From Modernization Theory to World History
The theories of underdevelopment and dependency were not the only criticisms of modernization theory. Even if the latter claimed to be part of a tradition of classical sociology and of Weber in particular, many critics viewed it as a theoretical scheme imposed on the historical record rather than as a genuinely historical sociology. A concern to understand the global differently did not only arise from Marx-inspired theoretical critiques, but also from those who wanted an account that was more sensitive to historical research.
In this chapter I examine three such approaches. The first is the work of historian Fernand Braudel who, in distinguishing between his concern to write a ‘world history’ from writing the history of the world, contributed to the establishment of a particular tradition of historical social science, or social-scientific history. Within sociology, this tradition was taken up by both Weberian and Marxist sociologists. I look, in turn, at the grand projects of Michael Mann, on charting the sources of social power, and Immanuel Wallerstein, on delineating the modern world system, as exemplary of this idea of a ‘world history’.
I
Fernand Braudel’s ‘world history’, published as the three-volume series under the general title, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, is explicitly written ‘outside the world of theory’ and is intended ‘to be guided by concrete observation and comparative history alone’ (Braudel 1981: 25). It is a magisterial study of social and economic life that builds an argument about the development of global capitalist economy by drawing together illustrative accounts from around much of the world. The first two volumes, The Structures of Everyday Life (1981) and The Wheels of Commerce (1982), are organized thematically around understandings of material civilization and market economy. The third, The Perspective of the World (1985), in Braudel’s words, ‘is a chronological study of the forms and successive preponderant tendencies of the international economy’ (1981: 25). While Braudel, in reflecting upon the writing of these volumes, says that he does not claim to have depicted everything about the complex world from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, he is nonetheless attempting to assemble various ‘scenes’ to create a coherent whole (1981: 559). The framing device that brings unity to this endeavour is an understanding of capitalism as a system, as having developed in Europe and subsequently diffused around the world to create a world system of capitalism. What will be at issue is precisely what is held to make up that system.
Braudel argues that the meta-narrative of capitalism provides a ‘model’ that enables both an exposition of European history and the incorporation of snapshots of history from elsewhere (1985: 619). While Braudel is critical of those economic histories which focus only on events in Europe, his own volumes are, themselves, oriented to understanding the dynamics of European history with other histories only discussed in light of their relationships (usually subordinate) to Europe. As Braudel states, these volumes constitute ‘a long project backwards from the facilities and habits of present-day life’ (1981: 27); that is, Braudel uses the present to select and then structure the dynamics of the past deemed to be worthy of consideration. It is the present-day understanding of the global, as structured by a particular form of European dominance, which provides the basis for the development of the narrative. Thus, while Braudel may be writing his histories self-consciously ‘outside the world of theory’, the commonsensical grand narrative of European capitalist development, or modernity, continues to underpin his assemblage. This grand narrative is so thoroughly embedded within Braudel’s cultural framework that it no longer requires explicit acknowledgement; it is presented, instead, ‘as the historian’s “common sense”’ (Weinstein 2005: 77). In this context, I argue that selection is itself a theoretical intervention in the ordering of history as I will discuss in more detail at the end of this chapter.
Braudel distinguishes between an empirical understanding of the world and the analytical use of ‘world-’, that is, world with a hyphen. While the ‘world’ is to be understood as pertaining to the whole world, ‘world-economy’, for example, ‘only concerns a fragment of the world, an economically autonomous section of the planet … to which its internal links and exchanges give a certain organic unity’ (1985: 22). The varieties of world-economies that have existed in the past have, according to Braudel, been worlds unto themselves, not necessarily co-extensive with the world as such.1 The European world economy is seen to be the first world economy to have world-historical relevance, that is, to have created a world economy. It is this belief that underpins the narrative and analytical structure of the volumes whereby examples are drawn from other parts of the world only to the extent that they illuminate some aspect of the European story, that is, ‘to form a clearer judgement of Europe’ (1985: 387). Even the chapters of Volume 3, explicitly focused on ‘the rest of the world’, are narrated in terms of the connections of the rest of the world to what are seen as European developments. As Braudel writes, while it might have been preferable to try to understand non-Europe ‘on its own terms, it cannot properly be understood, even before the eighteenth century, except in terms of the mighty shadow cast over it by western Europe’ (1985: 386).
The connections that Braudel recognizes between Europe and the wider world are seen to be central to Europe’s development. Indeed, he even asks whether ‘Europe’s industrial revolution – the key to her destiny – [would] have been possible’ without such interactions (1985: 387). However, nowhere in the three volumes does he empirically address the substance of those connections; that is, imperialism, enslavement, dispossession and colonialism. Instead, he talks about ‘the discovery of America’ (1985: 388), slavery as part of the solution to the problem of a shortage of labour in the Americas, ‘India’s self-inflicted conquest’ (1985: 489) and so on. In discussing the decline of India in the nineteenth century, Braudel wonders whether this was a consequence of ‘the peculiar form of capitalism in India’ or maybe ‘the economic and social straitjacket of a low wage structure?’ (1985: 518). Other options were: ‘the difficult political situation’, ‘growing intervention by Europeans’, ‘India’s technological backwardness’ or the impact ‘of the machine revolution in Europe’ (1985: 518). He does, however, consider an alternative explanation as well, ‘an external not an internal explanation – in a word, Britain’ (1985: 522). Even here, however, the explanations are based in terms of India’s loss of trade, of industry, of markets, losses which the English were then able to exploit. ‘Ironically,’ Braudel writes, ‘India’s very strength was used to bring about her destruction … to the greater profit of the English’ (1985: 522). Britain’s connection to India is seen primarily in terms of being able to exploit India’s misfortune with no discussion of how Britain may have been implicated in the creation of that misfortune. While in other contexts, the issue of agency is seen to be central to European activities, here Europe is curiously presented as the passive recipient of good fortune (a consequence of the disassociated misfortune of others).
Braudel ends his chapter on the relations between Europe and the rest of the world by suggesting that ‘we still do not really know how this position of superiority was established and above all maintained’ (1985: 533–4). This is stated at the same time as asserting that the Industrial Revolution was not only ‘an instrument of development’, but that it was also ‘a weapon of domination and destruction of foreign competition’ (1985: 535). My argument is that if we focus on the latter, we may be closer to understanding the reasons for Europe’s dominance in, and over, the world. Throughout Braudel’s text there are occasional references to the explanation of Europe’s dominance resting in her involvement in the enslavement of Africans and the indigenous populations of the Americas, the appropriation of natural resources from other parts of the world, the destruction of foreign markets to enable the better distribution of her own commodities, the exploitation of technological advances and discoveries made elsewhere, the subjugation of other peoples and so on. These references, however, are fragmentary and are not brought together as part of the system he is seeking to disclose; that is, he fails to establish a systematic explanation based on these connections. Instead, the dynamics of European history are regarded as explainable only in terms of internal forces and the global exists simply as a space into which European activities spill out. There is little consideration of the global as having been meaningfully constituted by the variety of activities, violent conquest as well as mutual trade, which over time knit the world together empirically.
II
Michael Mann’s four-volume study, The Sources of Social Power, published over the span of a quarter of a century (1986–2013), is organized around what he presents as four key dimensions of power: economic, ideological, military and political. His concern at the outset of the project is to navigate a path between functionalist accounts of modernization, which also operated in terms of four functions (even if they weren’t called types of social power), and their dominant alternative as expressed in Marxist critiques of underdevelopment and dependency theory, where equivalent functions were seen to be structured on the dominance of the economic. He suggests that understanding the ways in which social power determines the shape of societies ‘is an empirical question’ that requires an address to historical evidence from the beginning of human history to the present (1986: 30). Nonetheless, the empirical material is to be organized around the four dimensions of power.
The four dimensions are held to be dimensions of power in order to set out a more realist account of social relations than that found within functionalist modernization theory. Where, in the latter, material factors are associated with two of the functions, economic and political, and only the latter is specifically linked to the category of power, Mann incorporates all four principles as expressions of different kinds of power. From his perspective, on the other hand, the problem with Marxist approaches is that, despite the concern with power, they over-emphasize the economic to the neglect of the other three dimensions. This understanding organizes the first part of the first volume which is designed to establish that, nonetheless, the economic does come to predominance with the rise of capitalist modernity.
Anybody engaging with the vast historical record that is Mann’s canvas is necessarily going to be selective. As with Braudel before him, Mann is concerned to stress that he is not necessarily writing a history of the world, but rather, drawing upon the most appropriate history, ‘that of the most powerful human society’, in order to comment upon the world (1986: 31). The history of modern Western civilization, he argues, ‘has been just about continuous from the origins of Near Eastern civilization around 3000 BC to the present day’ (1986: 31) and it is for this reason, together with its status as being the most powerful society, that the history of the world will be told in terms of the history of the West. What the discontinuities are in the histories of other peoples and places is not mentioned; neither, as will be suggested subsequently, is there space for discussion of the historical context in which the West became ‘the most powerful human society’ on the planet.
The first volume, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, sets out the ‘pre-history’ of a variety of civilizations from Mesopotamia to Phoenicia, Greece and Rome before looking in more detail at the ‘set of interrelated dynamics … that medieval Europe possessed and that helped it move toward industrial capitalism’ (1986: 373).2 In the selection of histories that make up the first half of the volume, Mann writes that though he has ‘not discussed developments in China and India, they would have been recognizably similar to those described so far in the Middle East and the Mediterranean’ (1986: 341). Significant differences between societies, he suggests, only emerged in response to challenges from major religions or philosophies such that by AD 1000 ‘four recognisably different types of society existed, each with its own dynamism and development’ (1986: 341). These differences were not to be superseded ‘until one of them, Christianity, proved so far superior to the others that all had to adapt to its encroachments, thus becoming a family of societies once more’ (1986: 341). Despite the now significant differences identified by Mann between the four, this becomes the basis of, again, not discussing the others as now the differences make global comparative sociology ‘too difficult’ (1986: 371).3 First, other parts of the world and other histories were not discussed because of their similarities, then they are not to be discussed because of their differences. Further, in the turn to focusing solely on Europe, any conjunctures ‘impinging on Europe from outside’ are to be set aside (for now), in favour of an endogenous account oriented to detailing the emergence of European ‘class-nations’ (1986: 373, 495).
The second half of the first volume, then, presents ‘essentially a single story’, ‘the history of a single “society”, Europe’, told in terms of its systemic dynamism that integrated ‘its diversities into one civilization’ (Mann 1986: 500, 504). The conjunctures ‘impinging on Europe from outside’, that were initially flagged to be dealt with in the final chapters, amount effectively to a half-page discussion of Europe’s relationship with Islam. While Mann suggests that Europe may have ‘borrowed some things from Islam’ , he suggests that what they were ‘is still controversial’ and whether they ‘made a critical contribution to European development is still unclear’ (1986: 508). What is clear, however, is that ‘the necessity of military defence’ against Islam or the Mongols united the variety of European states ‘in the defence of Europe’ and thereby ‘protected the dynamic through their military-power organizations’ (1986: 508).
The only connections explicitly acknowledged by Mann between Europe and the rest of the world involved the defence of Europe against potential ‘invaders’. There is little discussion of the actual incursions by Europe into much of the rest of the world: for example, the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the European empires that stretched across the majority of the globe, the European trade in human beings and so forth. This omission continues in the second volume, The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760–1914, which focuses on primarily endogenous accounts of five Western countries from the Industrial Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War.
The second volume charts the history of the West’s geopolitical development by examining how the ‘structuring role of nation-states’ was ‘also entwined with classes’ (1993: 33). The exclusive focus on the emergence and development of ‘class-nations’ reinforces the internalist account characteristic of the first volume and leaves little room for discussion of the ways in which broader political and economic configurations might also have been significant for understanding the developments under discussion. As Tooze writes, ‘[i]nsofar as the world is allowed to enter, it is by way of global capitalism and then only in a single, sheepish chapter’ (2013: 133). Further, for a four-volume study, in which one of the structuring variables is ‘military power’, there is remarkably little discussion of the exercise of that power by European states within the world and the consequences that this entailed.4 European colonialism as a significant aspect of the rise of Europe was supposed to be addressed in the third volume, which is oriented specifically to global empires. As Mann himself notes in the preface, this volume, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945, was supposed to ‘rectify an omission in Volume 2, the neglect of the global empires created by the most advanced countries’ (2012: vii). ‘These are, of course,’ he continues, ‘essential for an understanding of modern societies’ (2012: vii). The accounts given of empire, however, are largely descriptive and there is little attempt to reconsider the historical narratives or social-scientific claims of the earlier volumes in light of this, given that 1890 is hardly the constitutive moment of European empires.
Volumes 1 and 2 provided an account of the emergence of what, for him, is the most powerful human society, Europe, in terms of internal factors such as the development of ‘class-nations’ within it. However, the turn to what he regards as ‘external factors’, those of empire, ought at least to necessitate a reconsideration of the account of ‘internal’ factors. For a start, it should be recognized that, given that many European states were imperial and colonial states, at the same time as, or even prior to, becoming national states, the formulation ‘class-nation’ is itself, at best, an initial interpretive device for subsequent reinterpretation and, at worst, simply incorrect. However, Mann’s history of the British Empire does little to reinterpret what was previously seen as ‘British’ industry or the ‘British’ state. Further, there is a curious failure to address European empires in the longue durée, that is, from the Spanish imperialism of the fifteenth century that arguably began the process of creating the world as it came to be known from a European perspective. Mann skips from briefly considering the British Empire to considering the US and Japanese empires, but these latter are discussed primarily in terms of their activities in the twentieth century. By missing out an address of the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and other European empires, Mann does little to re-contextualize or rethink the historical narratives of the preceding volumes. Despite him suggesting that understanding empires is essential for understanding modern societies, and seeking to rectify their omission from earlier volumes, it seems that the arguments made in those earlier volumes do not need to be changed as a consequence of this necessity.
For the most part, the approach to empire in the first three volumes presents it either as a precursor intermediate historical formation to modern capitalism, that is, in terms of a form of political empire, such as Austro-Hungary, that would subsequently fracture to create ‘class-nations’; or as an appendage that had little consequence for developments in the ‘class-nation’ with which it was associated. In the fourth volume, Globalizations, 1945–2011, this disassociation goes further with empire primarily being used to describe the form of the US in the late twentieth century. Further, there is little discussion of the impact of processes of decolonization on the ‘class-nations’ of Europe or the ways in which decolonization fundamentally reshaped Europe and the global order more generally (see Hansen 2002). The failure to address empire adequately in these accounts means that Mann misses its central role in the historical formation of ‘class-nations’ or their transformation in the period of decolonization.
As Linda Colley (1992, 2002) has argued, it was the existence of empire that enabled the class-settlement in Britain whereby the working-classes and other classes were drawn into and made a part of the national project initially fashioned by elites. This was associated with rising living standards as a consequence of imported food and the rationalization of domestic agriculture, as well as empire providing an opportunity for upward mobility for middle and professional classes. A later welfare state settlement was further facilitated, as Holmwood (2000b) argues, through continuing policies of cheap foodstuffs and commodities, enabled now through a system of Commonwealth preferences. Indeed, in this context, it could be argued that it was decolonization which fractured the class-settlement in Britain after the 1960s, leading to the return of high levels of inequality un-ameliorated by the resources of empire. In displacing the specific histories of European colonialism with general accounts of political empire broadly understood, these volumes fail to acknowledge the interconnections, and their implications, that ensued from colonial relations and continue to impinge on the social structures of domestic formations in the postcolonial period.5
The rise of modern capitalism is located in the intertwined development of classes and nations in Europe and the form of modernity is associated with the dominance of economic power. ‘Economic imperialism’, that is, the expansion of markets and, with them, the diffusion of European influence, including military power, is taken to be the central process in the development of world history. In this way, a teleological account is smuggled into a historiography argued to be profoundly anti-teleological and the economic is privileged in a fourfold scheme in which all aspects are argued to be equally significant. Ironically, Mann’s attempt to steer a third way between structural functionalist interpretations and the economic determinism of Marxist critique, leads him to a curious form of Weberian Trotskyism, where historical developments are parsed as uneven and combined development, albeit where development is represented in ideal typical terms and the processes derive their character from Weberian sociology rather than that of Marx. Ultimately, as with Eisenstadt and the other modernization theorists before him, modern nation states are formed endogenously in Europe without regard to the imperial and colonial contexts of those states. At the same time, the generalization of nation states in the twentieth century is assigned to the break-up of empires whose substance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has gone largely unrecognized.
The plurality of the ‘new combinations’ of the political, economic, military and ideological outside European combinations has, of course, the form of multiple modernities. Globalization is a European phenomenon, fractured by disjunctive engagements with it such that European dominance is finally in question, ultimately leaving a primacy of the economic at the core of his argument. The chapter now turns to the more explicit focus on the economy that is found in Wallerstein’s world systems theory.
III
Immanuel Wallerstein’s project of charting the development of ‘the modern world system’ is comparable to the works discussed above and, indeed, is closely affiliated with the tradition of historical social science associated with Fernand Braudel (see Smith 1991). Wallerstein is clear that he is not writing a history, but, instead, is seeking ‘to describe the world system at a certain level of abstraction, that of the evolution of structures of the whole system’ (1974a: 8). In this, he could be regarded as close to Mann’s project of providing an historical account of the sources of social power. The substantive and geographical coordinates of Wallerstein’s study are also broadly similar to the preceding authors. Chronologically, his study ranges from a medieval prelude to, eventually, the present day; and, spatially, it is predominantly focused on European history and the contemporary West. His is projected to be a six-volume series, with the four published volumes taking us up to the beginnings of the First World War in 1914. There are a further two planned volumes that, he writes in the preface to the fourth volume, will focus on the twentieth century and take us through to 2050, charting the demise of the modern world system and pointing to ‘a successor or successors yet unknown’ (2011b: xvii).
Where Wallerstein differs from Braudel and Mann is in terms of the explicit intellectual context out of which his study emerges; that is, in his explicit advocacy for a Marxist-inspired interpretation of world history. Wallerstein was involved in the debates around dependency and underdevelopment, discussed in the previous chapter, but believed them to be insufficient to address the systematic nature of capitalism in operation in the contemporary world (see Wallerstein 1974b). A further distinction was that his early work was situated in an attempt to understand processes of colonial rule, decolonization and independence in Africa in the mid twentieth century, albeit within a broadly functionalist perspective. In seeking the appropriate unit of analysis to study the post-independence countries, he suggests that he was forced to turn his ‘attention to early modern Europe’ and to scale-up from sovereign states and national societies to the world system (1974a: 6–7). The latter was because only the world system constituted a social system within which all constituent elements could be located and related; and the former because Europe was understood to be ‘the origins and early conditions of the world-system’ (1974a: 10). In this way, his understanding of the historical emergence of modern capitalism was closely related to his establishment of the world system as the social-scientific unit of analysis appropriate for explaining that emergence and both were arrived at from an initial starting point rooted in his academic work on Africa. However, as will become apparent, Africa subsequently disappears from his delineation of the world systems model which is focused primarily on an understanding of European nation state history.6
In very basic terms, and drawing on his first volume, Wallerstein’s modern world system can be understood as follows. The long sixteenth century saw the emergence of a European world economy that was a system of economic linkages greater than any juridically defined political unit. It was distinguished from empires, which were regarded as political units, and differed from earlier world-economies precisely by not being also transformed into empires. Instead, the European world economy ‘embarked on the path of capitalist development which enabled it to outstrip these others’ (1974a: 17). Capitalism, according to Wallerstein, is only feasible within a world economy and not a world-empire, although he does not provide an analytical account of why this might be so. Instead, he simply follows Weber in comparing China with Europe and outlines the distinctions between them. These distinctions are then used to explain, retrospectively, Europe’s turn to capitalism and China’s failure or inability to do so.
As with Weber before him, Wallerstein presents China as having the material conditions for capitalism in the early modern period, but failing to develop capitalism in the modern period. ‘It is doubtful’, he writes, ‘that there was any significant difference between Europe and China in the fifteenth century on certain base points: population, area, state of technology (both in agriculture and in naval engineering). To the extent that there were differences it would be hard to use them to account for the magnitude of the difference of development in the coming centuries’ (1974a: 62). He departs from Weber, however, by arguing further that the difference in value systems, to which Weber had attributed explanatory purchase, ‘seems both grossly exaggerated and, to the extent that it existed, once again [does] not account for the different consequences’ (1974a: 62). The essential difference, for Wallerstein, rested in ‘the conjuncture of a secular trend’, going back to the ancient empires of Rome and China, ‘with a more immediate economic cycle’, whereby Europe moved towards cattle and wheat and China towards rice (1974a: 63). Nowhere does he discuss the possibility that the causes of the ‘divergence’ may (also) have rested in the impact of British commercial and foreign policy towards China, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The extent of Wallerstein’s consideration of the issue is summed up in the following sentences: ‘with the Treaty of 1842, China would start on the path of being herself incorporated. But that is another story’ (2011a: 168). Expanding a little on this story, most historians agree that the fundamental problem for the British in terms of their trade with China was that the Chinese did not wish to purchase anything that the British produced, preferring instead to trade their goods only for bullion. This changed when Britain realized that it could use the resources of India, namely tea and opium, to finance its investment in China, despite the fact that China prohibited the import of the latter (Greenberg 1951; Dean 1976). The illicit supply of opium into China was initially tacitly authorized by the British government and then explicitly so through the Opium Wars which forced China to open up her markets to international trade as well as to grant extraterritorial rights to British traders within her borders, without, of course, any reciprocal rights for Chinese traders in British markets (O’Brien and Pigman 1992). British gunboat diplomacy, or ‘free-trade imperialism’ (Gallagher and Robinson 1953), was the means by which Britain was able to extend the markets within which she was able to sell her goods. As Greenberg (1951) has argued, large-scale production at home meant producing more than the domestic market could absorb, thereby creating the need to sell the surplus abroad. So, a key part of the explanation of British economic dynamism is not an endogenous story but, rather, a story of colonial dimensions. Nowhere does Wallerstein discuss these aspects as potentially integral aspects of the explanation for why China did not develop to capitalism in a manner similar to Europe.7
One of the reasons for this can be seen more clearly in his separation of the two main elements that he suggests are constitutive of the modern world system: ‘the capitalist world-economy … built on a worldwide division of labour’ and ‘political action [that] occurred primarily within the framework of states’ (1974a: 162; for discussion, see Robinson 2011). While he recognizes that the economic linkages between places were appropriately understood in the context of the world, he circumscribes the remit of political action to that of the national state. But the very context for a worldwide division of labour that included slavery and coerced cash-crop labour, sharecropping, bonded labour, and free labour was usually an imperial or colonial regime that participated in enslavement and subjugation beyond its national boundaries. Further, as discussed above, the worldwide free market was not necessarily ‘freely’ created but emerged as a consequence of coercion, warfare and subjugation of other powers. That is, the realm of political action extended beyond the national state and was constituted in the imperial or colonial states within which ‘worldwide’ economic differentiation was created and managed. By distinguishing a world economy from an ideal type of world-empire, Wallerstein has little room in his analysis for the very real empires of European states, or the ‘free-trade imperialism’ they operated, that had worldwide reach. Where these are discussed, they are discussed in terms of their peripheral relation to the European world economy (the Americas) or as external to it (Asia) (1974a: 336) and the manner of their ‘incorporation’ is naturalized (as above, ‘China would start on the path of being herself incorporated’ (2011a: 168)).
Introducing his chapter on incorporation, Wallerstein writes: ‘Incorporation into the capitalist world-economy was never at the initiative of those being incorporated. The process derived from the need of the world economy to expand its boundaries, a need which was itself the outcome of pressures internal to the world-economy’ (2011a: 129). Here, he acknowledges there were pressures that preceded expansion and that expansion was forced upon others, but he does not name the processes that facilitated this: colonialism and imperialism. Wallerstein consistently euphemizes European colonial and imperial history within his history of the modern world system understood in terms of capitalism. He writes, for example, that ‘the discovery of America was to give Europe a richer source of gold than the Sudan and especially a far richer source of silver than central Europe’ and suggests that ‘the economic consequences [of this] would be great’ (1974a: 41). There is no mention of the processes of colonialism, dispossession or appropriation (or, more simply, theft) that enabled Europe to have access to those precious metals and to use them for her development alone and, in the process, create the conditions for the underdevelopment of others (see Trouillot 2003; Goody 2006; Hobson 2004).
Wallerstein discusses this process in a little more depth in the second volume, but even here naturalizes what other scholars have documented as an exceedingly brutal process (Bakewell 1971; Galeano 1973; Cole 1985; Brown 2012). Wallerstein writes, ‘the Europeans first seized Inca gold, then mined Potosi and Mexican silver … They sent settlers to control the area of the Americas politically and to supervise the economic operations, and they imported labor as well. In short, they incorporated the Americas into their world-economy’ (1980: 109). This rather glosses over the violence and force necessary in seizing Inca gold, the coerced and enslaved labour required to mine the silver, the forced transportation of human beings from one part of the world to work for Europeans in another part of the world. Further, the European world economy is seen to have its own internal logic and the only consequence of wider engagements is the transformation and incorporation of peripheral or external areas into it; there is no discussion of how the European world economy, or our understanding of it, may have changed in turn. It also fails to address the analytical significance of the incorporation that is recognized. Namely, that the incorporation of the Americas into the European world economy was not based on freely chosen market relations.
Given that, for Wallerstein, the market, and the free relations this assumes, was central to the establishment of a specifically capitalist form of world economy, acknowledgement of ‘unfree’ incorporation seriously undermines the theoretical claims otherwise made. He states quite straightforwardly that ‘capitalism as an economic mode is based on the fact that the economic factors operate within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control’ (1974a: 348). This, he continues, ‘gives capitalists a freedom of maneuver that is structurally based’ and that ‘has made possible the constant economic expansion of the world-system, albeit a very skewed distribution of its rewards’ (1974a: 348). It is clear, however, that colonial expansion preceded capitalist relations, given that the latter were created and maintained through colonial violence. Further, Wallerstein’s recognition of the ‘skewed distribution of its rewards’ points to an acknowledgement of hierarchies other than ones created through the market, but nowhere is this integrated into his broader theoretical analysis.
In another instance, in discussing the increase in the land area under European control and the favourable land/labour ratio this brought about, Wallerstein does not refer to colonization and dispossession as the basis of this. He simply points to the existence of ‘formal overseas colonies of European powers’ as if this was a natural fact that did not require explanation (1974a: 68). ‘Europe expanded into the Americas’, Wallerstein writes (1974a: 128); with no discussion of the ‘double conquest’ this entailed, that is, whereby the earlier inhabitants of the continent ‘lost not only sovereignty, but commons and severalty also’ (Jennings 1971: 541). In his second volume, Wallerstein answers the question of how one ‘creates’ a market in a particular place, ‘if there aren’t enough people of a high enough income level’ there, with the suggestion that ‘one encourages “settlement”’ (1980: 239). The appropriation of land en masse in the Americas by European migrants, or settler-colonists, not only improved the land/labour ratio for Europeans, but it also, as Wallerstein argues, ‘made possible the large-scale accumulation of basic capital which was used to finance the rationalisation of agricultural production’ (1974a: 69). Again, instead of focusing on the processes of colonization that enabled this, Wallerstein moves to address ‘the so-called price revolution’ which, he suggests, is central to historiographical debates on the topic (1974a: 69). With these two examples, we see the way in which the empirical record pointing to the importance of colonial relations is subsumed to a consideration of the pre-formed theoretical debates on the emergence of capitalism.
IV
The first two chapters have sought to examine the ways in which ideas of the global developed within sociology in the twentieth century. The first chapter focused on how different sociological traditions, such as Weberian modernization theory or Marxist underdevelopment theory, worked with an implicit understanding of the global in the construction of the societal types that were seen to be the basis of their theoretical models. This chapter, in turn, examined the construction of the global in the work of those sociologists who engaged directly with the historical record. Despite their many theoretical and methodological differences, what is clear is the extent of common agreement on a particular narrative concerning the emergence of the global. This is a narrative that, simply put, asserts the singular importance of European history from the medieval period onwards and develops its understanding of the global in terms of subsuming all other events and narratives to the one emerging from Europe.
Modernization theory avows the singular achievement of Europe and the West and holds up this experience as the model for the rest of the world. Underdevelopment and dependency theory, for the most part, critique the celebratory aspect of the modernization narrative and argue for the development of alternatives to liberal capitalism. They do not, however, contest the historical adequacy of the narratives underpinning the theoretical framework of modernization. The conceptual paradigm of multiple modernities, similarly, critiques the idea of a singular path to modernity, but does not disagree with the historical understanding concerning the emergence of, what is believed to be, European modernity. History, in the first chapter, is not directly engaged with, but simply confirms what is already known. In the second chapter, the historical record is addressed directly, but here the issue of selection operates to maintain agreement on one particular narrative.
The difficulty with attempting to understand the world, or the idea of the global, historically is determining the parameters of the study (for a fuller discussion, see Bhambra 2011b). As Christian (2003) argues, world history, to be meaningful (and possible), has to be more than an encyclopaedic endeavour to document all the histories of all the peoples in the world; what is needed is a particular narrative to bring these histories within a coherent structure. The issue, as McNeill has also suggested, is less about discovering new histories about others, more about ordering them in such a way as ‘to present the different facets and interacting flows of human history as we now understand them’ (1990: 21). The most frequently used structure, or grand narrative, is some version of Weber’s ‘rise of the West’ thesis whether that is organized in terms of models based around understandings of capitalism, power, modernity, or, latterly, globalization. Even positions ostensibly critical of Weberian social science, such as those of underdevelopment and dependency, generally present an historical narrative in terms of expansion outward from an initial transformation, that of feudal Europe into a capitalist world economy. In this way, world systems theory can be understood as following the standard historical trajectory of attributing significance to events which are seen to be endogenously European and which then diffuse out to the world.
The trail laid by Max Weber in seeking to determine the causes of the miracle of Europe has been adapted by subsequent scholars attempting to account for the miracle in Europe. This can be seen to be the central concern of the projects of both Braudel and Mann discussed above; and while Wallerstein’s focus is more on understanding the development of capitalism, his turn to history is similarly oriented to examining the specificities of Europe that, he believes, enabled its world economy to become a truly world-historical one. The social-scientific frames of modernity, power, and capitalism rely on a remarkably similar historical narrative and similar omissions of histories that could have been addressed but were not. McNeill, a historian, suggests that while his personal idiosyncrasies may have previously led him to look at ‘history from the point of view of the winners’, we must nonetheless acknowledge that point of view and ‘admire those who pioneered the enterprise and treat the human adventure on earth as an amazing success story, despite all the suffering entailed’ (1990: 3). Questions of who this ‘we’ consists of, and whether ‘we’ must celebrate the successes (of some) despite the suffering (of others) entailed by a purportedly inclusive human adventure, formed the nub of postcolonial, and other, criticisms that are the broader impetus for this book.
Notes
1Braudel’s formulation of different epochs of ‘world-economy’ is significant. It is doubtful that the latter could be understood without political and social institutions that incorporated the territories of such an economy, in other words, empires. Indeed, most writers, for example, Eisenstadt (1965), identify earlier periods of world-economy as periods of empire. Braudel is concerned with capitalist world-economy and might have been made sensitive to the issue of its political and social institutions by his very recognition of previous phases of world-economy and their connotations with empire. But this was not to be the case.
2This is remarkably similar to the concentration on different societies found in Parsons’s (1966) more straightforwardly, theoretically derived study.
3In a similar fashion, Mann acknowledges, in Volume 1, his omission of ‘gender relations’ (1986: 31) and promises to address this omission in Volume 2. However, in the Introduction to Volume 2, he abandons his ‘original intent to focus on gender relations in this volume’ citing the fact that gender relations ‘have their own history, currently being rewritten by feminist scholarship’ (1993: 16). This is not a lot different to his treatment of postcolonial scholarship. Apparently, despite his avowed interest in connections, important histories can be written without impinging on mainstream histories. From most perspectives, the ‘rewriting’ of histories by feminist and other scholarship would be a moment for pause and reflection about their impact on the histories being written outside their influence. This points to the role of ideal type methodology and the value-relevant concerns of feminists not being the same as his own as a means of disengagement.
4As with Braudel, the implicit recognition of the role of military power in the constitution of earlier world-economies and their status as empires might have led him to address its role in establishing and stabilising the very market relations bound up with nation states and classes. A historical sociology attuned to comparative issues might have been expected to rehabilitate the role of military power in the history of the West, including its economic dominance, not further displace it.
5In this context, Runciman’s three-volume treatise of sociological theory, which ends with a case study of the history of Britain, is significant (Runciman 1997). He argues for the three modes of production, persuasion, and coercion that characterize any society to have been fully established as capitalist, liberal, and democratic respectively by the immediate post-World War One period with no subsequent mutations or challenges to their stability. Once again, colonialism, empire, and its end have no determining significance for understanding English society (for further discussion, see Holmwood 1998).
6In the preface to Volume 4, Wallerstein (2011b: xvi) writes that he plans to address ‘the scramble for Africa and the rise of movements of national liberation’ in Volume 5.
7Interestingly, Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), in his book The Great Divergence, also has but a single reference to the Opium Wars and attributes little significance to ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in his account of the making of a singular world economy.