ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (ann.)

By Andre Gunder Frank, Announcement of a forthcoming book, n.d.

Evaluation

Evaluation by eight referees commissioned by four publishers:

1.Anonymous A
2.Bin Wong—Univ. of California
3.Mark Selden—State Univ. New York
4.Albert Bergesen—Univ. Arizona
5.Anonymous B
6.Kenneth Pomeranz—Univ. of Calif.
7.David Smith—Univ. of Calif.
8.Stephen Fuller—Durham Univ. UK

A work of highest intellectual, social and moral importance. Specialists will welcome the forcefulness, verve, and coherence of Frank's BIG PICTURE. Much of it will be completely new to many other historians and social scientists who will have to change their views and rewrite their lectures after they read it. Would have a major impact [1].

This is a stimulating and exiting book written in a style to challenge received wisdom. This book breaks new ground with an historiographic self- consciousness that should make it accessible to readers who will nevertheless find the major theses a basic challenge to their assumptions and understandings of early modern world history. The great virtue of this book is its relentless push to redefine our framework for thinking about the early modern economy. At this large task I believe the author has succeeded. I believe this book could become a benchmark study [2].

This can be a landmark book that not only arouses powerful controversy but shapes substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact [3].

The book is clearly written and understandable. The scholarship is superior. The greatness of this book is that it touches a number of intellectual nerves [with] an important thesis that will generate much discussion and intellectual debate because it forces a rethinking. Will command a very general audience. There is no directly competing book [4].

Compelling argument against Eurocentrism, for holistic theory/ὔglobologyὕ to understand the whole world. Forces us to turn the telescope of world history around to see that the focus was, and is Asia NOT Europe [5].

This will be an extremely important book of sufficient originality and importance ... at the intersection of several important literatures [to] have a major impact. It could not be more ambitious [6].

Impressive breadth of scholarship. Succeeds in its overall argument. Persuasive, approaching CONVINCING. Conclusion is IMPORTANT [7].

A very provocative read. A fair competitor with Francis Fukuyama's THE END OF HISTORY [8].

This is a bold new interpretation that ... creates a distinctive argument to explain Europe's post-1800 successes. The author places his argument in an even longer-run perspective to suggest that Europe's 'rise' may be just a temporary one bracketed on either side by eras of Asian dominance. It departs from virtually all other 'global' or 'world' system perspectives by arguing that Europe was not the central location of economic dynamism in the early modern world (1400-1800) and therefore that 'capitalism' was not a unique cultural phenomenon that can explain the differential economic success of Europe over Asia. The author redefines our baseline for assessing the 'rise' of Europe [2].

The book is a plea for global studies as a general historical proposition. What is most impressive to this reader is where you succeed in bringing to bear ample data to demonstrate the logic of world economy processes. You are probably correct in essentials on many of the boldest hypotheses, and notably the global framing of the economy, on the argument of the centrality of Asia for the period 1400-1800, and on the rejection of the entire Eurocentric analysis of incorporation, 1500 and all that [3].

It aims, first, to provide a new account of the rise of Western Europe in which the actions and institutions of Europe itself become far less important than forces that operated at the global level, and were largely a product of developments that began in East and South Asia circa 1400, and were then accelerated by the rush of New World silver after 1500. It was this silver alone that enabled Europeans to move from a very marginal position in the world economy to a significant one, and later to a (temporarily) dominant one. Then, as if these claims were not enough, the book moves to argue that almost all received social theory is wrong, since it a) directs our attention to supposedly unique features of European society that were actually neither very unusual nor of much importance in explaining the divergent development paths, and b) directs our attention away from [these and to] attempting analysis at the global level, which the author claims is by far the most illuminating place to look for explanations of what may at first seem like regional differences [6].

No other work both provides the exhaustive documentation and the theoretical clarity and conviction of thesis. You get the feel of the interconnectedness of the world in a way ... not felt before and the reminder that according to all received theory this is not supposed to be so. That is the power of this book. Frank gained his world wide fame by making an argument that caused a revolution in thinking about Third World Development. Well, the same thing is about to happen again, except this time the stakes are much higher. Now it is the theories of the endogenous nature of change in the West that is being challenged. The Wallersteinian world economy did not give rise to the world-system, Frank argues, but the Afroeurasian world system gave rise to the European world economy. To correct the historical fact is to challenge the theoretical scaffolding of everyone from Marx to Weber to Braudel to Wallerstein. Frank's point is that they simply got it wrong. [He] turns on their heads many of the received assumptions about the origin of the modern world system/economy. The book is that conceptually important [5].

Author's Abstract

This book outlines and analyzes the global economy and its sectoral and regional division of labor and cyclical dynamic from 1400 to 1800. The evidence and argument are that within this global economy Asians and particularly Chinese were preponderant, no more "traditional" than Europeans, and in fact largely far less so. Moreover, the Europeans did not do anything—let alone "modernize"—by themselves. That contention turns the tables on the last two centuries of historiography and social science, and indeed also of the humanities a la "the East is East, and the West is West, and never the twain shall meet." They DID meet, albeit not at all on the alleged European terms, and the question is WHY?

The book builds up, chapter by chapter, the global scaffolding that will permit the construction of at least preliminary answers derived from the structure and dynamic of the world economy as a whole. Chapter 2 outlines the productive division of labor and the multilateral trade framework, as well as the sectoral and regional inter-connections within the global economy. Chapter 3 signals how American and Japanese money went around the world circulatory system and provided the life blood that made the world go round. Chapter 4 examines the resulting world population, productive, income and trade quantities, the related technological qualities and institutional mechanisms, as well as how several regions in Asia maintained and even increased their global preponderance therein. Chapters 5 and 6 propose a global macrohistory that treats the Decline of the East and the Rise of the West as related and successive processes within and generated by the global world economic structure and dynamic. Chapter 6 inquires how Asia's world economic advantage between 1400 and 1800 turned to its disadvantage and to the [temporary] advantage of the West to face the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. World-encompassing macro- and micro-economic analysis is used to account for The Rise of the West in global instead of the received Eurocentric terms.

The introductory Chapter 1 suggests that received historiography and social theory fall seriously short of what we need. Marx and Weber or Parsons and Rostow and their many disciples are far and away too Eurocentric, and Braudel and Wallerstein also are still not nearly holistic enough. None of them is able, or even willing, to address the global problematique, whose whole is more than the sum or its parts. Chapter 7 then builds on the historical evidence and argument of this book to derive theoretical conclusions about how to analyze this global whole. Only a globally holistic analysis can permit a better, indeed any even minimally satisfactory, comprehension of how the whole world economic structure and dynamic shape and differentiate its sectoral and regional parts East and West, North and South. Recourse to a more holistic global historiography and social theory suggests how Asian, and particularly Chinese, predominance in the world economy through the eighteenth century presages its return to dominance also in the twenty-first century.

EPIGRAPHS

PREFACE

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION TO REAL WORLD HISTORY VS. EUROCENTRIC SOCIAL THEORY
HOLISTIC METHODOLOGY AND OBJECTIVES
GLOBALISM, NOT EUROCENTRISM
CHAPTER OUTLINE OF A GLOBAL ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE
ANTICIPATING AND CONFRONTING RESISTANCE AND OBSTACLES

Chapter 2:

THE GLOBAL TRADE CAROUSEL 1400-1800
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD ECONOMY

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century Antecedents

The Columbian Exchange and its Consequences

Some Neglected Features in the World Economy

WORLD DIVISION OF LABOR AND BALANCES OF TRADE 1400–1800

Mapping the Global Economy

The Americas

Africa

Europe

West Asia

- The Ottoman Empire

- Safavid Persia

India and the Indian Ocean

- India

- North India

- Gujarat and Malabar

- Coromandel

- Bengal

Southeast Asia

Japan

China

Central Asia

Russia and the Baltics

A Sino-Centric World Economy Summary

Chapter 3:

MONEY WENT AROUND THE WORLD AND MADE THE WORLD GO ROUND
WORLD MONEY: ITS PRODUCTION AND EXCHANGE

Micro- and Marco- Attractions in the World Casino

Dealing and Playing in the Casino

The Numbers Game

HOW DID THE WINNERS USE THEIR MONEY?

Spenders vs Hoarders

Inflation or Production in the Quantity Theory of Money

Money Expanded the Frontiers of Settlement and Production

Chapter 4

THE GLOBAL ECONOMY: COMPARISONS AND RELATIONS
QUANTITIES: POPULATION, PRODUCTION, PRODUCTIVITY, INCOME AND TRADE

Population, Production and Income

Productivity and Competitiveness

World Trade 1400-1800

QUALITIES: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Eurocentrism Regarding Science and Technology in Asia

Guns

Ships

Printing

Textiles

Metallurgy, Coal and Power

Transport

World Technological Development

MECHANISMS: ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

European—Asian Comparisons

Global Institutional Relations

--In India

--In China

Chapter 5

HORIZONTALLY INTEGRATIVE MACROHISTORY
SIMULTANEITY IS NO COINCIDENCE
DOING HORIZONTALLY INTEGRATIVE MACROHISTORY

Demographic/Structural Analysis

A "Seventeenth Century Crisis"?

Monetary Analysis and the Crises of 1640

Kondratieff Analysis

Crisis/Recessions in the 1762–1790 Kondratieff “B” Phase

More Horizontally Integrative Macrohistory?

Chapter 6

WHY DID THE WEST RISE [TEMPORARILY ?]
UP AND DOWN THE LONG CYCLE ROLLICOASTER?
THE DECLINE OF THE EAST PRECEDED THE RISE OF THE WEST

The Decline in India

The Decline Elsewhere in Asia

HOW DID THE WEST RISE?

Climbing Up on Asian Shoulders

Supply and Demand for Technological Change in the World Economy: A Hypothesis

Supplies and Sources of Capital

A GLOBAL ECONOMIC/DEMOGRAPHIC ACCOUNTING FOR THE DECLINE OF THE EAST AND THE RISE OF THE WEST

A Demographic Economic Model

A High-Level Equilibrium Trap?

The Evidence 1500–1750

The 1750 Inflection

Past Conclusions and Future Implications

Chapter 7

HISTORIOGRAPHIC CONCLUSIONS AND THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS
HISTORIOGRAPHIC CONCLUSIONS: THE EUROCENTRIC EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

1. The Asiatic Mode of Production [AMP]

2. European Exceptionalism

3. A European World-System or a Global Economy?

4. 1500: Continuity or Break?

5. Capitalism?

6. Hegemony?

7. The Rise of the West and the Industrial Revolution

8. Empty Categories and Procrustean Beds

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS: THROUGH THE GLOBAL LOOKING GLASS

1. Holism vs. Partialism

2. Commonality/Similarity vs. Specificity/Difference

3. Continuity vs. Dis-continuities

4. Horizontal Integration vs. Vertical Separation

5. Cycles vs. Linearity.

6. Structure vs. Agency

7. Europe in The World Economic Nutshell

8. Jihad vs. McWorld in the Anarchy of the Clash of Civilizations?

REFERENCES CITED

EPIGRAPH:

ORIENT

THE East; lustrous, sparkling, precious, radiant, rising, nascent;
place or exactly determine position, settle or find bearings;
bring into clearly understood relations; direct towards;
determine how one stands in relation to one's surroundings.
Turn eastward !

ReORIENT

Give new orientation to; readjust, change outlook !!

— from THE CONCISE OXFORD DICTONARY
thank you for being so CONCISE !!!

Andre Gunder Frank
University of Toronto
96 Asquith Ave
Toronto, ON CANADA M4W 1J8

Tel. 1 416 972-0616
Fax. 1 416 972-0071
Email agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca
My home Page is at: http://www.whc.neu.edu/whc/resrch&curric/gunder.html