A Chinese World System, Again?

2015

Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told. How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to the dominant wisdom, capitalism’s origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an examination of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu provide an account of how these diverse events and processes came together to produce capitalism. Table of Contents Introduction The Problem of Eurocentrism Confronting the Problematic of Sociohistorical Difference What is Capitalism? What Is Geopolitics? Chapter 1 The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique Introduction The ‘Commercialization Model’ Revisited: World- Systems Analysis and the Transition to Capitalism The Making of the Modern World- System: The Wallerstein Thesis The Problem of Eurocentrism The Problem of Historical Specificity The Spatio-Temporal Limits of Political Marxism The Brenner Thesis: Explanation and Critique The Geopolitical in the Making of Capitalism The Political Marxist Conception of Capitalism The Problematic of Sociohistorical Difference: Postcolonial Studies Engaging Capital The Eurocentrism of Historicism The Violence of Abstraction The Lacuna of Postcolonial Theory Conclusion Chapter 2 Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism: The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development Introduction The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development: Exposition and Critiques Unevenness Combination Seeing Through a Prism Darkly? Uneven and Combined Development beyond the Eurocentric Gaze Trotsky beyond Trotsky? Uneven and Combined Development before Capitalism More Questions than Answers: Method, Abstraction, and Historicity in Marx’s Thought Modes of Production Versus Uneven and Combined Development? A False Antithesis Conclusion: Towards an ‘Internationalist Historiography’ of Capitalism Chapter 3 The Long Thirteenth Century: Structural Crisis, Conjunctural Catastrophe Introduction Pax Mongolica as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development The Nomadic Mode of Production and Uneven and Combined Development The World-Historical Significance of the Mongol Empire Trade, Commerce, and Socio-Economic Development under the Pax Mongolica Apocalypse Then: The Black Death and the Crisis of Feudalism Class Struggle and the Changing Balance of Class Forces in Europe Peasant Differentiation in the Age of the Black Death Development of the Productive Forces Conclusion Chapter 4 The Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry over the Long 16th Sixteenth Century Introduction Unevenness: A Clash of Social Reproduction Ottoman–European Relations The Tributary and Feudal Modes of Production: Unevenness Combined Ottoman ‘Penalties of Progressiveness’ – European ‘Privileges of Backwardness’ Combination: Pax Ottomana and European Trade The Ottoman ‘Whip of External Necessity’ The Breakdown of Christendom The Ottoman Blockade and the Emergence of the Atlantic The Ottoman Buffer and English Primitive Accumulation Conclusion: The Ottoman Empire as a Vector of Uneven and Combined Development Chapter 5 The Atlantic Sources of European Capitalism, Territorial Sovereignty and the Modern Self Introduction Imagining Europe in the Atlantic Mirror: Rethinking the Territorialised Sovereign, Self and Other Tearing Down the Ideological Walls of Christendom: From Sacred to Secular Universalism in the Construction of the European Self and non-European Other Legitimising Colonialism: The Historical Sociological Foundations of Eurocentrism Culture Wars in the Americas The Colonial Origins of the Modern Territorialised States Systems 1492 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development The Smithian Moment: American Treasures and So-Called Primitive Accumulation Sublating the Smithian Moment: From Smith to Marx via ‘the International’ Primitive Accumulation Proper: From ‘Simple’ to ‘Expanded’ Reproduction The Uneven and Combined Development of Plantation Slavery The Sociological Unevenness of the Atlantic Sociological Combination in the Plantation System New World Slavery and the Rise of Industrial Capitalism Contributions to the Sphere of Circulation Contributions to the Sphere of Production Conclusion: Colonies, Merchants and the Transition to Capitalism Chapter 6 The ‘Classical’ Bourgeois Revolutions in the History of Uneven and Combined Development Introduction The Concept of Bourgeois Revolution Reconceptualising Bourgeois Revolutions: A Consequentialist Approach Reconstructing Consequentialism through Uneven and Combined Development The Origins of Capitalism and the Bourgeois Revolution in the Low Countries The Rise of Dutch Capitalism: An International Perspective The Making of the Dutch Revolt The English Revolution in the History of Uneven and Combined Development Rediscovering the British Revolution Social Forces in the Making of the British Revolution 1789 in the History of Uneven and Combined Development Peculiarities of the French Revolution? Capitalism and the Absolutist State in France The Origins of the Capitalist Revolution in France Capitalist Consequences of the French Revolution Conclusion Chapter 7 Combined Encounters: Dutch Colonisation in South-East Asia and the Contradictions of ‘Free Labour’ Introduction The Specificity and Limits of Dutch Capitalism Dutch Institutional Innovations The Limits of Dutch ‘Domestic’ Capitalism Unevenness and Combination in the Pre-Colonial Indian Ocean Littoral The Intersocietal System of the Indian Ocean South Asia beyond the Eurocentric Gaze The Dutch Encounter: A Policy of Combination The Specificities and ‘Success’ of Dutch Strategies of Integration and Domination in South-East Asia The Moluccas The Banda Islands Indian Textiles Conclusion Chapter 8 Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ Introduction Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’: Advances and Impasses in the Revisionist Challenge Points of Agreement: European ‘Backwardness’ and the Role of the Colonies Late and Lucky: Contingences, the Eurasian Homogeneity Thesis, and the Great Divergence Structure and Conjuncture in the ‘Rise of the West’ The Geopolitical Competition Model and Its Limits Feudalism, Merchants, and the European States System in the Transition to Capitalism Unevenness Combined: North-South Interactions in the ‘Rise of the West’ The Conjunctural Moment of ‘Overtaking’: Britain’s Colonisation of India The Significance of India’s Colonisation to the ‘Rise of the West’ The Mughal Empire and the Tributary Mode of Production The Imperial Revenue System and Agricultural Decline in the Mughal Empire European Trade and Colonial Conquest: Towards 1757 Conclusion Conclusion Notes Index

New Perspectives on Turkey, 2017

Past and Present, 2020

Positions, 2020

The Survival of Capitalism Since the financial crisis of 2008, we have witnessed astounding proclamations indicating that capitalism is dead or at least dying. The similar scene repeats in this COVID-19 pandemic situation. Some experts quickly anticipate the end of global capitalism and the return of the new cold war. Rhetorical expressions such as these emerging from the left were not surprising; however, in this case, the subjects of these utterances were interesting enough. They were not the left, but preferably those who had stood in opposition to the leftist demand to end capitalism. Politicians, policymakers, people in business as well as liberal economists, even comedians, seemed to be waiting for the last breath of capitalism. However, capitalism did not die. It has survived, and so we still live in a world of ridiculous "transformers." Why is this happening? How does capitalism sustain itself ? There are lots of arguments to support the life of capitalism. Still, I think this is the point where we should return to Marx's analysis of capitalism, his approach to the secret of capital, so to speak, the problem of a commodity. We need to reconsider the enigmatic relationship between commodities and capitalism. The material foundation of global capitalism resides in the multinational divisions of labour and the worldwide distribution of commodities. In this capitalist logistics, Asian countries have played a crucial role after the Second World War. The Cold War was the geopolitical strategy to invent so-called Asia. For most of the people in Asia, the Cold War was not so much "cold" as "the hottest" warfare. After the collapse of the socialist bloc, Asian countries seemed turned to be "Factory Asia" based on regional supply chain and the cheap labour-power in the global economy. One day, Asia was the revolutionary countries of a red flag, but now turned the land of promise for global capitalism. Global task allocation allowed China to be the central hub of Global Value Chain (GVC), at the same time, accelerated the integrated trade and disintegrated production. This global transformation ended up with the separation between consumption an production, which seemed to undermine the role of the nation-states in the international relations. As Zygmunt Bauman positions politics EPISTEME ISSUE 3 1

Studies in Political Economy, 1989

I ntroduction The effect of imperialism on the economic development of Third World countries has long been a subject of interest to Marxist scholars. The international expansion of capitalist states, which led to the creation of a world market and the integration of pre-capitalist countries into this market, heralded a new phase of capitalism the implications of which are still being debated. The dominant view of postwar Marxists has been that imperialism created and perpetuated underdevelopment in the Third World. These countries, conceptually located in the periphery of the world capitalist system, have had their development blocked as a result of their economic relations with the imperialist countries. Capitalism, while successfulin developing the productive forces in the countries now at the centre of the capitalist world market, is not capable of performing the same role in the periphery. The solution for the Third World involves 'delinking' from the world economy, self-reliance and socialism.While this has been, and probably still is, the dominant view in postwar Marxist analysis, it has not gone unchallenged. Some scholars, working within the Marxist tradition, have argued that imperialism has, in fact, had a very favourable impact on the Third World in terms of stimulating the development of 'the productive forces. Furthermore, these scholars argue that the end of direct colonial rule in many parts of the world has

How the West Came to Rule is a welcome contribution to Marxist debates on capitalist origins not just for its sharp focus on the issue of Eurocentrism in the way capitalism is written up historically and conceived popularly, 1 but also because it sets out to develop an alternative framework to those histories. The essential feature here is its subsuming of large parts of the world outside and beyond ‗Europe' and the general argument that it is impossible to understand the true origins of western capitalism without assigning a central place to those areas of the world. Stated in this way the argument is unexceptionable, since no Marxists have seriously disagreed with Marx's view that western capitalism (capitalism as it emerged in Britain and more widely in ‗western' countries) would have been impossible without the preceding or accompanying histories of colonial subjugation, Atlantic slavery and the world market more generally. The debates have always been about how much all of that mattered and whether capitalism can really be said to have ‗started' in a single country, notably England, and somehow spread outwards from there. Both the critique of Eurocentrism and the call for a more integrated historiography of capitalism have the potential to steer future Marxist scholarship and debate away from the problematics and framing guidelines of the transition debates, not least of the one dominated by the work of Brenner and the perspectives of what is called ―Political Marxism‖. But for this shift to new ways of thinking about capitalist origins to come about How the West needs at least a preliminary critique that rids it both of its residual formalism (as I see it) and of the one or two confused characterizations this leads to. Whether ‗combined and uneven development' really does work as a framework of explanation at the level of generality at which the authors situate it (that is, beyond the dynamics of a capitalist world dominated by a mounting sense of nationality) is a separate issue that I shall leave aside for others to take up.

This conference is timed to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of Giovanni Arrighi and Fortunata Piselli's "Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments: Feuds, Class Struggles and Migrations in a Peripheral Region of Southern Italy". Published in 1987, the essay confronts the question of capitalist (under) development in Calabria in the 19th and 20th centuries; in the process, it also makes a major intervention into debates about the origins and dynamics of capitalism. "Capitalist Development in Hostile Environments" puts forward the thesis that three different developmental paths emerged side-by-side within Calabria: the "Junker" Road with large latifundia and intense class conflict (in the Crotonese), the "American" or Farmer Road with strong feuds (in the Piana di Gioia Tauro), and the "Swiss" Road, where mass migration went hand-in-hand with a decline in both class conflicts and feuds (in the Cosentino). While these three paths led to core status elsewhere (Prussia, the United States, Switzerland), in Calabria all three paths were associated with peripheralization. At the same time, however, these three roads produced very different outcomes in terms of human welfare. To mark both, the 30th anniversary of the English language version and the release of the Italian publication, the University of Calabria will host an international conference, which will take place from June 6 to 8, 2017. The goal of the conference is to stimulate critical reflection on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological contributions of the essay, as well as the key questions and debates that it confronts.

In K. R. Shyam Sundar (ed.), Perspectives on Neoliberalism, Labour and Globalization in India,, 2019

2009

Asia after the Developmental State

Macroeconomics and Finance Research Division (ERMF), assisted by Charissa N. Castillo, coordinated the overall production of the publication. Jean-Pierre A. Verbiest and Cyn-Young Park, together with Akiko Terada-Hagiwara, contributed the first chapter in Part 1, "Overview of economic highlights and prospects." The second chapter in Part 1, "Export or domestic demandled growth in developing Asia?" was prepared by Jesus Felipe and Joseph Lim of the University of the Philippines School of Economics. The special chapter, "Promoting competition for long-term development" was contributed by Douglas Brooks and Lea Sumulong with significant input from Simon Evenett of Oxford University. The ERMF Modeling Team under the supervision of Duo Qin provided projections for the People's Republic of China and the Philippines. Technical and research support was provided

The two centuries old hegemony of the West is coming to an end. The ‘revolutions of modernity’ that fuelled the rise of the West are now accessible to all states. As a result, the power gap that developed during the nineteenth century and which served as the foundation for a core-periphery international order is closing. The result is a shift from a world of ‘centred globalism’ to one of ‘decentred globalism’. At the same time as power is becoming more diffuse, the degree of ideological difference among the leading powers is shrinking. Indeed, because all great powers in the contemporary world are in some form capitalist, the ideological bandwidth of the emerging international order is narrower than it has been for a century. The question is whether this relative ideological homogeneity will generate geoeconomic or geopolitical competition among the four main modes of capitalist governance: liberal democratic, social democratic, competitive authoritarian and state bureaucratic. This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these four modes of capitalist governance, and probes the main contours of inter-capitalist competition. Will the political differences between democratic and authoritarian capitalists override their shared interests or be mediated by them? Will there be conflicting capitalisms along the lines of the early part of the twentieth century? Or will the contemporary world see the development of some kind of concert of capitalist powers? A world of politically differentiated capitalisms is likely to be with us for some time. As such, a central task facing policy makers is to ensure that geoeconomic competition takes place without generating geopolitical conflict.

2025

This document is a summary of the book A History of Global Capitalism: Feuding Elites and Imperial Expansion by Sambit Bhattacharyya (2020). The book analyzes the evolution of global capitalism over five centuries, highlighting elite competition as a driving force behind imperial expansion and geopolitical conflicts. Key events such as the Industrial Revolution, European colonialism, the world wars, the Cold War, and the rise of China, India, and Russia in the 21st century are discussed. Furthermore, the book examines the economic, political, and strategic implications of global capitalism, as well as current trends toward a multipolar system.

The purpose of this article is first to contextualize the concept of the "Global South." Then, we offer an overview of classical and new historiographies of capitalism(s) of the "Global South." We focus on works that examine the period between roughly the 10th and 19th centuries, and further explain how we understand and periodize capitalism. Lastly, we introduce the contributions to this special issue. Methodology: This review is based on a holistic and non-Eurocentric Marxian approach, emphasizing the importance of both internal and external factors, global entanglements and uneven development when studying regional dynamics. We also underline the relevance of both connections and comparisons in understanding and analyzing the genesis and rise of global capitalism(s). In other words, we highlight multifaceted forces at work that may be conceived of in terms of a global dialectical conjuncture. Originality: This is one of the few existing articles that pulls together and briefly outlines the different existing trends in writing the histories of capitalism(s) in the "Global South" before the advent of the 20th century. We discuss developments in China, India, the "Islamicate" world, Latin America, the relationship between modern plantation slavery and capitalism as well the "Great Divergence" debate. In doing so, we identify a "global turn" in recent historiographies of capitalism(s). Conclusions: We suggest that the prevalent binary narratives-either embracing or rejecting the (pre-)capitalist nature of societies, commercial practices and production sites in the "Global South"-do not do justice to the complexity of historical dynamics. Furthermore, many studies lack nuances and do not adequately consider multilinear processes, entanglements between the local and global and shifting multipolar centers of development. More often than not, academics also neglect spatio-temporal specificities, transitional periods between-or the hybrid coexistence of-different modes of production, that is, developments which should neither be reduced to predominantly capitalist nor pre-capitalist relations, processes and structures. We also argue that a return to the concept of totality helps to transcend the oversimplified assumptions and analyses of dominant historical accounts.

2007

Amiya Kumar Bagchi has written a great book, a history of human development as he calls it, which offers a fascinating account of global capitalism as it evolved over a period of four centuries. Bagchi provides a perspective on the global ascendancy of capitalism which is fundamentally different from conventional (western) views of global history. First, Bagchi sets himself against the triumphalist Eurocentric views of historians such as Douglas North, Eric Jones and David Landes. According to these authors, there has been a 'European miracle', which was the result of a long evolution starting around the tenth century and culminating in the creation of free trade and free (unregulated) markets, based on private property rights, and of a 'Weberian' profit-seeking capitalist class. This free-market private-property system made possible rapid capital accumulation and technological progress resulting in the Industrial Revolution, which raised European (Western) standards of living relative to those of the rest of the world and also gifted 'civilization' to the rest of the world. Bagchi shows that reality has been very different. First, there is little evidence in support of European exceptionalism: data show that Europe did not have any competitive edge over India and China in the period prior to the Industrial Revolution. Second, Bagchi makes clear that European capitalism established dominion over the world not as a result of economic superiority or by 'free' trade but by war, subjugation and occupation. It was in warfare that the rest of the world was inferior to Europe's capitalist states. Markets have been continually manipulated by powerful capitalist enterprises (notably the various East India Companies) and by the aggressive power of best-practice technologies of war for territory, trade, markets and colonial tribute. 'Armed capitalism' thus contributed to the advancement of Europe and North America in terms of output and productivity levels during the period 1760-1860-the first 'axial age' in modern history. That Europe advanced at the expense of the rest of the world is epitomized most starkly by the role of the slave trade and slave-run plantations in transferring surplus from the colonized periphery to Europe and then on to the regions of recent European settlement. New estimates by Bagchi of the surplus transferred from India to England show that they formed more than 50 per cent of British foreign investment from 1870-1913; Indian surplus, in other words, was used to finance the build-up of the US economy and Indian deindustrialization and the economic and human deprivation accompanying it was the collateral damage. Of course, the big question that arises is why China and India had fallen so far behind Britain and Western Europe in industrial and military technology by the 1840s. Bagchi's perhaps too short but intriguing answer (pp. 142-3) is that European states, unlike the Chinese and the Indian states, stimulated the creation (by force) of oligopolistic and often outright monopolistic markets, in which a small number of very wealthy producers, owning and controlling resources (including the privatized commons) could reap major economies of scale in production, while at the same time a proletariat of workers was created by marginalizing small farmers and artisans. Thus, it was by reducing competition and by actively creating monopoly power as well as a powerless labour force that the conditions were created for a process of cumulative economic growth-a process which was sustained by war and imperialism. Second, Bagchi's account goes beyond conventional economic histories by focusing on human development, that is, the quality of life of those who lived and worked under the capitalist system.