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