World System History

The Social Science of Long-Term Change

Robert. A Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, George Modelski, Robert. A Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, George Modelski

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134571444
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique

This extraordinary book presents a refreshing and innovative overview of the changes to the global system over the last 5000 years. Featuring renowned contributors - each specialists in their field - this is the only volume to offer so co-ordinated a study of continuity and change in the global social, economic and political system. Key areas covered include: * International Political Economy - Robert A. Denemark
* Archaeology - Jonathan Freidman
* Economic development - Andre Gunder Frank
* History - George Modelski
* Sociology - Christopher Chase-Dunn

Part I
General perspectives on world system history

1 The five thousand year world system in theory and praxis

Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K.Gills

We posit a world system continuity thesis. Our purpose is to help replace Eurocentric history and social science by a more humanocentric and eventually also ecocentric approach. Our guiding idea is the continuous history and development of a single world system in Afro-Eurasia for at least 5,000 years. This world historical-social scientific approach challenges received studies that attribute ‘the rise of the West’ to European exceptionalism. In our view, the rise to dominance of the West is only a recent, and perhaps a passing event.

Our approach is unabashedly historical materialist. Its main theoretical premises are: (1) the existence and development of the world system stretches back not just five hundred but some five thousand years; (2) the world economy and its long-distance trade relations form a centerpiece of this world system; (3) the process of capital accumulation is the motor force of world system history; (4) the center-periphery structure is one of the characteristics of the world system; (5) alternation between hegemony and rivalry is depictive of the world system, although system wide hegemony has been rare or non-existent; and (6) long economic cycles of ascending and descending phases underlie economic growth in the world system.

Theoretical categories and operational definitions

The world system

Per contra Wallerstein (1974a), we believe that the existence and development of the same world system in which we live stretches back five thousand years or more. According to Wallerstein and unlike our world system (without a hyphen), world-systems (with hyphen and sometimes plural) need not be even world wide. Braudel and Wallerstein both stress the difference between world economy/ system and world-economy/system. ‘The world economy is an expression applied to the whole world…A world-economy only concerns a fragment of the world, an economically autonomous section’ (Braudel 1984:20–1). ‘Immanuel Wallerstein tells us that he arrived at the theory of the world-economy while looking for the largest units of measurement which would still be coherent’ (Braudel 1984:70).

In our view, shared by Wilkinson, this largest unit has long been much larger and older than the European-centered ‘world-economy/system’ of Braudel and Wallerstein. Wilkinson (1987a, 1993c) emphasizes political coherence and sees ‘Central Civilization’ as starting in 1500 BC and expanding more slowly than its earlier and more far-flung economic connections. We use the latter as a major criterion for the identification of the world system since at least 3000 BC and see its spread as having been more rapid.

The debate between 500 and 5,000 years of world system history is really about how to write world system history. It is a debate about continuity versus discontinuity. One position is that the mode of production or social formation in world history makes a sharp break about 1500. This position is dominant among historians and world-system theorists, including Wallerstein and Amin. The other position is that capital accumulation did not begin or become ‘ceaseless’ only after 1500 AD, but has been the motor force of the historical process throughout world system history. There was no such sharp break between different ‘world-systems’ or even ‘modes of production’ around 1500.

The real disagreement revolves around the question of what structures constitute a ‘system’ or a ‘world(-)system’ in particular. We contend that a hierarchy of center-periphery (and hinterland) complexes within the world system, in which surplus is being transferred between zones of the hierarchy, necessarily implies the existence of some form of an ‘international’ (at best a misleading term) division of labor. A criterion of systemic participation in a single world system is that no part of this system would be as it is or was if other parts were not as they are or were. The interaction from one part of the system to another may be only indirectly chain-linked. A weaker systemic link would be that the various parts may also have reacted to, and on, the same global ecological constraints. In Gills and Frank (1990/1) we suggest

The capture by elite A here…of part of the economic surplus extracted by elite B there means that there is ‘inter-penetrating accumulation’ between A and B. This transfer or exchange of surplus connects not only the two elites, but also their ‘societies” economic, social, political, and ideological organization…This inter-penetrating accumulation thus creates a causal interdependence between structures of accumulation and between political entities…That is ‘society’ A here could and would not be the same as it was in the absence of its contact with B there, and vice versa.

Despite our emphasis on ‘economic’ connections to cement the world system, we also accept the world system connections established and maintained through recurrent ‘political’ conflict among ‘societies’ as emphasized by Wilkinson (1987a). The recognition of such conflict as a mark of participation in the same world system is all the more important insofar as much of the conflict has been over economic resources and control of trade routes. Conversely, trade in metals and/ or weapons could increase military capacity and enhance control over sources of economic resources, including trade itself. Political conflict has also been the expression of the alternation between hegemony and rivalry within the world system and/or its regional parts.

Summarizing, then, we can list the following among the criteria of participation in the same world system: (1) extensive and persistent trade connections; (2) persistent or recurrent political relations with particular regions or peoples, including especially center-periphery-hinterland relations and hegemony/rivalry relations and processes; and (3) sharing economic, political, and perhaps also cultural cycles. The identification of these cycles and their bearing on the extent of the world system play a crucial role in our inquiry.

Indeed, the identification of the geographical extent of near-simultaneity of these cycles may serve as an important operational definition of the extent of the world system. If distant parts of Afro-Eurasia experience economic expansions and contractions nearly simultaneously, that would be evidence that they participate in the same world system.

George Modelski once counseled that if we want to study cycles, we should first define the system in which we want to look for them. Operationally it may be the other way around: the cycles can define the extent of the system!

The world economy

We may distinguish two related issues about the role and place of ‘economy’ in the world and its history. One refers to the existence and significance of production for exchange and capital accumulation. The other is whether the division of labor and competitive accumulation were played out at long distance so as to tie distant areas into a single ‘world’ economy. Both propositions are controversial, but we believe that both are also supported by historical evidence.

The first proposition has been the subject of debate in anthropology between substantivists and formalists. Weber, Polanyi and Finley are prominent among the former, but their findings are challenged by recent scholarship. One focus of the debate has been the Athenian economy. A lecture on the character of the ancient political economy by Millett (1990) argues for a political economy approach in which the ‘primacy of exchange’ is central. Millett’s approach rests on an important criticism of Polanyi (1944/1957), who unfortunately regarded the forms of exchange (e.g. redistributive, reciprocal, and market) in an evolutionary way, and hence incompatible with one another. Millett throws doubt on Polanyi’s thesis of the ‘invention’ of the market economy in fourth-century Athens by pointing to recent work by anthropologists on the complexity of exchange in ‘non-capitalist’ societies. Millett contends that the primitivist approach, which minimizes the role of capital, ‘is apparently contradicted by sheer volume of credit transactions in Athenian sources’ as credit was ‘everywhere’ in antiquity. For evidence of the market/credit economy as far back as Assyria note Larsen (1967, 1976); Adams (1974); Silver (1985); and Rowlands, Larsen, and Kristiansen (1987).

In our definition of the world system, regular exchange of surplus also affects the ‘internal’ character of each of the parts of the world system. Some scholars, like Wallerstein (1991), reject our definition because they do not believe that ‘mere’ trade makes a system. We do. We not only believe that regular and significant trade is a sufficient ground for speaking of a ‘system’ or of a real ‘world economy,’ but also that trade integrates social formations into something that should be called the ‘international division of labor,’ even in the ancient Eurasian world economy. This takes place because trade and production are not (falsely) separated. The nature of trade directly affects the character of production, as the history of the early modern world system so clearly illustrates, but which is also true much earlier. These effects are a consequence of specialization if nothing else, but we contend they are intimately related to the system of the regular transfer of surplus as well.

A related question then is how extensive was this division of labor and trade network. By our criteria it included Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Anatolia, Iran, the Indus Valley, Transcaucasia, and parts of Central Asia, in the third millennium BC. All of these are south of the mountain ranges that ran across Asia from east to west. Chernykh’s work (1993:302) leads to the inclusion in this world system of ‘a whole chain from the Atlantic to the Pacific: the European, Eurasian, Caucasian and Central Asian provinces, along with others outside the USSR’ all of which are north of these mountains. He also suggests in his foreword (xxi) that ‘from at least the fifth millennium BC until the third millennium BC, the peoples of the EMA cultural zone seem to have shared the same developmental cycle: the formation and decline of cultures at various levels generally coincided.’

At least two kinds of evidence support the claim that the southern and northern regions were part of one world system emcompassing much of Afro-Eurasia by the Bronze Age. There were extensive and recurrent trade, migration and invasion, as well as cultural/technological diffusion, and north-south contacts across and/or around the mountains in various regions from Anatolia eastward. There was also substantial coincidence in the timing of long economic cycle phases identified independently for the north by Chernykh and for the south. This temporal coincidence may be traceable to ecological and/or other systemic commonalities. Therefore there is evidence for the existence of one immense Afro-Eurasian wide world system by the early Bronze Age. Therefore also, one of the important tasks of research and analysis is to inquire into its earliest development and explore its (cyclical?) expansion and transformation over time. We find that this world system was formed in the third millennium BC or earlier, and proceeds today.

Although preciosities did play a significant role in these trade and political relations, it is well to stress that there also were significant amounts of economically vital trade in bulky necessities: metals, timber, grain, animals and other raw materials and foodstuffs, and of manufactures such as textiles and ceramics. For instance, southern Mesopotamia lacked metals and timber and was dependent on their import from Anatolia and the Levant, while it exported grains and textiles.

Like Blaut (1993) we argue that the most important European impact was the injection of new supplies of American bullion, and thereby themselves, into the already well established Eurasian economy. The Europeans did not in any sense ‘create’ either the world economic system or ‘capitalism.’ What the injection of new liquidity into the world economy actually seems to have done was to make important, though also limited, changes in financial flows, trade and production patterns, and to permit the Europeans to participate more actively in the same. They specialized in exploiting global differences in resources, production and prices to maximize their profits as middlemen, and where convenient they used force to assure their own participation in this exchange.

Thus long before the birth of the putative ‘European world-economy’ and still long after its advent, the real world economy had a far-flung division of labor and an intricate trade system, which was preponderantly Asian. Its major producers/ exporters of silver were Latin America and Japan, and of gold, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. South, East and West Africa had been major sources of gold for centuries, but parts of Africa also exported slaves westward and eastward.

The major importer and re-exporter of both silver and gold bullion was western and southern Europe, to cover its own perpetual massive structural balance of trade deficit with all other regions, except (perhaps) with the Americas and Africa, although the Europeans received African and especially American bullion without giving much in return. Western Europe had a balance of trade deficit with and re-exported much silver and some gold to the Baltics and eastern Europe, to West Asia, to India directly and via West Asia, to Southeast Asia directly and via India, and to China via all of the above. China also received silver from Japan.

West Asia had a balance of trade surplus with Europe, but a deficit with South, Southeast, East, and possibly Central Asia. West Asia covered its balance of trade deficits to the East with the re-export of bullion derived from its balance of trade surplus with Europe, the Maghreb and via it with West Africa, and gold from East Africa, as well as some of its own production of both gold and silver, especially in Persia.

India had a massive balance of trade surplus with Europe and some with West Asia, based mostly on its low cost cotton textile production and export. These went westwards to Africa, West Asia, Europe, and from there on across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas. In return, India received massive amounts of silver and some gold from the West, directly around the Cape or via West Africa. Since India produced little silver of its own, it used the imported silver mostly for coinage or re-export, and the gold for coinage (of so-called ‘pagodas’) and jewelry. India also exported cotton textiles to and imported spices from Southeast Asia, and also via the same exchanged cotton textiles for silk and porcelain and other ceramics from China. However, India had a balance of trade deficit with Southeast Asia and especially with China, and so was obliged to re-export especially silver to the east.

Southeast Asia exported spices and tin of its own production to Europe, West Asia, India and re-exported imports from India to China, which were its major customers, some eight times more than Europe. Additionally, Southeast Asia exported gold from its own production to India, China, and Japan, although it received silver from India, some of which it also re-exported to China via Malacca. Southeast Asia seems to have had a balance of trade surplus with India, but a deficit with China.

China had a balance of trade surplus with everybody (making it a ‘super-accumulator?’) based on its unrivaled manufacturing efficiency and export of silks and porcelain and other ceramics. Therefore, China, which like India had a perpetual silver shortage, was the major net importer of silver and met much of its need for currency out of imports of American silver which arrived via Europe, West Asia, India, Southeast Asia and with the Manila galleons directly from the Americas. China also received massive amounts of silver and copper from Japan and some through the overland caravan trade across Central Asia.

Japan, like Latin America, was a major producer and exporter of silver to China and Southeast Asia, but also of some gold and considerable copper as far as India and West Asia. Gold was both imported to and exported from China, depending on changing gold/silver/copper price ratios. Silver moved generally eastward (except westward from Japan and Acapulco via Manila), and gold moved westward (except eastward from Africa) via overland and maritime routes. Some eastward moving gold even reached Europe.

The complexity of the international division of labor and the network of world trade was of course vastly greater than this. However, even this mere summary should suffice to indicate how, contrary to Braudel and Wallerstein, all of these world regions were integral parts of a single world economic system between about 1400 and 1800 AD. The injection of American bullion provided new liquidity that facilitated an important increase in world-wide production, which rose to meet the new monetary demand. This ‘pull’ factor encouraged further development in China, India, Southeast Asia, and West Asia, including Persia. Even so, the Europeans were able to sell very few manufactures to the East, and instead profited substantially from inserting themselves into the inter-Asian country trade.

Capital accumulation

We regard the process of accumulation as the motor force of (world syst...