis about the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), based on an analysis of its technology in the widest sense of the word, is that, despite widespread beliefs, there was no stagnation at that time, which was marked by significant innovations, although these charted a different course than did those of Western industrialization. The commercial and manufacturing economy expanded, but it ‘was stably based on household-level production’, and it was at this level, rather than through new inventions, that considerable improvements in techniques and machinery were made.- Labour productivity and growth of output took place and China maintained her economic superiority in the world, Bray claims, until industrialization took over in Europe, that is, until the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

China too had its own not only proto-industrial but industrial forms of production, especially in ceramics, which constituted such a large part of her export trade, in bronze, but later on also in cotton. Silk too was produced mainly by women in the household; it was collected for taxation and used for export, but in the Ming period weaving workshops developed in towns where men took over the production. However, the production of tea, also an export crop, remained at a household level, quite unlike its plantation production in Taiwan, India and Ceylon under the British.

China is recognized as passing through ‘an age of astonishing creativity and transformation’² during the Song (960-1279) and the Yuan (1279-1368) dynasties, and elsewhere too the period 1000-1500 CE witnessed ‘an economic revolution such as the world had never seen’. Cities grew, mainly in the south-east, agriculture was transformed, commerce flourished. Gunpowder, the magnetic compass, and printing -the three inventions that Francis Bacon named in 1605 as the foundation of the modern order in Europe - had all come into common use in China in Song times. Of course

Islamic and Chinese sciences suffered set-backs, for example, as the result of the Mongol invasions, equivalent in a way to the fall of Rome that, according to Landes, ‘set European science back almost a thousand years’.³ Subsequently, during the Ming dynasty the country is often thought to have gone through a period of stagnation, when China lost its pre-eminent position in technical enterprise and material expertise, to be overtaken by the West. Mark Elvin’s concept of the ‘high-level equilibrium trap’ was elaborated precisely to explain this stagnation (in inventions) during the Ming.⁴ He sees Chinese society as having reached an advanced stage but then becoming a prisoner of this level of attainment, which prevented it from further development. Bray, however, is concerned to counter this idea. Ming society produced sufficient transformation to establish China ‘as the economic center of the world, a role it easily sustained until the end of the eighteenth century’. During that period there was a shift from a predominantly subsistence base to a steadily expanding commercial economy directed towards external as well as to internal trade. ‘Ming China was the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods, of ceramics, silks and cotton, as well as of tea and sugar.’

Trade flourished on sea and land. It was already in 1433 that the seventh and the last of the great maritime expeditions conducted by Zheng He reached Africa. Commerce was based on exports, mainly manufactures, and it was these that lured Spanish (after 1492) and Japanese silver into the country, the former from America by way of the Philippines, stimulating the economy, encouraging the search for profit, widening the gap between rich and poor, and promoting the search for the ‘confusion of pleasure’ and the accumulation of ‘superfluous things’ (discussed by Clunas⁵ and Brook⁶). For this was undoubtedly a luxury culture. As Brook insists, the silver (‘the lord of silver’, according to Zhang Tao) was ‘drawn in and absorbed by an economy that had already developed considerable commercial capacity.’⁷ The enhanced agricultural production of the late fifteenth century meant that a surplus went into trade, and ‘the regular circulation of surplus encouraged a move from surplus-production to commodity-production.’⁸ This circulation moreover was made possible by state investment in improved communications (as was earlier the case with rice production), which in turn facilitated the movement of ideas. The acquisition of wealth upset the social order and changed the culture, inducing a feature not at all confined to China, and deriving from the tension between economic growth and social stability.

The latter part of the Ming corresponds to the short Momoyama period in Japan (1573-1615), which has been described as the golden age of kazari, the elaborate decorative objects often of Chinese origin (karamono) displayed in the reception halls of the newly built castles of the aristocracy, which had already been developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and had given rise to a body of written manuals such as Arrangements for Reception Room Display (1511 [?]). Here once again we find luxury, display and connoisseurship, not eventually confined to the aristocracy. At the same time, a tradition of ‘aesthetic restraint’ (wabi) was developed in conjunction with the tea ceremony; the ideals of simplicity and sobriety sometimes led later to ‘puritanical’ movements attempting to restrict pleasures of various kinds. The seizure of Osaka Castle by the Tokugawa clan in 1615 was followed by the regeneration of the city of Edo, by two and a half centuries of peace, by a cultural flowering there as well as in Kyoto and Osaka, ‘led principally by the merchants’,⁹ and giving rise to the Kabuki theatre, the licensed brothel quarters, ukoyon-e paintings and prints of everyday life, periodic festivals and pleasures of the senses, a culture that gradually spread throughout the entire archipelago. This was a popular culture, partly centring on periodic festivals, but theatres and licensed pleasure quarters were open all the year. Nightly fireworks on the Sumida River in Edo were displayed to satisfy customers enjoying a night out on a pleasure boat. Cultural activities based on mercantile success expanded not only in Europe in the sixteenth century but in China and Japan as well.

It was at this time that the Europeans were developing the capacity to sail the globe, the fire-power to command entrepots in other countries and the bullion required to penetrate their markets. ‘But the world economy was not yet centered on Europe in the sixteenth century. It would be centuries before the West reversed this interaction between Chinese production and European consumption with the power of technology and the drug trade.’¹⁰ In other words, not in the medieval period, nor yet as the result of the Renaissance, the Reformation or the Enlightenment, but with the Industrial Revolution.

In developing commerce, Ming merchants were not impeded institutionally, politically or culturally to anything like the extent that has often been assumed by Westerners. Ming merchants were assisted by ‘the alienality of property and the freedom to exchange’.¹¹While they were not given much encouragement by the state or by Confucian doctrine, they were not unduly hindered either; the Ming state left the economy largely alone to grow as it did,¹² a situation not very different from that in contemporary Europe, though it could be argued that it began to change with state patronage of ‘merchant adventurers’. Some commentators, such as Qiu Jun, advocated trade, although he still follows Confucius in condemning conspicuous consumption. Qiu’s comments included the following remark: ‘When the people operate their own markets, they can readily negotiate quality and price to determine whether or not to buy something. When officials operate markets for people, quality and price are invariably fixed, yet self interest . . .’ crops up.¹³ We may describe this as the Chinese paradox (though known among other elites in the West as in the East); the dominant ideology despised trade, yet the mercantile economy grew under its own impetus and gradually changed the whole socio-cultural system. This was the ‘bourgeois revolution’ that was not confined to one part of the world, for all operated in a world economy. Indeed in China both the state and the local magistrate had to rely on purchases in the market, and the state’s concern with communications by land and water, primarily for reasons of social control, greatly assisted commerce at the same time. So too did the settling of dispute cases by magistrates, the guarantee of weights and measures, and the introduction of paper money to facilitate exchange. Paper money (‘flying money’ in Chinese) probably originated in the early ninth century CE as a private arrangement among merchants which was soon taken over by the state. It gradually evolved into ‘a true paper currency’,¹⁴ and by the eleventh century the state had organized its factory production. Whether or not with the state’s aid, the political economy changed. Moreover, a large part of the population was involved in growing and processing silk and cotton for the market, not simply selling their surplus but working on ‘a cottage-based piece rate’.¹⁵ Proto-industrialization was truly present.

The issue raised by Brook’s account of early Ming is this. The economy was already becoming monetized; in 1436 the imposition of the Golden Floral Silver commuted a portion of the tax grain from seven southern provinces into silver. Other commutation arrangements followed. Obligatory service at the local courier station was commuted between 1490 and 1507. By the end of the sixteenth century practically all services had been changed to monetary payments.¹⁶ This chronology seems to set aside the notion of Western ‘monetarist’ historians that such developments depended upon Europe’s export of large quantities of South American silver in return for manufactured goods, a process that could have begun only after 1492 but in fact had to wait until after 1545 with the opening of the Potosi mines in Bolivia. China of course exported goods well before that date to Asia and to Europe, so that the process must have been well lubricated beforehand. Services were already being commuted into silver at roughly the period that the same was happening with rents in England after the Black Death.

Brook gives two reasons for this change to monetization in China. One was population increase and land scarcity, which forced many to live by handicrafts and teaching, in other words by activities involving the exchange of goods and services for livelihood, not merely as an adjunct to agriculture. But such artisanal specialization had begun long before. The second had to do with the difficulty of administering such an enormous country employing a taxation system based directly on goods and services.¹⁷ In other words we may see these events, like their parallels in Europe, as being the result of developments in the existing agrarian-based political and economic systems, a working out of their internal logic, rather than of any one-way movement from outside, although clearly, as trade requires at least two partners in the exchange, there is bound to be some adjustment and convergence to the external partner and to the system of trading they employed. Any system of transactions, whether based on reciprocity or on the market, will stimulate a countervailing response, quite apart from the diffusion of ideas and objects. Associated too with the ‘logic’ of the market, the twin features of monetization and rural surpluses produced a demand for goods which stimulated manufacture (the Brenner debate again). Such a trend would lead to the growth of the commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie, to an efflorescence of their respective artistic endeavours (Kabuki in Japan, Shakespearean drama in England) and to a monetization, a commodification, of socio-economic relationships.

Braudel, who was well aware of the growth of commerce in Asia, argued that two distinct types of economy existed side by side. The market economy drew rural surplus into regular patterns of exchange, while the ‘infra-economy’, the informal other half of economic activity, was ‘a world of self-sufficiency and barter of goods and services within a very small radius’.¹⁸ The first was European, the second Asian. That distinction seems part of the whole process of dichotomization that marks the West’s treatment of China. Even where similarities are found, in commerce, in towns, in culture, in population, any differences are magnified into two distinct forms of activity; when capitalism appears in the East, it is designated as ‘collective’ as compared with the West’s ‘individualistic’ variety. In this particular case, Brook notes, there was nothing uniquely European about the market economy; that could be found in Ming China. Indeed, in my view that duality of activity may well hold for most economies (however simple) where commerce enters in; there is a sphere for commerce and a sphere for barter, which today is virtually reduced to the family.

Brook goes on to point out that the Chinese economy was very active in commerce as well as in manufactures, especially of textiles and porcelain. But he claims that, whereas in the West merchants advanced capital to rural workers in the form of raw materials and controlled their product, in China the merchant sold the materials to weavers one morning and bought their product the next. The first was a method of controlling production from within, while in the late Ming merchants extracted their profits outside the production process.¹⁹ Masatoshi has argued that the latter ‘cannot be regarded as a stimulus to development’ (that is, of capitalism) because the relations of production were not affected. As we have seen, Braudel too makes a similar attempt to distinguish Eastern mercantile activity from Western. He does not see capitalism as developing automatically when commerce expands but as forming within the hierarchies constructed on top of the market economies, a process that he maintained was unique to Europe. That argument about uniqueness seems to arise retrospectively, in order to account for the undoubted uniqueness of the European economy in the nineteenth century, but for reasons to do with the interconnectedness of transactions, the interchange involved in trade, which I discuss in the final chapter. Braudel’s view of the distinction between commerce in East and West is questionable, at least as far as the growth of mercantile capitalism is concerned. The same dichotomy exists in Wallerstein’s conception of a world economy, in particular the European world economy, which emerged with capitalism in the sixteenth century.²⁰

However, there was no ‘failure’ to develop capitalism in China, Brook suggests, but something else was created: ‘an extensive market economy that used state communication networks to open links to local economies, organized rural and urban labour into consecutive production processes in certain regions without disrupting the rural household as the basic unit of production, reorganized patterns of consumption without entirely severing consumption from production . . .’, etc.²¹

According to Braudel, Wallerstein, Masatoshi and Brook, capitalism in the European sense could not develop in China. Taking a contrary position, many Chinese authors have perceived ‘sprouts of capitalism’ at an early period. The ‘logic of capitalism’ was surely embodied in the growth of commerce, and in this regard the arguments of the former seem rather weak; relations of production clearly changed in late Ming China and social hierarchies were radically affected. China seems to have been well on its way to fur-ther developments in the commercial and manufacturing economies which were pointing in the direction of capitalism. That is presumably why they have been so successful in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and now mainland China in recent years; these countries were already geared to such developments.

Taking a rather different approach, the art historian Clunas thinks the concept of the ‘early modern period’ (from 1500 to 1800) offers a more fruitful way of looking at

developments rather ‘than the now-hackneyed “sprouts of capitalism” controversy’, initiated in China in the 1950s. He suggests a shift of attention should be made from the processes of production to those of consumption. Of course in principle one needs to look at both, and the desire to follow Douglas, Schama, Appadurai, even Bourdieu, into the latter arena seems mistaken if it means a neglect of the former. But consumption is clearly very significant.

In the later part of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), that is in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the focus on consumption gave rise to a whole literature of connoisseurship, part of a general elaboration of valued, indeed of luxury, objects. The Ming arrived with the expulsion of the Mongols, against whose rule there was a strong reaction. As in the parallel and almost contemporaneous situations in Renaissance Florence and in the Netherlands of the Golden Age, this interest in connoisseurship turned on the consumption of luxury products, as indicated in the title of Wen Zhenheng’s work Treatise on Superfluous Things (1615-20). That book consists of twelve chapters, the titles of which give some idea of its range of interests:

1 Studios and retreats

2 Flowers and trees

3 Water and rocks

4 Birds and fish

5 Calligraphy and painting

6 Tables and couches

7 Vessels and utensils

8 Clothing and adornment

9 Boats and carriages

10 Play and arrangement

11 Vegetables and fruit

12 Incense and teas.

Clearly not all these are ‘superfluous things’, and some are representations. But all may be incorporated into luxury behaviour. Other compilations include sections on food, gambling, prostitutes ‘and all the other luxury commodities available to the late Ming man of fashion and wealth’.— As we have seen, Clunas sees this situation not in terms of changes in the mode of production so much as a question of consumption.²³ But clearly the two are intimately connected, and the end of the sixteenth century ‘saw the first integration of China into a developing world economy’ and a consolidation of rural order, arising from a surge in population and a decline in the size of holdings, accompanied by the commercialization of state revenues (as Brook had suggested).²⁴That process led to a growth in the Chinese marketing networks but not, Clunas argues, in the number of the merchants, though that proposition is difficult to accept, especially given their more prominent cultural role.

The literature on luxuries goes back to a work written in the first half of the thirteenth century, entitled Record of the Pure Registers of the Cavern Heaven. But this Song text was only published in the late Ming at a time when the genre really took off. Concerned as it was with forgery and the authenticity of valuables and luxury items, that genre makes available ‘the very early reduction of this type of knowledge [in China] to a commodity’, since the books were obtainable in the market place, as for example Eight Discourses in the Art of Living written by Gao Lian. Gao’s father had been a rich grain merchant whose son employed a most distinguished obituarist to write his tomb inscription. But, despite their efforts, economic success was not in this case translated into political power, as Gao was unsuccessful in the examination system. However, this failure did not prevent him from participating ‘in the quintessential elite pastime of art collecting and appreciation, since not only had all social as opposed to economic barriers to owning pictures dissolved by the sixteenth century, but some of the most important connoisseurs of the day were from a background of trade.’²⁵ So, somewhat contrary to Clunas’s earlier remark, the position of merchants had decidedly changed as the result of shifts in the system of production as well as that of exchange. These volumes were produced not so much for the magnates themselves but for local elites scattered throughout the empire, as were the contemporaneous ‘encyclopaedias for daily use’ and the almanacs, not altogether dissimilar from the Hausvater Literatur of contemporary central Europe. This period was also the time when prose fiction, such as Jin Ping Mei (1617), was getting into its stride. Once again the chronological parallel with Europe in these developments is striking. Indeed, Clunas sees China as developing an interest in its past which is again akin to that of the Renaissance in early Western Europe, beginning perhaps with Flavio Biondo’s development of the idea of media aetas in the 1430s.²⁶

The association of personal names with Ming ‘decorative arts’ has been limited to the ‘gradual freeing of the artisan class from the restrictions placed upon them by the “service” system of the early Ming, whereby they had been compelled to spend regular periods in the unpaid employment of the state.’²⁷ The growing commercialization of the period from about 1450 had seen the state abandon these obligations in favour of taxes and the market place. The use of personal names has also been linked to the concept of ‘individualism’ rather as the practice of signing pictures in Italy from about 1500 has been seen as the typically Renaissance attitude to artistic creation, in contrast to a ‘medieval’ model in which anonymous creators work more closely within the specifications of patrons or within the bounds of doctrine. But interpretations of this phenomenon in the West have now turned in an opposite direction: ‘Works were signed to show they met the standard of a hierarchically administered but collectively working enterprise’, the signature being not only of the artist but of the entrepreneur as guarantor.²⁸ That is a possibility, but there are other ways of generating quality than by signature, the increasing use of which in the West certainly had something to do with the spread of literacy, a shift from potter’s marks to writing names.

It was not only in the late Ming that this use of personal names was found associated with the arts. For painting that had long been the case, especially for the literati. Trade marks were known from the highly commercialized world of the late Song (960-1279) in the thirteenth century, especially with luxury lacquers, painted ceramic pillows and the like, but in the late sixteenth century this practice broadened out with the development of a China-wide market, a period too when foreign goods were widely popular as luxury products. The Song period saw the beginning of the formation of a national market in luxury products which some Marxist scholars have associated with ‘sprouts of capitalism’. By the sixteenth century that market worked on an empire-wide basis.

Whether or not there is any direct link of the notion of commodity (manufactures for

exchange) and capitalism, or whether the idea should be more widely interpreted, there were few transactions in the Ming period that were not subject to monetary valuation, not only artefacts but agricultural land, entertainment, social services, religious and ritual performance, as well as knowledge in the form of published books.²⁹ Yet there was a certain ambivalence about many of these transactions, in sexual services, for example, as well as in knowledge. Of no item is this truer than painting. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the perceived difference between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ painters was of great importance, the latter being members of the elite, the former seeing the elite as patrons. The distinction was subsequently eroded as elsewhere, but there remained a residual feeling that works of art should not be submitted to ‘vulgar’ market-place transactions; as Clunas remarks, ‘the market-place could provide goods whose explicit meaning lay in an attempt to negate the marketplace as a model of the way society ought to be structured.’³⁰ This ambivalence, not at all confined to China, led to powerful tensions.

Nevertheless commodification was widespread. China’s late imperial period (16001900) has been characterized by Rowe as one of ‘intensified commercialization, monetization, and urbanization’.²¹ To these features Cohen³² has added that of ‘commodification’, especially of rights in land. Regarding the latter, Cohen analyses the many contracts produced by the Chinese in Taiwan in relation to the sale or pledging of such rights, as well as those in water within a particular community, contracts that normally include statements that close kin have already been offered the opportunity to purchase those rights (as often in earlier European law such as Norwegian ‘odals-right’ and in Normandy).³³ Many of these rights were held by corporations, including ancestral ones, the members of which held shares which were themselves commodities that could be bought and sold. These associations included the God of the Military Association, the Old Earth God Association, the Old Association of the God of Literature, the Confucius Association and others. Each met once a year and kept detailed account books. Shareholders often received dividends and might have priority access to the land for the purposes of cultivation, but only by paying a proper rent. The associations had rental income from about one-third of all wet rice land in the particular village Cohen studied.

Cohen sees the great use of contracts for such purposes as going hand in hand not with a very strong state (‘oriental despotism’) but with a relatively weak one. The interests of kin were limited and controlled by contract - that is to say, the potential objections of close kin to a sale were pre-empted by a statement that they had been offered the chance to acquire these rights at the market rate but had refused. Commodification was powerfully supported by such contracts, which were essentially community arrangements that hardly involved the state. Indeed we find their proliferation when the state is weak rather than strong. For the contracts were enforced by ‘community solidarity’³⁴ and showed a ‘marked absence of significant intervention by the state’. The ‘rule of law’ was essentially localized.

As we have seen, the world of the Chinese literati took an ambivalent line towards trade and luxuries; they proposed to look upon the ‘roots’ (ben) of the state as agriculture and its ‘branches’ (mo) as craft and trade. The former was essen-tial, the latter not, and therefore open to distrust. For the branches produced luxuries which drained the vital energy of the state, since attention to these was thought to bring about the collapse of the polity. Luxury and extravagance start with the government and spread outwards; for then artisans do not make the essentials required for farming but follow fashion in the creation of inessential items. The unease about ‘things’ was very widespread, right down to the Ming. While contrary voices were raised, they were in a small minority.

Attempts were often made to control consumption by sumptuary legislation. Appadurai sees this situation as intermediate between the fixed-ranking systems of earlier societies and the more flexible ones of later fashion-conscious ones.³⁵ But it seems more likely that sumptuary patterns continue the earlier association of rank or status with dress or other material items, as well as expressing a more general aesthetic of restraint which is at times ‘puritanical’. Mukerji— and others have claimed that materialism of this kind was a preliminary to capitalism. However, Clunas argues, this feature was not confined to Western Europe but is found concurrently in China, possibly, he suggests, because at this time (as the work of Wallerstein has emphasized) the East and the West were being drawn together into the same world system of exchange (but not initially as part of the periphery). Sixteenth-century China, he concludes, ‘exhibits so many consumption patterns paralleled by those of Europe’,³⁷ which are ‘the motor of change, rather than a result of it’. However, it is difficult to unravel the nexus of supply and demand factors, of production, exchange, consumption; a generally accepted view is that the commercialization of agriculture and the absentee landlord loosened the bonds of Ming society. Riches certainly increased, but there was little of productive interest in which wealth could be invested, so it went into consumption goods which gradually made sumptuary laws out of date. Not that emulation disappeared, but it came to depend upon fashion rather than the law.

What Clunas’s study of luxury consumption in late Ming China of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests is that a reasonable comparison can be made at the level of consumption, as a ‘motor of change’, with Western Europe. In both areas the widespread production and consumption of luxuries depended in the end largely upon productivity and the commercialization of agriculture, in which Brenner, Wallerstein and many others have seen the growth of ‘sprouts of capitalism’ in the West and in which Brook, Clunas and others have seen similar developments as occurring in the East, perhaps ahead of the West. A surplus led to exchange and to specialist activities. But in the East greater attention seems to have been paid to luxuries than in the West, although Sombart argued that from 1300 to 1800 the expansion of trade in the West was led by the demand for luxury goods. So that there may have been greater opportunities for investment in production in the West - in the East ‘productive outlets for these resources were extremely limited.’³⁸ If so, in certain limited spheres the productive forces and technology of the West would have had at this time a certain measure of advance over the East as far as the movement towards industrialization was concerned. But the differences seem to have been small.

The kind of connoisseurship discussed by Clunas is directly related to the presence of literacy, which widened the gap between rich and poor, since modes of appreciation were elaborated in texts. The notion of the majority of authors who discuss earlier written cultures is that those members (usually the majority) who cannot read and write are characterized by ‘cultural impoverishment’. That idea has been somewhat modified by one trend, in what are sometimes referred to as ‘cultural studies’, which has drawn attention away from the elite aspects of literate culture and focused on ‘ordinary lives’, on the working classes, on ‘popular culture’. But in one sense they were undoubtedly impoverished; for example, in China those who had not been to school had only mediated access to the contents of Confucian texts and could participate in the ‘high culture’ of drama, poetry, fiction and similar genres only in a derivative way, if at all. In contrast, no one would claim of purely oral culture, like that of the LoDagaa in Ghana, that any members were ‘culturally impoverished’ in the same sense. It could be argued that, in the centralized Ghanaian societies of Gonja or Asante, part of the population were less centrally involved in that they did not fully participate in all the activities of the ruling elite, but that political deprivation seems much more limited in kind than what is referred to in written cultures.

Going along with this absence of reading and writing is the very limited emphasis those societies placed on the kind of connoisseurship which Clunas considered for China. That kind of expertise seems to be tied in not so much with stratification itself as with the type of economic stratification, which is also social stratification, that we find in post-Bronze Age societies, with their distinctive styles of life associated with hierarchically defined ‘classes’ and differential ownership of land. Part of the hierarchy is literacy; the illiterate are ‘low’, the literate ‘high’. In China the same axis of differentiation gives rise to the dichotomy between ya, ‘elegant’, and su, ‘vulgar’.³⁹Among the non-stratified LoDagaa of Ghana, on the other hand, we can find related notions of satisfaction in a finely worked bow, for which one would use the term viela, translated as ‘fine’ or ‘good’. But there is no real opposite of ‘vulgar’. After all, in a

classless society we are all ‘vulgar’, ‘common’, ‘plebeian’.

Another important dichotomy in such appreciation is that of ancient and modern. While parallel words exist in LoDagaa, kuuri, ‘old’, and paala, ‘new’, the same evaluations do not really hold, anyhow of objects. On the other hand, tengkuori, ‘the old country’, has its value as a place of origin, though not, for example, of return or of pilgrimage, and there may be some good attached to objects associated with a specific ancestor. But antiquity for its own sake has no particular virtue. Nor I think is there the opposition between ‘utility’ and ‘pleasure’ found in China, since all objects and actions offer both utility and pleasure. There is no explicit moral dimension here such as is found in ‘the earliest classical discussions of issues like luxury and frivolity versus simplicity and integrity’.⁴⁰ There pleasure was seen as a feature of gentlemanly behaviour, but like luxury it was risky to take it too seriously. That notion of gentility was accompanied by some depreciation (by the ‘gentle’) of the activities (the skill) of artisans (and especially of women); the activity of the amateur had a status above that of the professional, who exchanged his skill for livelihood. On the other hand, connoisseurship that involves scholarship is contrasted with dilettantism. At the same time there was a ladder of taste in which the recognition of the fake is also present.

Bray has given us an account of the commercial and technological achievements of the Chinese that persisted over time and were overtaken by the West only with the Industrial Revolution. Brook sees the monetization of China as preceding the advent of American silver but claims, as others have done, that a different form of economy developed which could not lead to capitalism. But, as Clunas shows, mercantile activity was associated with the extensive exchange of goods, especially luxury goods, which were acquired by the middle as well as by the ruling classes and produced a culture not dissimilar to that of the West from the standpoint of complexity. Their arguments have cast considerable doubts upon those who, like Elias,⁴¹ have seen the ‘civilizing process’ as a feature primarily of Western societies.

But perhaps the most thorough and extensive treatment of the comparison between East and West, primarily at the economic level, has been made in the recent work of the historian Pomeranz.— His enquiry is an important indication of the change that is beginning to come over world history, though this revision has a long way to go before it gets general acceptance in the scholarly market place. As we have seen, major social thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - Marx and Weber in sociology, Smith and Malthus in economics - saw as a central problem the explanation of the rise of capitalism, modernization, industrialization in the West contrasted with ‘the fall of Asia’, the failure of the East to participate. What advantages did Europe possess, what blockages existed in Asia? In the twentieth century the enquiry has continued in the hands of Braudel, Wallerstein, Chaudhuri and Landes, and in a less comparative way by scholars such as E. Jones, Stone, Hall, Elias and many demographic historians who, implicitly at least, have looked at the East from the standpoint of Western ‘advantage’. The sociologists and social historians among them have searched for deep-rooted, longstanding cultural differences, while economists and economic historians have been prepared to see more recent divergences of a technological kind. Both groups of European scholars have tended to find in the East the foil that their initial question anticipated.

However, there can be no doubt, if we go for la longue duree, the long term, that such advantages were time-specific, since most of the very important developments that took place following the ‘urban revolution’ of the Bronze Age and its rural counterpart, advanced agriculture, occurred in Asia. That continent had undoubtedly taken the lead in what prehistorians refer to as the ‘civilizing process’, and in China it long continued to hold an effective lead over Europe until the opening up of the Greek world. Even after the decline of classical civilizations, China and India still flourished, as did the Muslim world of West Asia and later of Europe that inherited much of their learning and achievements.⁴³

Such a Eurocentred approach has been attacked in gene-ral terms by Blaut and on a more specific front by Frank, who has called upon us to ReOrient our world views. But Pomeranz, an economic historian of China, proposes we should ask the question in another way. Why was it that in the East developed areas such as the Yangtze delta followed a different track from the West? Although Pomeranz uses China and Europe in the sub-title of this book, in fact he rejects these as units of comparison, arguing that we need to compare ‘core areas’ throughout Eurasia that were similar, though not of course identical, in terms of population density, of commercialized agriculture, of relatively free markets, of security of property and of extensive handicraft industries (protoindustrialization). For until 1800, he argues, we were living in a polycentric universe and have to examine the fate of not one but of each of those centres. He isolates several ‘core areas’ in China (starting with the Yangtze delta), in Japan (the Kanto plain) and in India (Gujarat) which he sees as having similar characteristics to Western Europe (specifically to England and the Netherlands) in respect of the economy and, a fact on which he insists, of resource constraints that are occasioned by the sizes of the population and the demands on food, fuel, housing and handicrafts. These demands raise ecological problems in respect of which there was a great divergence in the way they were met.

Up until 1800, Pomeranz maintains, the economies of the core areas had been basically commensurable. His arguments are based primarily on the analysis of economic data of a neo-classical, market-driven kind, though ecological considerations are very central, even if political, technological, ideological, religious and family ones are not. His assessment of the similarities in core areas as late as 1800 is based not upon intuition nor upon preformed opinion but upon detailed measures, some of which are of his own construction. This examination leads him to counter the widespread assumption that Europe, in particular England, was basically more prepared than other core areas for the adoption of industrializing strategies, in terms of markets, of capital availability or of security of investment. While he acknowledges the existence of small differences (for example, in interest rates, though some would dispute that this is small), in his view these could not account for the radical nature of the ‘great transformation’ that later took place. Indeed, in some ways, Europe was less well placed than others and was thereby able to profit from ‘the advantages of backwardness’, for example, in relation to land use, which was less intensive and allowed for some expansion. By means of a variety of measures, such as the consumption of sugar and of other everyday ‘luxuries’, including tea and coffee, he tries to show the similar patterns that existed in these core areas. In addition there were not only similarities in the use of luxuries, such as works of art, both to acquire as well as to consolidate status in what had become the more fluid conditions of social hierarchy that had evolved in the densely inhabited areas, there were also similar resentments of old against new elites, especially because of their use of ever-changing fashion and their avoidance of sumptuary laws. Discourses such as ‘A Treatise on Superfluous Things’ in China began to appear slightly earlier than their European counterparts, suggesting that the commercialization of cultural goods took place earlier in the East.

Pomeranz maintains that all of these core areas had in a certain sense reached the limits of their potential growth at current technical and organizational levels, and all were facing similar constraints of an ecological kind in pursuing their present paths and in maintaining their standards of living. These constraints could be temporarily solved by drawing in the economics of peripheral areas which supplied the deficiencies of land-based products in return for the export of handicrafts and know-how, filling the shortfall in the Malthusian necessities of food, fuel, fibres and building materials. But eventually the periphery would catch up with the core. This is where the great divergence arose. These ecological constraints could be countered by pursuing either labour-intensive or capital-intensive strategies. The first led to the Chinese ‘cul-de-sac’, the latter to Western industrialization. England was able to initiate the second course not primarily because of inherited entrepreneurial skills nor yet because of superior levels of science and technology, nor even because of a particular religious ethic or cultural ideology, but partly at least because of geographical accident which brought together accessible deposits of coal and iron that solved the energy crisis (as Wrigley and others have argued) in a way that circumvented the ecological constraints (on the use of metals, for example) imposed by the destruction of forests. That availability provided both the power (coal) and the materials (iron) for the construction of the machines needed in the Industrial Revolution. But most importantly there was the ‘military fiscalism’ that led to successful overseas wars and to the establishment of colonies, which even Adam Smith saw as contributing to economic growth. Here again England was particularly fortunate in being able to expand to America, where emptied lands and slave plantations could systematically produce export crops of tobacco, sugar and raw fibres, especially of cotton for cloth, both for consumption and for export, products which could not be produced in the core area because of insufficient land or resources. This advantage Pomeranz sees as the foundation on which industrialization was built, since the colonies not only supplied the raw products but also offered a market for handicrafts and manufactured goods.

One great strength of Pomeranz’s account is the use of detailed economic data to refute prejudices based on the later achievements of the West. That strength could also be a source of disagreement, not only because of his neo-classical framework (extended to ecology) with its assumptions of ‘rational optimization’. Non-economic variables are in effect discounted, in many cases to the great advantage of the argument, especially when one is dealing with Eurocen-tric writers who take a very different line on the question of long-term and short-term advantages. Very pragmatically, Pomeranz sees Britain as favoured in the transition to fossil fuels, as escaping from the reliance on wood and as having its all-important textile industry supplied with fibres from America. Other supposed advantages in economic ethic or entrepreneurial skills are quietly set aside. At one point he does refer to the presence in Europe of printing in an alphabetic script, and that did surely offer an advantage in the accumulation and circulation of technological and scientific knowledge about inventions or improvements in industry and agriculture, linked to the so-called scientific revolution. The technological concomitants of this revolution and their contribution to sustainable growth could have received more emphasis. Moreover, the mode and means of communication are as important in the process of modernization as the mode and means of production.

In a substantial review of his discussion, Parthasarathi warmly welcomes Pomeranz’s comparison of key areas of Asia and Europe, correcting glib assumptions of European superiority;⁴⁴ he writes that, from this point on, ‘it will be difficult to sustain tired and worn-out arguments about European superiority.’⁴⁵ But he goes on to argue that the ecological explanations for the later divergence are not in themselves enough. He criticizes, for example, the absence of a consideration of state policies following a mercantilist ideology, much more fundamental to economic development in Western Europe, especially in terms of protection and labour discipline. However, protection was certainly not confined to Western Europe; it obtained more widely in the Asian silk industry, while work discipline, as envisaged by E. P. Thompson,⁴⁶ emerged out of industrial production itself (in China as in the Rhode Island mills in the USA) rather than from government policy, although the latter often supported the mill-owners. To achieve a competitive advantage, Englishmen had to work much longer, more continuously, than ever before.

More substantially, in my view, Parthasarathi suggests that Pomeranz has downplayed the importance of technological change for Europe’s economic development. There is the question of why North-Western Europe experienced ‘revolutionary technological breakthroughs in the late eighteenth century, which had the effect of expanding ecological possibilities'⁴⁷ While Pomeranz was right to insist that changes were ‘not the product of a dynamic Europe versus a technologically stagnant Asia’, nevertheless he consistently downplays the importance of technological change. And that change of course had a history that relates partly to past educational and technological achievements - that is, to the scientific and technological revolutions, to what Nef called the First Industrial Revolution and to the great advances in the circulation and accumulation of information.

That dynamic trajectory is also related to the competitive drive of the entrepreneurs: ‘In the case of cotton there is abundant evidence that the need to out-produce Indian textiles propelled the innovative activities of British cotton producers.’⁴⁸ The term ‘need’ rather begs the question. At the time, England was purchasing large quantities of Indian cottons, so that there was a clear incentive for import substitution. If they had to compete, they had to innovate. Similar pressures existed in the iron industry. Technical advances and the use of coal were linked to competition from Swedish and Russian imports, stimulated by the demands of the army and the navy. The result was the staggering growth of British cotton manufacture (and of the iron industry that serviced it). That growth had begun in producing a substitute for Indian imports, the extent of which had drawn protests from local textile producers, of wool and silk, for example. By 1815 British cotton consumption reached a weight of 80 million pounds; south India, which only twenty years earlier had been one of the major cotton-producing regions in the world, consumed 20 million pounds. By 1850 Britain imported nearly 1000 million pounds of cotton a year, much of it for the export trade. The profits from this production fed the railways and other industries. For the Indians and Chinese, however, ‘there was no need to mechanize spinning, rationalize the use of labour, or in other ways transform the manufacturing process’, since they could produce handmade fabric more cheaply than others. These breakthroughs, a response to economic and social pressures, dominated the Great Divergence and the emergence of industrial capitalism.

Technological change was of great importance in this whole process, but was not of course to be divorced from the state of the economy and of knowledge systems. Despite this lacuna, Pomeranz’s account should certainly help to change the terms of the debate

about the origins of capitalism, the rise of the West and the fall of the East.

Notes

1 Bray 2000: 65.

2 Bray 2000: 1.

3 Landes 1969: 29-30.

4 Elvin 1973. Elvin was in fact trying to explain technological ‘stagnation’ from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

5 Clunas 1991.

6 Brook 1998.

7 Brook 1998: 10.

8 Brook 1998.

9 Tsuji 2002: 18.

10 Bray 2000: 11.

11 Brook 1998: 69. McDermott (personal communication) remarks that ‘a key point to recall about Chinese “merchants” is that virtually no Chinese male, from members of the imperial family down to slaves, was adverse to making profit from commercial transactions, and many often sought to do so. Merchants - i.e., people who did nothing but trade - were for at least the first 1500 years of imperial rule not respected, as the rewards of office were regularly greater than those of trade; once this changed, from the sixteenth century onwards, attitudes towards even full-time merchants shifted and became more positive in some elite circles. There is considerable regional variation in all this from the sixteenth century onwards, but well-to-do traders (as opposed to most traders, who were either peddlers or small shop-owners) certainly did move in official circles if they had the interest and social skills.’

12 Brook 1998: 111. The problem was often with the local rather than the central government, with ‘non-officials’ such as yamen clerks who placed arbitrary charges on merchant outsiders.

13 Brook 1998: 102.

14 Tsien 1985: 96.

15 Brook 1998: 116.

16 Brook 1998: 88-9.

17 Brook 1998: 88. Copper continued to be used in the countryside in many areas.

18 Braudel 1977: 24; Brook 1998: 200. Braudel has made a very detailed study of the forerunners of modern capitalism, including India and China, Japan and Islam. He recognizes that market preconditions for capitalism existed throughout the region but

nevertheless concludes it was only Europe that attained the highest levels of financial operation largely for political reasons. But these he analyses only sketchily, privileging the supposed freedom of European towns and the willingness to gamble. However, the first quality is vague and questionable, the second more apparent perhaps in China, but both were widespread features of merchant culture. I hope to discuss the work of Braudel in greater detail elsewhere. I have largely taken a view of capitalism that defines it according to its mode of production, but it is perfectly possible to see it in terms of the type of exchange it promotes, not simply market or commodity exchange, but the use of the development of certain credit mechanisms. The latter view is associated with Schumpeter, who believed that ‘the development of the law and practice of negotiable paper and of “created” deposits affords the best indication we have for detecting the rise of capitalism’ ([1954] 1994: 78). Ingham remarks that the ‘differentia specifica of capitalism is to be found in its particular monetary institutions’ (2003: 302). Modern finance regarding national debt and taxation represents developed forms of economic transaction but at least in more embryonic forms they were surely present in China, where paper money originated.

19 Brook 1998: 199.

20 Wallerstein 1974: 347ff.

21 Brook 1998: 201.

22 Clunas 1991: 36. The luxury market did not flourish equally strongly throughout China. It was most prominent in the Yangtze Valley, in certain cities along the Grand Canal up to Beijing and along the south-east coast.

23 Clunas 1991: 4.

24 McDermott suggests that large landlords’ share of landholdings arguably increased in size during the last century of the Ming. In the area on which we have most information, the lower Yangtze delta, rich officials felt confident enough to invest their wealth in land; hitherto their fear of taxes and their recollection of the first Ming emperor’s confiscation of the larger holdings in the delta’s core prefectures had persuaded them to minimize their land investments. Properties in the late Ming also swelled through the popularity of the practice of commendation, whereby commoners threatened with taxes preferred to donate their land to official households and become their bondservants (i.e., pay them a rent that was lower than the taxes they would otherwise face). Elsewhere, in Hunan and Henan, imperial household members’ landed estates seem to have grown in size and importance.

25 Clunas 1991: 15.

26 However, Ming literati culture was not greatly interested in the pre-Ming past, except in a superficial way. That does not seem the case with the classics (Nylan 1999).

27 Clunas 1991: 64. These painters were mainly literati, whereas pre-Song painters were usually artisans. After the early seventeenth century virtually all painters were working for money, but it still mattered if that was the only aim. The personalization of calligraphy began, according to Nylan (1999: 19), in the late Eastern Han. Previously, writing had been used ‘to confer added dignity upon a precious object or an exemplary person’, as ‘functional beauty’. Then ‘fine writing begins to be connected with the special abilities and qualities of the person who does it - no longer an anonymous artisan . . . but rather a person of high status himself.’ It now becomes, in his terminology, ‘art’.

28 Burke 1987: 64.

29 Clunas 1991: 117.

30 Clunas 1991: 120. By the sixteenth century, the notion of ‘vulgar’ was applied to a kind of writing. At the very time that the social distinction of amateur and professional became crucial to literati discourse, thanks to the theories of Dong Qichang, most literati painting (wenrenhua) was done for purchase or on order. Nylan (1999: 19) sees the shift of calligraphy from an artisanal activity to an art form as connected with its development as a mark of status for leisured individuals. These became a group that in the Wei-Chin period (CE 220-420) saw itself as a viable alternative to the throne, as a rival source of extragovernmental authority.

31 Rowe 1984: 1.

32 Cohen 2002.

33 Chinese law gave kin and immediate neighbours the right of first refusal in land purchases at least since the Song. These ‘contracts’ might better be called ‘declarations of intent’.

34 Cohen 2002: 90.

35 Appadurai 1986.

36 Mukerji 1983.

37 Clunas 1991: 172.

38 Clunas 1991: 161.

39 From the early Qing the divide between the vulgar and the elegant gave way to the view of many literati of peasants as illiterate, as mindless animals outside the purview of Confucian ideas of humanity and morality. On connoisseurship, see also Nylan 1999.

40 Clunas 1991: 84.

41 Elias 1994. It is widely recognized that politesse was developed earlier in China and other parts of Asia; paper was used for toilet purposes in its early days, centuries before Europe.

42 Pomeranz 2000. Some China experts have queried Pomeranz’s data on the Yangtze valley as exiguous and may exaggerate the strength of the economic growth. They see little technological improvement in the eighteenth century when other parts of China were catching up and the role of merchants was changing.

43 Goody 2003a. In China the urban revolution came around 2200 BCE, late by Near Eastern standards.

44 Parthasarathi 2002: 270.

45 Parthasarathi 2002: 293.

46 Thompson 1967. In fact labour discipline was well developed in many rural societies; see Thomas Smith (1988) on Edo Japan. But the same was true of China in late imperial times and even of simple agricultural regimes of the African kind.

47 Parthasarathi 2002: 280; his italics.

48 Parthasarathi 2002: 288.

The Growth and Interchange of Merchant

Cultures

The word ‘capital’ has been long established in English and other European languages. Its use in the sense of commercial (trader’s) wealth employed to accumulate more wealth dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century (1709). But the notion of a capitalist dates only from the very end of that century, following the Industrial Revolution, when we find it used by Arthur Young (1792) in his account in reference to the rich in France who paid little in direct taxation. In 1845 Disraeli wrote in Sybil of the poverty of the many at a time when ‘the capitalist flourishes; he amasses immense wealth.’ The term capitalism for a whole system occurs in Thackeray’s novel The Newcomes (1854), at the time the notion is also taken over and elaborated most famously by Karl Marx.- Marx develops the idea: ‘The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital. Commodity production, and developed commodity circulation, trade, start from the historical pre-conditions under which it arises. World trade and the world market open up in the seventeenth century the modern life-history of capital.’ According to Marx, we may find capitalist production as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but ‘the capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century.’² He argues that mercantile capital in itself is incapable of explaining the transition of one mode of production to another, though it has a solvent effect on feudalism. However, it is the case that when the alternative means of production emerge, as with the coming of industrialization, then merchant capital becomes available, as in nineteenth-century India and elsewhere, to invest in the new set-up. With this investment there was an overall shift from the production of textiles by putting out in cottage ‘industry’ to their manufacture in mechanized factories by wage labourers largely financed by merchant capital. The combination of the two, capital (not exclusively of merchants) and new means of production, brought about the transformation. Before the latter came about but following increased merchant activity, there occurred a period, noted by Marx, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries when the feudal mode was weakened and the industrial had not yet come into being, when we have the domination of merchants and mercantile culture, manifest in what Nef calls the First Industrial Revolution (about 1540-1640) but which is often referred to as mercantile capitalism.

Marx’s discussion of the origins and development of capitalism is based essentially upon European experience. It was the serfs of the Middle Ages that gave rise to the chartered burghers of the towns out of which the bourgeoisie developed. Capitalism more generally was associated with the bourgeois sector, not only with merchants, which comprised either a subordinate class within earlier societies or a dominant element with the expansion of trading activities and of literate specialisms in Europe as well as in Asia. This development was promoted by the discovery of America, its bullion, and later its cash crops, by the rounding of the Cape and its trade. Growing markets, internal and external, gave rise to industrial production.³ The shift in the mode of production was predicated upon the accumulation of capital facilitated by the importation of precious materials from America and by the profits from trade, including colonial trade. ‘There is no doubt’, Marx writes in Capital, ‘that the great revolution which took place in commerce in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concurrently with the geographical discoveries, and which stimulated the development of commercial capital, were among the principal factors in the transition from feudal to capitalist production.’⁴ What we have seen, I think, is that such an expansion of commerce (except for colonial exchange) was not limited to Europe, even if the subsequent transformation to industrial production initially was thus restricted. And it was that later shift to machines, not commerce, that involved the expansion of a workforce that did not own the means of production.

Others have seen the organization of the workforce as critical. Capitalism exists, in Runciman’s definition, when ‘formally free labour is recruited for regular employment by on-going enterprises competing in the market for profit.’⁵ Formally free labour is found in many circumstances: the transition to capitalism occurs when wage labour becomes dominant in the economy as a whole. The contrast of course is with tied, servile or even slave labour under earlier regimes. But calling capitalist or industrial labour ‘free’ is in some ways misleading. In pre-industrial peasant societies, and especially those practising hoe-agriculture, labour is much ‘freer’. That is certainly how my Ghanaian friend saw the situation. He was wrong in thinking the women were slaves, but not from the perspective of his own ‘freer’ forms of labour. This is not the way economic freedom has been characterized by economists, or by libertarian writers such as J. S. Mill in his essay On Liberty. There it is a question of an individual choosing his own plan of life, and that possibility my friend did not have in the same degree. But, as Peacock points out, ‘the hierarchical order at the place of work seems at complete variance’ with this freedom of action. That is where the workers’ chains in Marx’s account come into play in all industrial societies, for ‘the basis of alienation is technological and not institutional.’⁶

One complication with the notion of capitalism has been the European problem of its development out of ‘feudalism’, which has been defined in terms of rural landholding and tenurial systems. Western theorists discussing the transition tend to examine the earlier economy from the standpoint of the feudal lords and their relationships with the agricultural population; feudalism is defined in these very terms. Undoubtedly this segment included the large majority of people. But the other segment of the people, or of their time, that was involved in sometimes complex relations of manufacture and exchange cannot be neglected. Ever since the urban revolution of the Bronze Age, people and centres have been engaged in specialist activities that have inevitably involved creating and exchanging goods and services for other goods and services, or indeed for money, for exchange value, used to obtain them on a different basis than in the countryside. No one in the towns is self-sufficient; no man or woman is an island. Some of this exchange took place within the urban community, some with, some within, the rural sector, and some outside altogether, largely a luxury trade. And whatever political controls there may have been, a market element necessarily had to be present because incomings had to balance outgoings in some rough kind of way; there had to be some calculation of the profit and the loss. The Indian economic historian Habib⁷writes: ‘We may assume as a universal fact that as an agricultural society develops, interregional exchange in certain agricultural products begins, and on this basis and, still more, on the basis of extraction of surplus from the countryside, an urban economy at last emerges.’

It might appear that to include this notion of surplus is to ignore the problem of the accumulation of capital through the appropriation of a surplus as a result of wage labour. Such an accumulation took place in pre-industrial systems, for example, in the construction of terracing in advanced agriculture. That may be undertaken by the farm workers themselves or by subordinates whose labour is paid for at less than its value to the employer. In both cases, there is accumulation that consists of the productive investment. Part may be spent on luxuries and other consumer items, but even in postBronze Age cultures part may be reinvested in new capacity. That is how mercantile, manufacturing and agricultural enterprises have expanded ever since, much more rapidly of course with the growth of mechanization and industrial production. But continuing economic growth was not invented in eighteenth-century Europe, even if its tempo increased rapidly as the opportunities for accumulation expanded.⁸

The rural perspective inevitably raises questions about the ‘origin of towns’ and of the bourgeoisie, that is, their inhabitants, the traders, the ‘professionals’, the shopkeepers, as well as often the producers of the goods they dealt in, and the pure money-men who traded in the goods produced by others. From the feudal standpoint they are treated as marginal, as a future solvent. But looked at from a world perspective, prehistorically as well as historically, it is a different story. Towns and trading were already well developed following the coming of the Bronze Age (around 3000 BCE) which characterized the ancient Near East, Egypt, the Indus valley and the Yellow River valley in China.⁹ Those societies experienced what Gordon Childe called the ‘urban revolution’; towns, traders, professionals and manufacturers were all well established by then, although the last did not fill the dominant positions in society.

The position of merchants in early civilizations was recognized and analysed by Childe in his account of the growth of the first ‘cities’, the first ‘civilization’, in Mesopotamia. Apart from the priesthood, rulers and craftsmen inhabiting the city, there were also ‘the professional merchants or traders, who did not belong to any divine household and therefore did not figure in their lists, but who were essential in organising the imports (and exports) needed for urban life.’¹⁰ Materials had to be brought from Oman, from Iran, from Syria, from Asia Minor and even from Europe. The personnel involved were heterogeneous, probably including Semites, using caravans on land and flotillas by sea. ‘Semi-permanent agencies must be established at the termini for the collection of freight and cargo, just as European business houses have established factories and colonies on the coasts of Africa and China. . . . Owing to these conditions “trade” in the Orient was a more potent agency in the diffusion of culture than it is today.’¹¹ Of Assyrian merchants in Kanes, Anatolia (c.2000 BCE), who left much documentation, Oppenheim writes that they were remarkably free in their movements, could become very rich, had a pride in their social status and upheld high ethical standards.¹² Free craftsmen might travel with the caravans, seeking a market for their skills, practising their own religion; there was, for example, an Indian shrine located in Akkad. ‘If cults were thus transmitted, useful arts and crafts could be diffused just as easily. Trade promoted the pooling of human experience.’¹³ For one thing, commerce increased the heterogeneity of settlements.

‘The indispensable merchants, compelled by their profession to travel’ were of course dependent on the demand for goods and on the development of manufactures; Childe writes of an ‘industrial population’¹⁴ and of the existence of class as well as ethnic differences (and conflict). This ‘new middle class’, using ‘money’ and developing writing and ‘abstract’ measurement, acted as a ‘solvent’ to earlier ‘gentile’ society (the terms are his). I point to towns and their inhabitants because, although they were certainly not dominant until recently, they provided the nodes of systems of exchange, of manufacture largely and of developments of knowledge. They were the core of future changes, economically, politically and in more general cultural terms. They provided the point of the take-off in which they were continuously involved.

There are then considerable problems arising from the preference given to Europe in sequencing world developments. It meant assigning a universal ‘evolutionary’ significance to the passage from antiquity to feudalism, then to capitalism, so that Asia became an exception in not producing feudalism (let us here leave aside the ogre of Asiatic despotisms). On the contrary, we see both East and West as having common roots in the Bronze Age and its urban revolution. And it has been cogently argued that not only is feudalism itself found more widely but that regimes in the East and the West, that is, including the so-called Asiatic despotisms, were both variants of a system that could be called tributary.¹⁵

So the concentration on feudalism has obscured the common origin and played down, in the West, the role of towns. Over time the latter everywhere become increasingly important politically in relation to larger owners of agricultural land, the feudal aristocrats. Their power grew in relation to the rest of the polity, as royalty and aristocracy were obliged to recognize their significance, especially their valuable role as providers of goods, services, finance and ‘high’ culture. For the presence of towns and of the bourgeoisie that inhabited them, including artisans, shopkeepers and service personnel, was essential to the long-term persistence of these systems. The so-called rise of feudalism represented the decline of ‘ancient society’, of the Western inheritors of the urban revolution which led to a decay in urban continuity - but not to its disappearance, even in the West. Meanwhile, in Damascus, Baghdad and numerous other cities in the East, urban life continued and developed. Civilization, written culture, flourished and grew, building on Greek and indirectly Mesopotamian achievements. The same happened in China and in India. Productive systems developed, becoming more complex over time; in China, it was the production of books (with the use of paper and the invention of printing), of rice (with the introduction of double cropping), of silk,¹⁶ of bronze and of china,¹⁷ part of which entered into the export trade. Knowledge networks as well as trade, intrinsic to their existence, spread between East and West.

Remarking on the flow of technology, the historian Thomas Glick writes that, ‘In general, the movement of technological diffusion in the high middle ages follows the trajectory from China and India to the West, through the mediation of Persia, which was also a hearth of technical innovation.’¹⁸ Sinologists try to stress the slowness of transfer, Islamists the speed. That varied. The Chinese were almost a thousand years ahead of Europe in the development of certain foundry techniques, or even simple devices such as the wheelbarrow. Yet the use of paper was diffused from Samarkand in the mideighth century to al-Andalus by the mid-tenth, and ‘Arabic’ numerals in a matter of decades.

Paper was one commodity that, along with porcelain, China produced on ‘the industrial scale’.¹⁹ Paper fragments have been found from the second century BCE. By the Eastern Jin (317-420) it had become part of daily life, being used for a wide variety of purposes. At first it was produced locally, but in 1101 the state set up its own paper factories just for printing paper money. ‘In 1175 there were said to be over 1000 workers in the Hangzhou factory. In Sichuan there were whole villages of paperworkers, often peasants who had given up farming for better wages.’²⁰ The demand was fuelled by the widespread use of funeral money, connected to the ancestral cult and ‘by the huge increase in printing’. This paper was produced in mills; by 1597 ‘one Jangxi district had 30 paper mills, each with 1000 to 2000 workers.’²¹

Paper spread westwards before the coming of the Arabs in the eighth century, taken by Buddhist monks and Silk Road merchants throughout Central Asia. Papers inscribed with Chinese characters and used for notations of purchases have been found from an eighth-century site in the Caucasus Mountains.²² It was first introduced in the Arab world in the eighth century, reaching Muslim Europe in the tenth century, but paper-mills were first established there in the twelfth century. It was often said that the Chinese kept the secret of their knowledge of paper-making until a few artisans were captured by Arabs in the eighth century. Tsien²³ denies this, suggesting rather that the story arose because it was Europeans that later tried to retain the trade secrets, sometimes requiring an oath of loyalty from their factory workers on applying for a patent for monopoly of raw materials and manufacture. Paper migrated eastwards to Korea and Japan early on, and westwards to the Turfan area. It passed to Samarkand, then rapidly to Baghdad, where a second paper-mill was established by Chinese workmen around 794. From then on paper replaced parchment, and the Arabian supply to the European market continued until the fifteenth century. Paper appeared in al-Andalus no later than the tenth century, and the first Spanish mill was established in the city of Xativa, well known for its flax.

‘Bureaucratic necessity may have led Muslim officials to adopt paper, but the availability of paper in the Islamic lands also encouraged an efflorescence of books and written culture incomparably more brilliant than was known anywhere in Europe.’²⁴Copies of books were published in larger numbers than in China, despite their use of printing. They were part of a culture stretching from Cordoba to the borders of China, all of which recognized the sanctity of the Qur’an and of the language in which it was written; it represented a vast common market through which goods and ideas spread rapidly. That was made easier by the fact that the Qur’an gave rise to the extraordinary prestige of writing in Islam - ‘a text-based culture’.

While it took five centuries to reach Samarkand, with the Islamic conquest of that town by the Abbasid dynasty paper was adopted for the bureaucracy, and its use spread to Spain within two centuries. The burgeoning nature of the bureaucracy was encouraged by and at the same time encouraged the use of paper. In the tenth century, the paper-mills in Baghdad may have been supplemented by the produce of the ship-mills moored on the Tigris, although we do not know that they were used for paper-making. However, in an earlier period, in ninth-century Damascus, water-powered paper-mills did exist outside the city. There paper became a major industry, exported widely, including a light-weight variety for the pigeon-post, until the sack of the city by Timur in 1401. After that much paper was imported from Italy, beginning in the 1340s, where the process had been acquired from the Arabs. However, while paper was used for recordkeeping, there was some reluctance at first to use anything but parchment for copying scripture, among Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, though the Muslims were the first to change.

The first Christian-operated mill in Spain was built in 1157, at Vidal on, near the French border. In Italy paper, imported from Sicily, was at first forbidden for official documents, but a mill was eventually built at Fabriano in 1268-76. Later paper-making spread to Bologna (1293) and other cities in the north of Italy. In France the first mill was established at Troyes in 1348. Germany started manufacture at the end of the fourteenth century, and paper was used in the wood-block printing being introduced to Nuremberg. In the Netherlands a paper-mill is said to have existed in 1428, but it was not well established until 1586. In England the first written transactions on paper appear at the beginning of the fourteenth century, with early printers such as Caxton having to use imported materials, but paper-mills appeared before 1495. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, two hundred years later, there were 600 mills in England.

Printing techniques seem to have followed a similar trajectory, there having been close contact between East and West during the Mongol conquests. Block printing, which is first used for Buddhist texts in China between the sixth and ninth centuries CE, already existed in Europe before Gutenberg. When Chinese printing spread to the area inhabited by the Turkish-speaking Uighurs, who used an alphabetic script, movable type was sometimes used, showing this adaptation was ‘natural’, according to Tsien.²⁵ The Uighurs were conquered by the Mongols and incorporated into their armies that eventually conquered Persia. The Chinese impact was strong in the mid-thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries. Paper money was even printed in Tabriz in 1294, following the Chinese practice. In his history of the world (1301-1311) the scholar-official Rushid-eddin gave a brief account of Chinese printing, and although the Islamic religion did not favour printing (the word of God or his prophet had to be copied by hand) some pieces of printed matter dating from 900 to 1380 CE have been found in Egypt.

It was not only paper that was produced industrially. Of China, Ledderose²⁶ writes, ‘Much of what we call Chinese art was produced in factories’, in bronze, silk, lacquer, ceramics and wood. He is quite precise in what he means by factory production, which started very early. And it is differentiated from the workshop consisting of a master craftsman and his apprentices and is defined according to systemic properties, the organization of the workforce, the division of labour, quality control, social production and standardization. The factory is headed by an individual who is not necessarily a

craftsman but is in charge of organizing production.

It is possible, according to Ledderose,²⁷ that the Chinese factory system had an influence on developments in Europe. Pere d’Entrecolles provided detailed descriptions of the process at the time when the first European factory for porcelain was being established in Meissen and when state factories were being set up in seventeenth-century Europe, by Colbert (1619-1685), for example, in France. Europe developed the machines but mass production existed before, especially in ceramics. It was in 1769 that Wedgwood founded a factory in Staffordshire that made full use of the possibilities in the division of labour and concentrated on factory discipline.²⁸ Wedgwood derived his knowledge from reading the letters of Pere d’Entrecolles.

The problem with European theorizing becomes especially critical in this discussion of the role of the town and urbanization. Modernization is sometimes equated with the growth of cities, often their excessive growth, as portrayed in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and many other creations of imaginative fiction. But urbanization was clearly a feature not only of the West or yet of capitalism, whatever the patterns of growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early visitors to India were astounded by the size and complexity of the towns, as was Marco Polo on his voyage to China. So that it could not have been the towns themselves or the town-dwellers that were the critical feature of modern life. As a consequence, European scholars decided that Western towns, and specifically the communes that appeared in north Italy in the early Middle Ages, were fundamentally different. That supposed historical difference was then compared with notional Asiatic cities in an attempt to show that only the former were capable of producing the necessary entrepreneurs, the freedom-loving bourgeoisie, that could form the basis of a capitalist system.

Recent historians of Chinese and Indian cities such as Rowe²⁹ and Gillion— have shown this supposed difference to be highly questionable. So too has the speed with which industrial production has been taken up in Japan, China and South-East Asia, as well as, less prominently perhaps, in the Indian sub-continent. Town-dwellers in many parts seem to have been prepared to adopt new forms of production and the social relationships they entailed, throwing increasing doubt on most ideas of European uniqueness. Not entirely of course: Europe did ‘industrialize’ with machines before other continents, although other regions developed complex manufacture. But capitalism in the wider sense, not to speak of ‘modernization’, is another matter altogether.

A consideration of the rise of the bourgeoisie after the Bronze Age which took place throughout Asia raises a problem of explanation. Archaeologists have to account for developments in the modes of production, such as the shift from the Bronze to the Iron Age, in very general terms, partly because they have no evidence of non-material elements. But many changes such as that to the Neolithic occurred right across the world, so that one cannot assume that it took a particular set of cultural constellations to develop or acquire such features. That is not to say we have to deny the importance of those more particular factors, only to suggest we need to account for some socioeconomic developments in more inclusive terms.

Setting aside for one moment the sudden and radical shift contained in the notion of ‘revolution’, changes in patterns of consumption took place gradually over time related to increasingly complex systems of exchange. These were necessarily linked to changes in the systems of production. Improvements were often being introduced in methods of producing textiles, for example, including the use of simple ‘machinery’. It is an error to see change, always potentially possible even in ‘stagnant’, ‘traditional’ societies, as being invariably cataclysmic. It is more often incremental.

The rise of the bourgeoisie too was a gradual process that took place not only in Western Europe but throughout much of the Eurasiatic world, where it was linked to the extension of trade on an international as well as on a national scale. That transcontinental trade was encouraged by the seizure of bullion from the Americas as well as by the opening of the sea-routes to the East and West Indies in the so-called Age of Exploration. But such activities built on and extended earlier networks, such as the trans-Saharan trade in gold³¹ and the long-standing commerce in spices, silk and other textiles from the East,³² which had already seen the rise of rich merchants in India and elsewhere - where they are attested well before the arrival of the Europeans³³ - as well as in the Near East³⁴ and China.³⁵

Indian traders came mainly from the western Gujarat and eastern Coromandel coasts, but at the time of this European expansion they were to be found in all the major ports of the Indian Ocean and the China Seas. Indeed Vasco da Gama was led to India from East Africa by a Gujarati pilot. From the fifteenth century onwards, Sind in the north also contributed to this growing diaspora. During the Mughal period some traders followed the inland routes leading to Iran and Turan.— According to Arab sources, Indian merchants were present in the port of Siraf in the Persian Gulf from at least the ninth century, and they also frequented the coasts of Oman, Socotra and Aden. And we know from the Geniza documents found in Cairo and from the distribution in India of Christian and Jewish groups from the Near East that the transcontinental trade began well before. And it went East as well as West, to Malacca, to Indo-china and even further east. In the fourteenth century Hindu merchants sailed regularly to the South China Sea, as witness the Hindu temple in the south Chinese port of Quanzhou (Zaitun).

If mercantile wealth and monetary exchange were the solvents of Western ‘feudalism’ (though they had been well represented long before in the classical period), the same must have been true of the regimes (possibly ‘tributary’) of the rest of Eurasia. Although it is often claimed that the ruling circles of Asiatic countries were hostile to traders (indeed the same has been said of many Western rulers), merchants nevertheless existed and, like the specialized ‘literate’ bourgeoisie of lawyers, administrators and priests, performed essential services for them. It was the burgeoning of these services and of trade at all levels, as well as of literate communication more generally, that led to the modifications of those regimes in the interests of the middle classes.

In commenting upon Pomeranz’s theories, Parthasarathi points out that, by treating the areas of divergence in isolation, Pomeranz ‘ignores the important exchanges and links between Europe and Asia, especially in the trade in manufactured goods.’³⁷ This trade across the Eurasian landmass provided an important context for economic activities. And he goes on to argue that that meant economic pressures and opportunities were radically different. But they also had much in common, since all were involved in a joint trading system which required communication between the main parties, including the exchange of certain types of information, despite attempts to control its dispersion. That happened in the production of silk, which began in China about 3000 BCE and the secret of which was protected by the death penalty.³⁸ But that secret was divulged, possibly by two Nestorian monks from Persia in the sixth century who are said to have hidden some eggs in their bamboo staffs. It was not only silk that reached Europe from China via the Arab and the Byzantine worlds but also the processing techniques, initially the spindle-wheel and the reel.³⁹ The Near East already had a flourishing silkweaving industry in the second century CE, importing the raw silk from China. In Spain the Arabs introduced the technology in the eighth century. Subsequent to the Muslim conquests, there was an area of common concern and frequent communication that spread across the whole Eurasiatic continent. Eventually the weaving of silk expanded throughout the Mediterranean, to Corinth, Venice, Palermo and al-Andalus. In Spain, Granada was an early centre. In France the first workshop was set up in Tours at the time of the Crusades. The Italian silk industry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries also depended on imported raw materials, whereas Muslims in Spain and Sicily seem to have used their own. In Italy raw silk production began in the Po valley in the tenth century, probably through the connection with Byzantium and Venice. In Salerno too we find production in the eleventh century, with weavers and cultivators from the East.

The commercial success of Italy in the European silk markets began in the thirteenth century, especially in Lucca, Venice and Florence. Kuhn argues that the implements and machinery for silk production were transmitted from China to Europe mainly by merchants, but over a long period. The spindle-wheel and the reel were part of this transfer. In China a treadle-operated silk-reeling frame was used in the eleventh century; the earliest illustration from Italy dates from about 1510, demonstrating many ‘Chinese’ features. But mainly for economic reasons⁴⁰ techniques did not develop further in China as compared with the highly competitive Italian industry, where much effort was made to retain improvements within towns. In 1272 or 1276 an exile from Lucca, called Borgesano, took the invention of the water-powered throwing-frame to Bologna, where he was abundantly honoured. However, the Bolognese see themselves as having made this further contribution to mechanization in the sixteenth century. The diffusion of knowledge of the mechanized production of thread from Bologna to other towns was restricted. Workers in the industry of that town were forbidden to divulge the secrets of the process on pain of death,⁴¹ while the emigration of silk-mill workers to other cities was also prohibited. Nevertheless the techniques did get transferred to other parts of north Italy and eventually to France and to England early in the eighteenth century, where similar restrictions were applied. ‘Because of the shared activity of trade, medieval mercantile life displayed many similarities, whether in the Mediterranean, island Europe, or around the Baltic.’⁴² Howard is writing of Christian and Islamic cities, but the same applies to life in commercial centres elsewhere. Parallelisms were frequent.

The movement of information in different forms can be seen as intercontinental. Indeed it had to be, since it was based on international exchange; the demand for cloth from India led to changes in patterns of consumption in Europe and later in patterns of production in that continent as she tried to reproduce by more mechanical means the cloth of India and the porcelain of China. These were processes that were intrinsic to the Industrial Revolution and were later reproduced in the East. Blaut calls it ‘crisscross diffusion’.

The immediate cause of this revolution, which raises the related question of production rather than of consumption, was the attempt to compete with those oriental imports, a process facilitated by Europe’s access to American gold and to her lands, acquired by conquest and settlement, which had in turn required its specific development of marine technology and of military hardware - of ‘guns and sails’ in Cipolla’s terminology. The development of machines capable of competing in production owed much to the promotion of science and technology in the earlier phase of bourgeois development, which was in turn greatly indebted to the advent of printing and to changes in the mode of communication.⁴³ Together with the increase in scientific knowledge we find the diminishing role of religious understanding, what Weber called the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, though for most individuals that turned out to be a curtailment rather than a dismissal; it was not the end of magic and religion, as many nineteenth-century writers had thought, but their confinement to more limited spheres of belief and action.⁴⁴

It was the Industrial Revolution, demanding heavy investment in machinery and its operators, that changed the mode of production and could be said to have developed ‘capitalism’ - developed rather than introduced, because wage labour (or its equivalent) under a type of class or estate system had existed long before. One aspect of the Bronze Age was that it led to the creation of both an urban and an industrial proletariat, labourers who had no independent access to the means of obtaining a livelihood and who had therefore to work for others - or to depend upon others for charity. What the Industrial Revolution did was to make the vast part of the expanding productive and distributive system totally dependent on wage labour. It also relied of course on the mobilization of capital to provide the systems of production and distribution. In many cases this was effected by private entrepreneurs, or by federations of money-men, who organized the process, but in some cases, by no means always in later socialist societies, it might be carried out by governmental or civil associations (e.g. by unions and cooperatives). The first are capitalist in nature, the second not in the same way at all. The change in the mode of production generalized this system of wage labour throughout society.

Let us posit a model for the cultural development of cities from the time of the urban revolution. Goods were constantly exchanged between them, so too were ways of producing goods and modes of production and of communication in a wider sense - not necessarily the actual methods of irrigation, weaving or writing, but the ideas for setting them in motion. Towns then expanded, producing more specialists, more goods both for consumption and exchange. The gradual improvement of techniques, products and procedures passed along the routes of trade, of travel, communication or pilgrimage, the routes along which goods and peoples moved. As a further illustration of the flow of ideas and techniques we can turn to the work of the Andalusian Maslama (d. 1007) on astronomical tables. He revised tables created by al-Khwarizmi in the Near East in the seventh century, which made use of materials from Indian and Hellenistic sources. There were many other instances. Included in the agents of transmission are religious practitioners who did so much to spread information, as did Buddhist monks with paper-making; in China, the making of brushes, paper and ink was part of a monk’s training.⁴⁵

From the thirteenth century the Eastern influences on Europe expanded because of the opening of the land-route to China (though this had already been used in Roman times); in the twelfth century European artists in the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem consistently imitated Byzantine icons, some of which owed a debt to the Eastern art of India and China.⁴⁶ Products from the East, especially silk and porcelain, had long made an appearance in the West, later mediated by the Islamic world. Then the opening of the sea-route, combined with the growth of the economy and the intense interest in ‘curiosities’, and in knowledge in general, brought in much cheaper imports in larger quantities, which affected tastes over a wider range, principally of town-dwellers, than ever before.

In this way there was a gradual diffusion and growth of knowledge. Not in any straight line of course, for there are many short-term blips and longer-term declines, but these have eventually been overcome in the process of circulation. Especially important in this movement were ports of trade, including sea-ports such as Venice and Constantinople. Let us take Venice as the focus for a discussion of the development of capitalism rather than the ‘feudal’ economy of rural Europe. As early as the ninth century, after the earlier collapse of trade, the port was engaged in a vigorous exchange of goods in the Mediterranean, goods that included European slaves for the Arab market.⁴⁷ These links with the East enabled them in 828, for example, to bring from Alexandria the remains of St Mark, which then became the focus of Christian worship and ecclesiastical building in the city. This was a vibrant merchant community, building its own ships, organizing its own republic, acting as a distribution centre for European goods, particularly from the German states (though they were also in close touch with the Slavs and north Italy), travelling to the East and bringing other goods, mainly luxuries from that region, going on to elaborate its own ‘high’ culture, its magnificent painting, music and architecture.⁴⁸

Venice is particularly interesting from the standpoint of European history and the alternative model it provides for world development. Many European scholars take the rural aspects of ‘feudalism’ as central to the analysis of that mode of production, while the activity of town-dwellers is seen as peripheral, although recognized as gradually

eating away at the foundations of the system. It is true that, as archaeological evidence confirms, after the fall of Rome many towns in Europe went into decline. But while in England Roman Verulamium, for example, collapsed, a Saxon St Albans gradually took its place, minus the theatre, baths and public buildings except for the new churches. And while western Mediterranean trade fell off from its Roman peak, in the East towns such as Alexandria, Cairo and Constantinople continued to engage in multifold exchange activities and in doing so provided a core for the re-emergence of commerce in the western Mediterranean and for the growth of towns in Europe. The towns also became increasingly important politically in relation to great owners of agricultural land, the feudal aristocrats. They then took on a continuous arithmetical increase in size and complexity until they resulted in the vast urban centres of the present day.

During the medieval period the cities of Muslim Spain were important collecting points for merchants and commodities from all regions of the Mediterranean world. They provided markets for long-distance or international trade. The situation changed in the middle of the thirteenth century, when Christian merchants began to dominate following the expansion of Christian naval power in the period of the Crusades. While it lasted, that international commerce was more than the trade in economic goods alone. Many Islamic merchants were also well-educated scholars, so that knowledge and information more generally flowed with commerce in a very distinct way. The growth of commerce was connected to a growth in importance of the bourgeoisie and the development of a compatible knowledge system; it was after all the merchants who demanded more secular education for their children in the Netherlands in the later Middle Ages.⁴⁹

One earlier example of the shifts in leadership that communication promotes has been in the mechanization and industrialization of textile production itself, which, as we have seen, has been associated with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Of course, that country did contribute important innovations, and especially in the techniques and organization of production, that had immense consequences. By 1850 Britain imported nearly 1000 million pounds of cotton a year with which it made cloth to be sold throughout the world. But textiles had long been subject to a measure of mechanization (in the loom itself), and factory organization had played some part in their production. One fascinating example is that of the city of Bologna in northern Italy.

Indeed, if Venice can serve as a model for the growth of trading cities, neighbouring Bologna can do so for manufacturing centres, as well as emphasizing the shifting dominance of such towns in particular industries or in industry in general. The rhythm of such shifts clearly speeded up with the growth of science and technology, but the process itself was already long established.

We are dealing here with activities in a network of merchant cities, not confined to Europe but in this case mainly so. These cities were often in competition. But they tended to exchange goods, and hence information flowed, despite attempts to control some aspects. They also exchanged goods in the realm of ‘high culture’, because the spoils of commerce were employed in decorating houses as well as churches, in supporting musicians and artists of all kinds.⁵⁰

The silk industry of Bologna emerged from that of Lucca, Lucca from that of Muslim Palermo, Lyons in turn from Lucca (and eventually from China by way of the Islamic world). Those were already important merchant towns which experienced developments in the textile industry. These developments were part and parcel of the economic life of merchants, whose activities date back to an earlier period not only in Europe but in Asia too. They were an outgrowth of merchant culture, always in search of profit. Now if Bolognese merchants and manufacturers could show such enterprising characteristics, the peculiarities of the English are no longer so critical to the development of industrial capitalism. The spirit of capitalism was not confined to puritanical Protestants, as a knowledge of Italy’s contribution to modern commerce and banking would already have suggested. Its development was much more connected with the general climate of merchant cultures. Writing of the Bania merchants of north India, the historian Habib⁵¹ notes that they have two Calvinistic virtues, thrift and religious

spirit.

More specifically, neglect of such developments in Italy leads to a neglect of the already important long-distance trade of Venice and Genoa, who were importing luxury products in considerable quantities from the East, sending raw materials, bullion and some manufactured goods in return, such as paper from Bologna and beads made in Venice, though these appear to have served mainly to acquire West African (Guinea) gold to finance those imports well before the arrival of bullion from South America. The pattern had already been established as part of mercantile exchange.

What the case of Bologna makes clear is that the industrialization of manufactures did not suddenly begin with the Industrial Revolution of eighteenth-century England. We have evidence of the production of silk thread by complex machinery in Lucca from the thirteenth century and its adaptation to water power in Bologna in the sixteenth. As the historian Poni describes the silk industrial district of that town, almost all forms of industrial organization were present, the putting-out system and the Kaufsystem for the reeling phase, while the throwing took place in mills run by water-wheels, ‘highly sophisticated plants which were organised as a factory system at least as early as the sixteenth century.’⁵² In these plants the productive process of thread was more or less completely mechanized. ‘The complex network of production was controlled and coordinated by a few merchant manufacturers who brought the raw materials and shifted them from one production phase to another until the final product was obtained. ’ Poni disagrees with Mendels that Bologna was a proto-industrial city;⁵³ it had putting-out (Medick’s criterion) but also industrial activity which transformed a whole district of the town and affected the surrounding countryside as well as the many more distant places, such as Venice, involved in the silk trade which extended to the Near East. Already ‘the Bolognese silk industry was no different, in terms of the organisation and the structure of production, from the English cotton districts in the period around 1750-1820’ (my italics). Indeed, one aspect of that technology was transferred to England by one John Lombe after a prolonged residence in Piedmont (in Italy he is described as an industrial spy) and was used to construct the Great Mill of Derby.

John was the half-brother of Sir Thomas Lombe (1685-1739), a merchant manufacturer who sent him to familiarize the firm with the Italian silk-throwing machinery, the secrets of which were said to be jealously guarded (though in fact a description had been published in 1607). He returned from Italy in 1717 with some Italian workmen and started a new factory, the Great Mill of Derby, in 1719. It is said the silk-throwers of Piedmont were so enraged with Lombe that a woman was dispatched to Derby to gain his confidence and then to poison him. He did indeed die an early death. Meanwhile Sir Thomas took out a patent for ‘a new invention of three sorts of engine never before made or used in Great Britaine, one to winde the finest raw silk, another to spin and another to twist the finest Italian raw silk into organzine in great perfection, which was never before done in this country.’⁵⁴ He tried to renew the patent when it expired after twelve years, but the move was strongly opposed by certain cotton and worsted spinners who wanted to use parts of Lombe’s machinery.

The use of water power was critical for this machinery. Water-mills used for grain seem first to have been reported in Greece in 85 BCE, though the noria may have been earlier⁵⁵ (according to Antipater of Thessalonika). They were found in China in the first century CE, a very rapid transfer if that is what happened. The more efficient overshot wheel, which did not depend on the level of the water, became more widespread in Europe in the third century CE, possibly associated with the freeing of slaves under Christianity and attempts at the easing of women’s labour. Mills were especially important in societies that placed great emphasis on water control, as in Andalusia, and they were used not only for grinding grain but also for providing the water needed in the manufacture of paper, and later, in Bologna, for driving the silk-reeling machines. It has been suggested that in Andalusia the water mill was an afterthought to irrigation, whereas in Castellon milling (a feudal monopoly) was an end in itself and irrigation a by-product. The contrast is a marker of two different kinds of rural social organization, the feudal and hierarchical Christian system and the egalitarian, tribal Muslim one.⁵⁶ In the Industrial Revolution, water became one of the main sources of power in the production of textiles.

The growth of the towns of northern Italy was stimulated by the monopoly in trade between Europe and East Asia, financed by Venetian and Genoan bankers. Venice was fed by the River Po, to which canals were built, from Bologna, for example, to render it accessible to their produce, mainly in the textile industries, for wool, cotton and silk.⁵⁷That trade created great riches and stimulated what Poni calls a ‘court society’ (even without a royal court) which elaborated social distinction on the basis of consumer goods, the refinement of taste and good manners. This in turn increased the demand for luxury goods - for silk clothing, gold and silver jewellery, musical instruments, elegant furniture, books, pictures, spectacles and sculptures - and for the construction of large numbers of palazzi, of gardens and of villas. That development was linked closely to the emergence of a virtually new society, the Renaissance, and it led to a constant search for novel styles which took possession of the whole of Europe, as we are reminded by Shakespeare in Richard II (Act II, scene i):

The open ear of youth doth always listen;

Report of fashions in proud Italy,

Whose manners still our tardy apish nation Limps after in base imitation.

Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity -So it be new, there’s no respect how vile -That is not quickly buzz’d into his ears?

But the church too was a major factor in this change, redecorating old buildings with extravagant baroque ornamentation, especially employing gold leaf, a huge expense which the Protestant merchants of the North and North-West were spared.

Throughout Europe the demand for luxury fabrics increased. Previously it had been Damascus and Burga that had produced the highest quality damascenes, satins and velvets. But with the introduction of silk-mills Italy could now produce excellent thread and cheaper silks; for the mills powered by water could automatically reach the output of 4000 spinners by hand. Import substitution resulted in cheaper silks which not only the rich could afford. Everyone could now dress as nobles, scholars, lawyers or doctors. Sumptuary laws and customs collapsed. So too did Near Eastern centres of production of fine cloth, which now became exporters of the raw silk. It was part of the process of de-development which the advance of industrial production often brings about in its wake.

Silk manufacture spread north to Lyons in France, aided especially by merchants and bankers from Lucca, but others too set up bases there. The papal court at nearby Avignon provided a ready market, and in 1416 Louis XI was already worried about the extent of silk imports. Initially Lyons produced the cheaper silks, depending upon large imports from Italy for the more expensive items, as did other European countries. Italy relied upon the quality of its artisans and the mechanical techniques for production; it was responsible for the transfer to Tours of the loom ‘a la petite tire’ and about 1609 to Lyons of the loom ‘a la grande tire’ from Milan, which was analogous to Chinese devices of the same period.⁵⁸ The scale of Italian production, much for export, was enormous; in the second half of the sixteenth century there were some 8000 looms in Genoa, and it has been estimated that 60 per cent of the population depended on the production of silk for their livelihood.

France was the country that suffered most from the competition of Italian textiles, the dominance of which con-tinued until the end of the seventeenth century. Protests of a mercantilist kind had been made since the sixteenth century. But with the growth of the French monarchy under Louis XIV and of his court at Versailles, the situation began to change. The quality of Lyons silks improved, though they still had to pass themselves off as Italian. But with the concentration of the French aristocracy in Paris for a good part of the year, that town came to dominate social life, the supply of luxury goods and the development of ‘la mode\ which did away with sumptuary restrictions. Paris became filled with rich palaces, with theatres and salons, with elaborate gardens and with ‘civilized’ conversation. Merchants from Lyons came there to discover what people were wearing, or wanted to wear, and those visits gave rise to the annual change in fashion that would be created by the manufacturers. Italy could not then keep up with these constant changes; their fashions copied from France were always ‘out of fashion’ by the time they were produced. Gradually the silk trade of Italy capitulated, going first for cheaper products but eventually producing what Poni calls ‘a profound crisis of deindustrialization’ just as Italy had earlier created in the Near East.

In discussing the development of merchant cultures I have not been addressing the establishment of merchant empires, which have been held to arise in Europe between 1350 and 1750.— There were different views about the ‘terms of trade’ under these empires. Adam Smith argued for the benefit of trade between regions of different levels of economic development as ‘mutual and reciprocal’. Trade between the Old and the New World did not fit this pattern because ‘the savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of these unfortunate countries.’ Nevertheless ‘mutual communication’ was likely to restore the proper balance.⁶⁰ Marx on the other hand saw no possibility of equal exchange where power was unequal. ‘A dominant merchant capital presents itself everywhere as a system of plunder, just as development, whether under the merchant peoples of ancient or of modern times, is bound up with violent plunder, piracy, enslavement and colonial subjugation.’⁶¹ That notion seems mistaken for the earlier times, when there was much exchange between merchant cultures that were largely equal and interdependent. But where economic levels were very different, and especially when military power was unequal, Marx was often correct. Such an inequality was particularly marked after the invention of firearms, when Europeans operated from conditions of unequal power. They could establish virtually their own conditions for trade in many circumstances, especially in the case of those major colonial crops of sugar, cotton, tobacco and coffee or tea. Plantations were set up, manned by slave or indentured labour, or in Taiwan or India by low-paid local workers. The owners negotiated the terms of trade with their compatriots under restricted market conditions, and the whole set-up was very different from the reciprocal exchange which marked non-colonial long-distance trade. It was to the latter that Adam Smith’s notions were more applicable, to the colonial and neo-colonial trade that Marx’s comments applied. Ports of trade can exist more or less independently of trading empires, which arose after the Age of Exploration when European states became heavily dependent upon long-distance trade and upon the acquisition of territory and advantage in promoting that trade. The early phase of these empires is described as ‘the Age of Partnership’ or ‘of competition’. While initially the partners were of equal rank, one had muskets and cannon (later the Gatling gun and nuclear weapons), the other not. The only

true equality that occurred was before expansion.

Let me return to the question of merchant cultures. I am using the term ‘merchant’ here in a much wider way in relation to largely urban cultures based on the exchange of goods and services, and the inhabitants of towns, as well as to the actual process of exchange, over long and short distances. This is a much more inclusive usage than, say, that of Wallerstein,— and there may be better ways of characterizing the situation.

This is something different not only from the merchant empires⁶³ but also from merchant communities, a term Mauro— used for the Hanseatic League and for the great merchant associations (such as the East India Company) which he sees as developing out of them. The Hanseatic League consisted of a series of north German towns who signed a treaty of mutual protection against the Holy Roman Empire and to ward off competition from Hollanders and south Germans. Merchant cultures are not part of specific merchant communities in this sense, rather the reverse, though they may be of merchant empires. But these cultures do resemble each other not only in their trading activities but also in their ‘high’ culture. When I speak of merchant cultures I am referring to the whole urban network, the manufacturers or suppliers of the goods that enter into exchange, the body of lawyers, doctors and professionals, the craftsmen and artisans required to operate the system. The latter groups also ministered to the needs of the landowners and the church but their importance lessened as those of the bourgeoisie grew. They also displayed many similarities. Of the merchants of the Indian Ocean, mostly from the Near East, Mauro writes: ‘What is most remarkable, first of all, is their similarity to the merchants of the West. They had almost the same organisation, problems, and difficulties. Merchant communities were cosmopolitan . . . Everywhere .

. . they attempted to achieve prestige as well as cultural influence.’⁶⁵

Habib also argues that Indian trade was not so different from commerce within Western or Central Europe, that we see ‘the creation out of India’s own commercial fabric of institutions like brokerage, deposit banking, bill money, and insurance’,⁶⁶ that is, parallel development based on similar situations. ‘Could it be’, he asks:

that the European triumph over Indian (and Asian) merchants was not, then, one of size and techniques, of companies over peddlers, of joint stock over atomized capital, of seamen over landsmen? Might it not have been more a matter of men-of-war and gun and shot, to which arithmetic and brokerage could provide no answer, whether in the earlier ‘Age of Partnership’, or after Plassey?⁶⁷

In other words, power differences were intrinsic to domination, but at the same time the lead up to industrial capitalism was found in other merchant cultures.

Merchant activity in China has often been seen as stifled by Confucian doctrine and by imperial policy. But maritime trade expanded in the south-eastern coastal provinces after the tenth century.⁶⁸ ‘Long-distance overseas trade for the Chinese was no different than for other trading peoples. It required advanced shipping technology, large capital investment, and some degree of official protection. . . . By the Tang there were many foreign merchant communities, legally based. Merchants developed their skills in a relatively free officially backed trading atmosphere.’— Although at the end of the Yuan

and during the Ming (1368-98) overseas maritime trade was greatly restricted, with a view to creating a more peaceful coastal environment, merchant communities turned to exploiting trading opportunities within the vast territory of China. In any case, the overseas Chinese continued to engage in long-distance trade as well as some of the Chinese themselves. The Hokkien communities of Nagasaki are described as merchants without empire.⁷⁰ Of course they were associated with the Chinese empire, a so-called despotism, but that government left them very much alone. Trading communities could well exist without empire, as in the case of the Italian city-states.

Merchant cultures, or sub-cultures, did not of course exist on their own but were articulated with others. The notion of a merchant culture within ‘tributary societies’ has some link to Gates’s idea of the dialectic between a petty capitalist and a tributary mode of production. Petty capitalists are ‘family business people’⁷¹ rather than merchants, but of course it was within the rural domestic group that much of China’s production of silk was taking place. Apart from ‘popular culture’, there were ‘high’ cultures developed in courts and churches and among merchants and the bourgeoisie, who all have the means to employ artists and to purchase luxury objects. A good deal of attention has been paid to court culture, especially in post-medieval Europe. That was the subject of Elias’s major work⁷² and has been of continuing interest to political historians as well as to literary ones. The role of the court as patron is obvious. So too is that of the church, especially in the medieval period. All three ‘great organizations’, to use Oppenheim’s— term for Mesopotamia, developed partly autonomous cultures or sub-cultures that we may call ‘high’. We see these emerging embryonically even in ‘simple’ African states, like that of the Gonja in northern Ghana, although I have argued that in general culture was relatively homogeneous, partly because of minimal economic differentiation, partly because of constant intermarriage.⁷⁴ There one can see the presence of a simple court, together with merchant groups that are closely linked to the religious sphere. These are not greatly differentiated from the rest of the population; the women married into the chiefs compound came from all other estates including the commoners. And an even simpler society, such as the chiefless LoDagaa of northern Ghana, had nearby a strangers’ quarter, or zongo, inhabited by Muslim merchants, who provided various goods for the neighbouring community - salt, cloth, some manufactured goods - as well as purchasing the limited ‘surplus’ the farmers produced. Small merchant settlements of

this kind existed throughout the tribal areas and constituted part of their political economy.

With the urban revolution, these groups began to emerge not only as distinct estates (Stande), which they had been in Gonja, but as distinct ‘classes’ with their own ‘style of life’. As systems of production and exchange developed, each created their own ‘high’ cultures, patronizing the arts in their own specific way. Court culture can be illustrated by that of the Mughal emperors of India with their Peacock Throne, elaborate architecture, large libraries (Akbar’s was reputed to contain 24,000 volumes), patronage of painters (despite Islamic prohibitions), and scholarly entourage (the regime was described as kaghazi raj, ‘government by paper’).⁷⁵ The court culture, still prominent in some European and Asian states in the eighteenth century, declined in Europe even before the Industrial Revolution; religious cultures too became of less importance, less autonomous, with the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the partial ‘disenchantment of the world’. It was the merchant-bourgeois culture that became dominant in artistic and intellectual life as in the economy and the polity; it organized the democratic process, established an industrial economy, took over the media, encouraged secular enquiry.

My argument does not seek to dismiss the contributions of Marx, Weber and so many others to this great debate but to refocus the discussion, to re-Orient as Gunder Frank would have it, in a broader world-wide frame. This wider perspective necessarily avoids, or reduces, the danger of ethno- or Eurocentrism, and allows other traditions to make their contribution to modern ‘bourgeois’ economies and to knowledge systems. Such traditions experienced troughs as well as peaks of achievements, in China following the Ching (though this has been disputed), in Western Islam following the tenth and eleventh centuries (the Golden Age). Europe too experienced a long period of quiescence in the early Middle Ages, save for some technological achievements.⁷⁶Feudalism hardly represented a very ‘progressive’ period after the fall of classical civilization; its knowledge systems were ‘cabinn’d, cribbed and confined’ by the dominance of religious institutions and thinking. Wickham,⁷⁷ a historian of late antiquity, writes of underdevelopment in Europe in the early Middle Ages using the same term as the economist Amin and others have done about the effects of colonialism in Africa. The medieval historian Duby has indeed spoken of ‘le naufrage de la haute culture’⁷⁸ in Europe between the sixth and the ninth centuries. In some areas that setback continued much longer and entailed a considerable discontinuity with the classical civilizations until aspects of these cultures, especially secular, and particularly in the arts and in knowledge systems, were revived under the Italian Renaissance.

That decline, indeed ‘wreck’, contrasts with the growing strength of Islamic knowledge as witnessed in the creation of encyclopaedias in the ninth century by

Mas’udi of Baghdad and others. The considerable achievements of Chinese encyclopaedias date from somewhat earlier in the Sung and come from a society in which the knowledge of the world was less dominated by a world religion. In Europe we have to await the Summae of Thomas Aquinas, which was purely a summing-up of theological knowledge; the Islamic encyclopaedias fall somewhere in between but also laid much stress on the theological. However, they formed part of a wider knowledge system which, as is well known, played so great an importance in contributing to developments in Europe - in medicine, in mathematics and in many other spheres - by way of its footholds in Sicily and in Andalusia (and Spain more generally). Postclassical Europe rejoined the competition only with the arrival of the twin benefits of printing and paper, radically changing the mode of communication.

It may be that the Industrial Revolution, which soon followed those developments and which all are agreed was a Western European achievement, has given rise to a system of production and of a type of society that will avoid the long-enduring troughs of earlier times (though subject nonetheless to shorter-term recessions). But it does not avoid the shifts of leadership between the nations, for example, in industrial production from England, to Germany and subsequently to the USA, and from there possibly to the East. Indeed, reinforcing my earlier argument of the significance of widespread bourgeois achievement is the fact that many countries in Asia, especially Japan, the ‘Little Tigers’, China itself, much of South-East Asia and some centres in India, have not shown themselves backward in adopting the forms of production developed in Europe (as well as their concomitants), whereas the structural and cultural theories of Marx and Weber provided little hope that they would, except by some process of imitative globalization. But this development is not purely imitative; it builds upon earlier ‘bourgeois’ achievements in science, technology and knowledge more generally, as well as in economic activity.

I return to Pomeranz’s notion of polycentred development. I see this as a feature especially of merchant-bourgeois cultures involved in exchange, including the exchange of information and knowledge. The exchange, and therefore the equalizing process of which Adam Smith wrote, occurred not only in economic activity but in culture more generally. Even the chronology is similar. Lopez⁷⁹ writes of the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages between 950 and 1350; Bray⁸⁰ speaks of the general economic advance of the years 1000-1200; Van der Wee⁸¹ refers to the revival of long-distance trade by the Italian city-states in the late Middle Ages, accelerating in the second millennium with the expansion of overland traffic from China and India. These periods went hand in hand with changes in the production of ‘high’ culture.

It is not altogether surprising then that, with ever increasing exchange, standards of living were rising more or less simultaneously in many parts of the two continents, and so too were standards of culture, of ‘high culture’. So since the beginning of the millennium we find roughly parallel developments in drama and the theatre, in music and musical instruments, in many parts in painting and in storytelling, as well as in the minor ‘arts’ of weaving (clothing), of cuisine,⁸² of the cultivation and use of flowers.⁸³While these activities take different forms in the different areas, they nevertheless reach levels of approximately the same complexity, in trade, production, consumption, and ‘higher’ cultural activities.

All this means rejecting any extreme version of Asiatic or European exceptionalism. Convergences have long been part of human history. There is nothing strange about this situation for either the Bronze Age or before. Archaeologists are always analysing world-wide developments in the manufacture of stone tools and other material artefacts. Part of the convergence is unquestionably developmental; similar initial situations unfold in parallel ways. But we also have to reckon with communication between these cultures, facilitated by changes in the media (paper and printing) as well as in transport (ships and sails). That was an important feature of the growth of textile production. Two features of pre-modern Europe illustrate the point: firstly, the importance of the role of Islam in spreading silk and its processing from China, and secondly, its development in southern Spain and Sicily, then passing to northern Italy, France and elsewhere, only to be overtaken by Indian cotton.

‘ “Modernization” and especially “westernization” are not a level or a stage’ but ‘an ongoing process of change and exchange naturally involving a multitude of parties.’⁸⁴The author, McDermott, takes the example of eye-glasses. There has been some conflict of opinion about where these were invented. Claims have been made for Florence and Siena, but the weight of evidence would suggest Venice, the main Western inheritor of Roman glass-making. As mentioned before, the island factories of Murano produced for the local and overseas markets. This technology seems to have been turned to the making of spectacles in the fourteenth century; the earliest representation appears in a church in the paper-making town of Treviso, near Venice, and dates from 1352.⁸⁵ In the second quarter of the fifteenth century, the Chinese adapted the idea to the local manufacture of spectacles from quartz crystal, producing a great variety of forms as well as developing a type of camera obscura and sketching out the way of making a photographic camera at least a year before Daguerre’s invention in France. In visual machines glass had already been used in connection with shadow plays from the eleventh, possibly from the first, century CE. A parallel series of exchanges and developments took place in the other direction with gunpowder and the compass.

If there is a general tendency, through exchange, for urban cultures to follow one another, how can we account for the European advantage of the nineteenth century? My discussion does not imply that one culture or civilization cannot achieve a temporary advantage - China as the result of the invention of the printing press, and perhaps through tea, India through cotton cloth and spices. Before the Industrial Revolution, the advantage of the West, as Pomeranz and others have argued, was not great. There were gains through the opening up of new sea-routes, the acquisition of colonies and the extension of trade and other contacts, as well as those won through printing with movable type and an alphabetic script, which, with the use of paper, a cheaper medium for reproduction, offered a great extension in the possibilities for creating and reproducing information and for promoting education, developments in which the demands of schooling were also creating a need. These demands were nourished by the new universities and schools of Western Europe in the thirteenth century. However, they did not initiate the search for ‘higher’ knowledge. Schools of a kind we recognize were established in all written cultures. They were often institutions for transmitting knowledge primarily of religious or canonical texts, at least in the Mediterranean regions and in Hinduism, less obviously in Buddhism and Confucianism. But in all these cases there also developed at certain times and in certain places the search for new and increased knowledge. Such a search took place in Islam in the madrasahs that emerged in the eleventh century. Zafrani even speaks of periods of ‘humanism’ in the Islamic tradition of Spain when secular knowledge flourished in a variety of ways. It was not only in Western Europe that these periods occurred, although there they did so perhaps with more radical effects. Before the adoption of printing in Europe the discrepancy in knowledge systems was largely to the benefit of Islam. We have seen the great difference in the holdings of libraries and the production of books. Certainly no knowledge systems had a permanent advantage before this date. Equally, what Marx and others have seen as a unique expansion of economic activity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represented initially not so much the birth of a new mode of production, capitalism, as the heightened rhythm of a process that had been going on for many centuries and in many places. And these developments from the urban revolution were not con-fined to Europe. They were followed by the Industrial Revolution, which had its roots elsewhere but which later did introduce a temporary European advantage, based not on a previous superiority but on an existing comparability.

If it is correct that we perceive a similar level of cultural activity, including the economy as well as culture in the more limited sense, throughout a number of societies in Eurasia, we do not imagine that this parallel development, of the kind that Pomeranz has found in a set of regions dispersed throughout the continents, is the result of the universal forces of history in any semi-mystical way. It results partly from the fact that there was a similar starting point in and unfolding from the Bronze Age (c.3000 BCE), partly because there were extensive networks of communication built up between towns and their inhabitants, largely but not exclusively through trade (pilgrimage and conversion too played a part), which led to the rise and later the dominance of the bourgeoisie and of merchant cultures.

Such cultures are essentially urban cultures but their networks often extend to the country. Indeed the goods in which they deal may be produced in the country domestically, as with silk in China, or by cottage labour, as in pre-industrial Europe. Moreover factories too may be located in the country, for reasons of labour or of power, especially water power. But production cannot be dissociated from distribution and consumption, and it is the towns that form the nodes for the distribution of most goods and services and where their consumption, especially of luxuries, is concentrated. I speak of these as merchant cultures in order not to encapsulate them in towns and to emphasize the critical aspect of exchange. But they also produce (or cause others to produce) and consume, as well as employing a literate bourgeoisie of doctors, lawyers, teachers and agents. For that consumption includes the production of information, literature, art, music and ‘high’ culture more generally.

In my view we can see the growth of modern life in terms of the long-term development of these central constellations, and of the interchange of goods, services and ideas within and between them, rather than in terms of the classical periodization of antiquity, feudalism and capitalism, punctuated by revolutions.

Notes

1 Marx did not use the word ‘capitalism’ until the late 1870s. The first reference in

English appears to be by Thackeray in 1854, but the term was not widely used until the

latter part of that century.

2 Capital 1, pp. 787 and 163, translated by Sweezy and Hilton (eds) 1978: 50.

3 Communist Manifesto (1848).

4 Capital III, p. 364; Bottomore and Rubel 1956: 130.

5 Runciman 1995.

6 Peacock 1987: 35.

7 Habib 1990: 372.

8 Nell 1987.

9 I am clearly setting aside the developments in Central and South America so well

described in Adams 1966.

10 Childe 1964: 104.

11 Childe 1964: 105.

12 Childe 1964: 92; Oppenheim 1964.

13 Childe 1964: 9.

14 Childe 1964: 109.

15 Wolf 1982.

16 Bray 2000.

17 Ledderose 1992.

18 Glick [n. d.]: 1. In his most illuminating work on irrigation and hydraulic technology, Glick comments (1996: 5) that I applied a Wittfogel-style model to Islamic Spain and assume ‘the servile conditions of the peasantry in irrigated areas’, an idea that Guichard associates with Braudel’s dogmatic notion that the dry zone is inhabited by relatively free peasants, the irrigated by the peasant slave. There is no specific reference to my work, and I certainly never employed the notion of slavery in this context; moreover I give ‘servile’ a much wider meaning. I do see mountain people practising rain-fed agriculture as being less constrained than those in the plain, though I certainly don’t give this difference the developmental significance of Mann, Jones and others (see pp. 41-2).

19 Bray 2000: 9. The invention of cheap paper in the first century CE saw a great extension of literacy, leading to unemployment as the state could not absorb all the literates. As a result, there was ‘a vastly changed intellectual climate in the Eastern Han’ (Nylan 1999: 38), a differentiation of the literate elite and the development of calligraphy as an art form using a cursive script. Cheap paper also made it easier for the young to be literate as they ‘no longer needed to study with a master to learn a text’ (p. 67).

20 Bray 2000: 9.

21 Bray 2000: 10.

22 Bloom 2001: 40.

23 Tsien 1985: 296.

24 Bloom 2001: 91.

25 Tsien 1985: 306.

26 Ledderose 2000: 4.

27 Ledderose 2000: 101.

28 McKendrick 1961.

29 Rowe 1984.

30 Gillion 1968.

31 Bovill 1968.

32 Miller 1969.

33 Goody 1996a.

34 See Goitein 1967.

35 Rowe 1984.

36 Markovits 2000: 10.

37 Parthasarathi 2002: 279.

38 Gontier 1995: 311.

39 Kuhn 1988: 418.

40 Kuhn 1988: 428.

41 Poni 2001b: 204.

42 Howard 2000: 113.

43 Eisenstein 1979.

44 For a general account of the new industrialists of the eighteenth century and their scholarly activities, see Uglow 2002. Few were university trained but most were dissenters or free thinkers.

45 Bloom 2001: 40.

46 Lach 1965: 35-6.

47 McCormick 2003.

48 Romanelli 1997.

49 Nicholas 1985.

50 See Howard 2000.

51 Habib 1990: 384.

52 Poni 2001b: 201.

53 Poni 2001b: 220.

54 Dictionary of National Biography (1893).

55 Mokyr 1990: 27.

56 Glick 1992: 982.

57 Poni 2001a: 6.

58 Poni 2001a: 8; Elvin 1973.

59 Tracy 1990.

60 Adam Smith, quoted in Tracy 1990: 5.

61 Marx 1966: 3,343.

62 Wallerstein 1974: 19.

63 Tracy 1990.

64 Mauro 1990.

65 Mauro 1990: 278.

66 Habib 1990: 398.

67 Habib 1990: 399.

68 Wang Gungwu 1990: 401.

69 Wang Gungwu 1990: 404.

70 Wang Gungwu 1990.

71 Gates 1996: 21.

72 Elias 1939.

73 Oppenheim 1964.

74 Goody 1971.

75 Murphy 1982.

76 See White 1962, taking into account the reservations of Blaut 2000.

77 Wickham 1994: v.

78 Duby 1996: x.

79 Lopez 1971.

80 Bray 2000.

81 Van der Wee 1990: 15.

82 Goody 1982.

83 Goody 1993.

84 McDermott 2001: 10.

85 R. Corti, L’ochiale, che storia. Scuola Officina 1 (2002) 24-9.

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Index

accumulation, continuing

Africa; population; slavery; terracing

agriculture; advanced; animal traction; cash crops; Chinese; commercialized; rain-fed;

rice; shifting; three field system

AIDS

al-Andalus

Alexandria

alienation; of property

architecture

art; artists; patronage

artisan

astronomical instruments

astronomy; astrolabe

Avignon

Bacon, Francis

Baghdad

banking; deposit

baths

beads

blast furnaces Blaut, J. M.

Bois, G.

Bologna

botany

bourgeoisie; achievement of; development of; literate

Braudel, Fernand

Bray, Francesca

Brenner, Robert

Britain; in-living servants

brokerage

Bronze Age

Brook, T

Buddhism

bureaucracy

Byzantium

Cairo

camera obscura

capitalism; agricultural; and pluralism; and production; and profit; and state; capital; capital availability; capital-intensive; commercial; definition of; industrial; late; logic of; mercantile; petty; proto-capitalism; spirit of; sprouts of; symbolic carvel technique Chaudhuri, K. N.

Chayanov, A. V V Childe, Gordon Christianity Cipolla, C. M.

civilization; antiquity; civilizing process; classical class

climatological decline

clocks

cloth

Clunas, C.

cognition

collectivism

colonization/colonialism; colonial trade commerce: agriculture; commercialization; exchange commodification; circulation of commodities

communication: and state; between cultures; development of; growth of; modes of; mutual; speed of communism, primitive

community; pastoral and mountain; solidarity

comparative advantage

compass

competition; age of Confucianism conscience Constantinople

consumption; conspicuous; luxury; patterns of; sumptuary

Cordoba core areas Coser, Ruth

cottage industries; putting out cottage-based piece rate cotton

culture; beliefs and values; communication between; court; cultural ideology; cultural

impoverishment; cultural incapability; high; luxury; material; merchant; of credit;

popular; religious; urban; vs. ideology; written

Damascus

democracy

demography; see also population de Roover, R.

despotism; Asiatic; organization; oriental

development; de-development; economic; of knowledge; of bourgeoisie; parallel;

polycentred; underdevelopment

de Vries, J.

diffusion; criss-cross

‘disenchantment of the world’

double-entry book-keeping

Dumont, Louis

Durkheim, Emile

East-West

economy: and stratification; development of; feudal; growth of; market; maximization; merchant; of reputation; revolution of; stagnation; world

education; centres of learning; European; examination system; Greek learning; growth of

learning; madrasahs; Renaissance academies; scholars; schools; secular; teaching;

universities

egalitarianism

Elias, Norbert; figurations

elites; landed

emigrants

empires; merchant; non-European

encyclopaedias

Engels, Frederick

engineering: hydraulic; metallurgical

Enlightenment

enterprise

entrepreneurship; characteristics of

environment; determinism; ecological explanations; ecological problems;

environmentalism; geographical factors

escapement device

Evans-Pritchard, E. E.

exceptionalism, European

exchange; bills of; commercial; freedom to; interregional; inventive; merchant; parallel; reciprocal

expatriate minorities exploration; age of eye-glasses

factory: at Hangzhou; labour; organization of; paper; production; system

family; affective; complex households; congruent love; divorce; elementary; extended;

kinship; lateral kin; marriage; mobility; nuclear; reproduction; romantic love; sexuality;

strategies of heirship; structure

fashion

feudalism; and aristocrats; and economy; production in

fiction

figurations

Finley, M. I.

food: animal protein; beer and wine; coffee; cuisine; industrialization of; luxury; pasta;

processing technologies; rye bread; salt; standard of cuisine; sugar; tea

Fortes, Meyer

Foucault, Michel

foundry techniques

France; Huguenots

Frank, Andre Gunder

freedom; and bourgeoisie; civil; intellectual; of choice; to exchange frontier

fundamentalist reaction

furniture

gambling

gardens

Geertz, Clifford

Geniza

Genoa

gentility

Germany; Germanic inheritance Ghana: Gonja; LoDagaa Giddens, Anthony glass

Glick, Thomas globalization; imitative Goffman, Erving Goitein, S. D.

Golden Age gold leaf Great Divergence Great Mill of Derby ‘great organizations’

Greece; learning

growth: continuous; sustainable

Gujarat

guns; caravels; modes of destruction; powder

Habermas, Jurgen

Hall, John

hierarchy of estates

‘high-level’ equilibrium trap

Hilton, Rodney

Hobsbawm, E.

Holland horse; collar humanism imperialism import substitution India; Mughal

individualism; and heirship; competitive examination; honorific; individualistic

calculations; individuation; possessive

Indo-China industrialization; de-industrialization; industrial population; industrial production; proto- industrial ization

industry: artisan; iron; Italian; knowledge; textile; silk

innovation

insurance

investment; capital; dividends; productive; security; shares

irrigation; hydraulic works

Islam; knowledge; Qur’an; rebellions

Japan; fireworks; Kabuki theatre; kazari; national character; prostitution; restraint;

samurai

joint stock

Jones, E. L.

Judaeo-Christian tradition Judaeo-Muslim culture Judaism Kanto plain Kaufsystem

knowledge: as commodity; development; ‘higher’; Islamic; movement of ideas; new; secular; systems Kondratieff (cycles)

labour: cottage; division of; factory; free; indentured; intensive; productive;

propertyless; servile/slave; wage; women’s; work discipline; workforce

land: contracts; differential ownership; landowners; tenure

Landes, David

Laslett, Peter

Ledderose, L.

Levi-Strauss, Claude: and elementary systems

liberty

libraries

literacy; and bourgeoisie; canonical texts; Greek alphabet; literate specialism; literati Little Tigers Lombe, John Lucca; knowledge

luxury: behaviour; connoisseurship; consumption; culture of; curiosities; fabrics; goods;

literature on; production of; ‘superfluous things’; trade

Lyons

Macfarlane, Alan Magna Carta Maine, Henry Malacca Malthus, Thomas mandarins Mann, Michael manufacture; exports

market; and society; common; economy and; free

Marx, Karl

Marxisant approach

Marxism

materialism

mathematics; Arabic numerals

mechanization

medicine

merchant/mercantile; adventurers; associations; capital; classes; community; culture;

economy; empires; estate; exchange; expanding activity; ideology; scholars

Mesopotamia

modernity/modernization

Mokyr, Joel

money; money-men

Mongols

monopolistic practices Moriscos Muldrew, C.

Murano

Nagasaki

natural world, socialization of

navigation

Needham, Joseph

Nef, J. U.

nomads

noria

norms, conformity to ornamentation, baroque

palaces

Palermo

papal court

paper; factories; mills; parchment

Parsons, Talcott

partnership, age of

patent

peddlers

periodicity

periodization, classical

peripheral areas

philosophy

photography

pilgrimage

pirates

Pirenne, Henri plantations

pleasure; confusion of plough

polycentric universe Pomeranz, K.

population: African; and anal intercourse; and birth spacing; control; demographic

transition; density; family planning; growth; industrial; infanticide; infant mortality; male

promiscuity and female circumcision; moral restraint; of China; positive vs.

preventative checks; post-partum taboo; procreation; pro-natalist family policies

porcelain

pottery

poverty

power; coal; steam; water; wind precious metals

printing; and book production; as mechanization of writing; press; woodblock production: booty; commodity; factory; feudal; household level; industrial; luxury; mass; means of; mode of; output; proto-industrial; relations of; seigneurial; silk; social organization of; socialism; specialist activities; textile; tributary proletariat property: alienation; and patriarchy; ownership; private; rights; security of; seigneurial;

transactions; transmission

prostitution

Protestantism; Protestant ethic

puritanism

quadrant

Quanzhou

race

rationality; rational optimization

record keeping

reel

Reformation

religion; and culture; priesthood

Renaissance; Italian

rent

republican ideal resource constraints restraint; aesthetic

revolution; agricultural; bourgeois; commercial; economic; English; First Industrial; French; Industrial; medieval economic; nautical; scientific; technological; urban risk

Robinson Crusoe

roles: articulation; segmentation

rudder

rule of law

Runciman, W G.

Schama, Simon Schumpeter, J.

science; advance of; language of proof

sea travel; maritime trade; naval power; ports of trade; shipping technology

secularization; curriculum

servants, in-living

shadow plays

ship-mills

Sicily

silk; machinery for production; secrets

Silk Route

Sind

slavery

Smith, Adam

socialism; regimes

social mobility

social relations, complexity of

society: ancient; court; hydraulic; market; tributary

sociology, structural-functional

solidarity

Sombart, Werner

spices

Stande

state, role of

Stone, Lawrence

sumptuary legislation

surplus; appropriation

taste, ladder of

taxes

tax grain

tea ceremony

technology; change; creativity; determinism; dialogue; shipping theatre

thought: abstract; reflection; self-consciousness

thrift

tobacco

Toledo

towns; Asiatic city; growth of; origin of; proto-industrial city; role of; trading cities; urban commune

trade; caravan; cities; colonial; Eurasian; export; free; joint system; long-distance;

luxury; maritime; monopoly; ports; secret; terms of; transcontinental

trading systems

translators

Turks

Tylor, E. B.

Uighurs

‘uniformitarianism’

urbanization

utility maximization

Venice

Versailles

Verulamium

Wallerstein, Immanuel

wars/warfare; military fiscalism; military power water: contracts; mills; wheels weaving Weber, Max

West: and Rest; civilization Westernization

wheel; barrow; overshot; spindle; spinning; water

White, Lynn

winding machines

windmills

Wittfogel, Karl

Wolf, Arthur

work: ethic; force; values world system Wrigley, Anthony writing; written culture Yangtze delta Zheng He

AND MODERNITY

the o k b a t d e b a t u

Jack Goody

Table of Contents

A cknowledgem ents

Introduction: the Notion of Capitalism and the Rewriting of World History

Notes

Culture and the Economy in Early Europe

Notes

The Sixteenth Century

Notes

The Other Side of the Coin

Notes

Malthus and the East

Notes

The Challenge of China

Notes

The Growth and Interchange of Merchant

Cultures

Notes

References and Bibliography

Index