Andre Gunder Frank

ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

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Personal and Professional
Research Interests
Publications
On the New World Order
On-line Essays
IISH Archives
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Berkeley: University of California Press 1998, 4th printing 2002, 416 pp [$19.95]
New Delhi: Sage India 1998 [Rps 495]
Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press 1999, 4th printing 2002, 509 pp
Tokyo: Fujiwara-Shoten 2000, 4th printing 2002, 604 pp
Seoul: Yesan Publishing Co., 2003 with new foreword to the Korean edition
Available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble
Read 41 sample pages
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BOOK AWARDS

American Sociological Association Political Economy of World-Systems Book Award 2000.
Andre Gunder Frank has been turning our thinking upside-down throughout his long and illustrious career. With his work on the development of underdevelopment, he successfully toppled the reigning orthodoxy of modernization theory and forced everyone to reconsider how underdevelopment comes about. The world, and our understanding of it has never been the same. Still working at full bore, fiercely attacking all of our preconceptions, Frank has written yet another masterpiece of provocative sociology. ReOrient calls into question virtually every set of assumptions that has dominated macrosociology since the inception of the discipline. All of the great thinkers of social science, from Adam Smith, to Weber and Marx, to Wallerstein, are put on the chopping block....Whether we agree with everything Frank says in this book or not, it is [a]major intellectual achievement. It forces us to confront the assumptions and concepts that our ideas and research have stood upon for generations. Now the rug is pulled out from under us, and we must question whether all of those "givens" are just cultural biases that we have inherited. This book is like a cold bath that you enter reluctantly, shiver in, and emerge from with a bracing vigor. What defines a great book? One model is a work that synthesizes everything that we already know. The greatness of ReOrient lies in an opposite principle: that of forcing its readers to revisit everything they have thought and read. We believe such a work deserves to be cherished and honored.

World History Association First Book Prize 1999
This book has just won the 1999 World History Association Book Award, which was presented at the WHA conference in Victoria, BC, Canada, on June 26, 1999. The choice was unanimous, because we regard this book as being in a class by itself. Its breadth of vision, courageous analysis and apt warning not to let ethnocentrism deter historians from pursuing a global perspective on the past, all make Gunder Frank's book exceptional and a must read for historians, teachers and students of world history. The book argues that European hegemony in the modern era did not really emerge until the nineteenth century, and that before that Europe was a rather marginal player in the Eurasian world economy that was centered on China. Only the windfalls of American silver and the Atlantic slave trade enabled Europe to buy its way into the existing world economy and industrialize. Its holistic approach forces historians to look beyond Europe to understand the making of the modern world, and Frank's attention to historiographic issues is outstanding.
David A Chappell Book Review Editor Journal of World History
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From AMAZON.COM Reviews posted by Customers at their own Initiative

ReOrient will prove an instant classic, rating among those great books that come along once in a generation, such as with Arnold Toynbee's The Study of History, William McNeill's The Rise of the West, and Immanuel Wallerstein's The World-System as seminal works in world history. For scholars researching the onset of industrialism and the West's eventual dominance, they will be introduced to a whole new set of questions found in neither Marx nor Weber that require exploration. This book will give world history a research agenda for a generation. Original, contentious, challenging, yet accessible, this is Frank at his best.
JEFFREY SOMMERS, Northeastern University, Boston

One of the best books of this century, November 18, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from North America
Gunder Frank have really helped to open up the eyes of people, who have long gotten used to reading books and literary works written with Eurocentric bias. He conclusively proves that Europe's success was nothing unique, and that Europe was the lesser of the many players in world economics, technology, and industry until about 1800 AD. China, India, Central Asia, South-East Asia, and the Middle East were those main players of the global trade, spanning from 1500 BC to 1800 AD. These above five regions also had the world's highest standards of living, most advanced technology, greatest industrial and commercial enterprises, best art forms, literature, philosophy, and musical styles, and also the most sophisticated government and best infrastructure in roads, bridges, canals, river and seaborne transportation from 5000 BC to 1800 AD Special note must be made of the role that Native American gold and silver played in helping Europe to become a player in the global trade, by giving Europe with the purchasing power to purchase Chinese silks, tea, porcelain, and other goods, Indian cotton textiles, and South-East spices and gems, should be noted. Gunder Frank provides ample proof in his arguments and successfully disproves long held Eurocentric ideas about the origins of the modern economics, commerce, and industry. Gunder Frank's work is an eye-opener to all. This book should be read by every person, willing to learn about world history. I must also say that in the 1800's and 1900's however, it was Europe which played the most significant role in moving the science, technology, industry, trade, and commerce of the world forward and to greater new heights, just as the other six regions of the world have done in the past.
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A fundamental book for the 21st century, December 3, 2000
Reviewer: Eric Vertommen (see more about me) from Brussels Belgium
The revolution brought by Frank is to destroy Eurocentric views adopted since 1800 bit by bit to reveal how the economic system has been working since the last 2000 years and especially the last 500 years. What it shows is that the global economy was centered around China until 1800 AD, that the main economic players of those 2 millennia were China, India and Japan assisted by Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Empire. The West was only minor and it is only because we achieved the conquest of the Americas and the exploitation of its silver deposits that we obtained a ticket in the global economy and gradually rose to proeminence. Britain was global hegemon from 1800 until 1914, displaced by the United States from then until present. Some forecasts predict that Chinese economy could outpace the US between 2013 and 2049.The book is fundamental because it explains the basics of this Asian economic advantage, how post-1800 Westerners could delude themselves while their ancestors (Adam Smith being the most famous) dedicated pages of study to record and analyse why Asia was so superior to the West in almost everything and why the West has risen and is maybe falling beyond again. An essential book for anyone to understand the global economy, to have an accurate look on current situation and evaluate the decisions made in the West to face Asian return to global power. A Chinese proverb says: There are no failures, only experiences. And another one: The 10.000 miles trip begins with one step. Make the first step of the next millennium and buy this book.
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Gunder Frank does it again. He turns standard Eurocentric historiography and social theory upside down, as he did many years ago in exposing the facade of economic development. He challenges the experts again, but this time they are quite a different group at least in terms of theory, e.g., ranging from Marx to Braudel. They all got it wrong because they did not see the whole picture, especially how the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Once again, his argument is clear, organized, and often exciting.
PAT LAUDERDALE Arizona State University

A New Frame in Which to View World History, May 17, 2001
Reviewer: Scott Snyder (see more about me) from Martinez, CA USA
I confess. I was Eurocentric. Despite a degree in International Economics from an east coast school known for its School of Foreign Service, I firmly believed Max Weber that the Protestant work-ethic was the source of western prosperity. I also believed in American exceptionalism. Frank's book cured me of both those false notions. This book is important for understanding the world's past as well as the contours of the future. I wonder how long it will take for the pendulum to swing back to Asia. Chinese-US relations are getting interesting, aren't they?

REVIEW EXCERPTS
A book for the millennium
... can be a landmark book that shapes substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact.
MARK SELDEN State University of New York

This will be an extremely important book of sufficient originality and importance to have a major impact. It could not be more ambitious.
KENNETH POMERANZ
University of California at Irvine

A work of highest intellectual, social and moral importance. Specialists will welcome the forcefulness, verve, and coherence of Frank's BIG PICTURE. Much 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.
ANONYMOUS Publisher's Referee

A fair competitor with Francis Fukuyama's The End of History.
STEVE FULLER University of Durham

ReORIENT deserves to become an instant classic.
MARTIN LEWIS Duke University at American Historical Association Meetings 1999

This is a brave book, brave in the academic as well as the personal sense. It insists on a completely necessary reorientation of academic and political views. It will prove to be compulsory reading.
JACK GOODY St. Johns College, Cambridge in London Times Higher Education Supplement

If challenging received wisdom is a trademark, this book is written as the mother of all challenges. The immense power of the book rests on the ability to provoke and force one to rethink many facets of history that have been taken for granted for a long long time.
HARBANS MUKHIA Indian Express

Gunder Frank's ReORIENT is a heroic effort to reconstruct our conceptions of the world economy in the early modern age. A brilliant theory-Frank's single-minded, relentless, and compelling organic model achieves coherence and has much to offer.
PETER PERDUE Massachussetts Institute of Technology in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

The value of this book is not only that it provides us with a global view of history but that it rethinks the entire field of the social science
YE TAN Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in WENHUI BAO [Shanghai]

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 shows how [they] got it all wrong. This book is conceptually that important. 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. A fundamental rethinking absolutely essential to understanding world history.
ALBERT BERGESEN University of Arizona

Andre Gunder Frank is an icon and iconoclast combined in one. With his new book, Re-Orient, Frank is again charting a new territory, this time challenging his friends and foes alike, including the former Frank himself, to think beyond narrow Eurocentric approaches to the vicissitudes of world economic change and continuity. The book is iconoclast to its core. It takes on the entire tradition of modern historiography, western and non-western, left and right, on the world economy. Among the revered he attempted to knock down in his new book are Karl Marx, Max Weber, Polanyi, Talcott Parsons, Arnold Toynbee, Charles Kindleberger, Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and most other contemporary social theorists such as Perry Anderson and Benjamin Barber on the left and W. W. Rostow, Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama on the right. The thesis of the Re-Orient is quite straightforward: a truly global perspective is needed in studying macro-historical changes in the world--the rise and fall of empires, the industrial revolution, the decline of the East and the corresponding rise of the West, colonialism in India and American revolution, etc. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as Frank repeatedly tells us in his book, the parts can only be understood in relation to the whole. Adopting such a globalist perspective is no easy task, however, as most of our contemporary social science, history included, is trapped in an Eurocentric ideology masquarading as universal science. Frank sets out to debunk this Eurocentric myth by marshalling an impressive array of evidence LEI GUANG San Diego State University

This iconoclastic book is the culmination of one of the most prolific social historian's life-long struggle to explain world development. A central idea put forward by the author is that in order to understand history one has to place the analysis squarely into a world-encompassing model of the global economy. Frank provides a much needed perspective that we are 'all in the same boat', that there is 'unity in diversity', and that ideas such as that of a 'clash of civilisations' are nonsense. It would be too easy to dismiss it as just 'politically correct'. To sum up, 'ReORIENT' is a landmark book.
HANS-JUERGEN ENGELBRECHT Massey University, New Zealand, in International Journal of Social Economics

Frank's book makes two big arguments. The first demolishes one of the pillars of Eurocentric history: the false belief that Europe was more advanced or more rapidly advancing that Asia in early modern times. The second argument is a theory aiming to explain why Europe began to outpace Asia in economic development around 1750 and, more concretely, to explain why the industrial revolution took place in Europe and not in Asia.
J. M. BLAUT in JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY

Andre Gunder Frank's latest work ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age definitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, almost everybody who has ever touched on the subject.
PEER VRIES University of Leiden in ITINERARIO

Andre Gunder Frank's thesis requires a revolution in Western thinking: if we transcend Eurocentrism, we can see that, viewed from the standpoint of the global whole, the main story of economic development is in Asia and not in the West. Frank pulls the rug out from under the Eurocentrism of Marx, Weber, Toynbee and even Wallerstein [and] the accepted ideological frameworks through which Western social theorists hide from thesmselves the deep interdependency of the world.
TIKKUN [Nepal] November/December 1998

I feel that the publication of this book is not an isolated or unique event, but rather a culmination of the past 20 years of Western research on China.
LI BOZHONG Qinghua University [China] in WENHUI BAO [Shanghai]

ReORIENT is a stimulating and thoughtful book that should be read by all serious students of the modern world system. [It] has caused great waves of anxiety among social scientists because of his claim that this new perspective on the West invalidates all our theories of development.
CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN UC Riverside in American Journal of Sociology

ReOrient's biggest virtue: it forces the reader to at least look differently at world history. This impressive and illuminating analysis sets out to challenge the mother of all orthodoxies that Europe discovered capitalism and industrialisation and that what followed and is happening and will happen is essentially a fallout of this European preeminence..
SAUBHIK CHAKABARTI The Statesman [India]

Frank raises the following issue in this book: Can any theory or perspective (theoretical, analytical and empirical) which carries the baggage of Eurocentric historiography and ideology address the social and economic issues of the 21st century? Can it do so especially as it suffers from the drawback of not being able to answer various questions relating to the resurgence of the Asian economy without reorienting its analysis of world history and global political economy.
SATISH K.SHARMA in SOCIOLOGICAL BULLETIN [India]

This is a bold new interpretation that ... creates a distinctive argument to explain Europe's post-1800 successes. 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. I believe this book could become a benchmark study. BIN WONG University of California at Irvine

We have long been indebted to Andre Gunder Frank for giving us unforgettable concepts. He now gives us the brilliant "Re-Orient", an incisive bon mot that not only steers us away from Eurocentric history but emphasizes even during the period of the so-called European hegemony, of Asia's vigor and significance. This book is written in the classic iconoclastic and synthetic style we expect from Frank. In support of this position he has assembled a prodigious amount of evidence. [His] strong and clear voice has always called upon us to revise. No scholar can afford to ignore this serious book.
JANET ABU-LUGHOD New School University in JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY

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Reviews of ReOrient and Evaluations by Reviewers and Referees

This list of reviews is complete through July, 2001.

Andre Gunder Frank has written responses to ReOrient reviews by S. Amin, G. Arrighi, and I. Wallerstein in REVIEW XXII, 3, 1999 and to the P. Vries review in ITINERARIO, 1998.


Reviews have appeared in the following publications, among others:

Publication Issue Reviewer
USA
WORLD HISTORY ASSOCIATION June 1999 DAVID CHAPPELL
JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY 11/1/2000 JANET ABU-LUGHOD
JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY 10/2/99 DAVID BUCK
AMERICAN HISTRICAL REVIEW 104:10/ S.A.M. ADSHEAD
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY DEC 1998 DAVID LANDES
BULLETIN CONCERNED ASIAN SCHOLARS 30:4/98 PETER PERDUE
JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY 25: 4/99 J. L. BLAUT
JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE 37/1:MR.98 ANON
LINGUA FRANCA FALL 98 GINA NEFF
WORLD VIEW JULY-SEPT 98 ANON
AMAZON.COM   JEFFEREY SOMMERS
PAT LAUDERDALE
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY v 105 nr 4 CHRIS CHASE-DUNN
INTERNATIONAL HISTORY REVIEW March 2000 GEORGE MODELSKY
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY 2000 DAVID LUDDEN
INDIA & NEPAL
INDIAN EXPRESS 15/11/98 HARBANS MUKHIA
THE HINDU 16/12/97 S. AMBRIJAN
THE STATEMAN 21/12/98 SAUBHIK CHAKABARTI
ECONOMIC TIMES 25/10/98 ANON
THE TELEGRAPH 16 June 2000 ABHIJIT KUMAR DUTTA
BUSINESS ECONOMICS July 31,2000 RILA MUKHERJEE
CHINA
DUSHU [Beijing] 2000/5 Liu He (Lidya Liu) [The World outside the Shadow of the European Streetlight] (PDF Format)
WENHUI BAO  Shanghai Daily] MAY 13, 2000 Wei Sei et al.
WENCUI ZHOUKAN Special issue on ReOrient: Whom on Earth Has the ReOrient offended? JUNE 19, 2001 (Prefaces by Chen Yangu and Bing Won; papers by Liu He [The World outside the Shadow of the European Streetlight]; Xu Youyu [Questioning the ReOrient]; Liu He [Whom on Earth Has the ReOrient offended?; Wang Ye [Reflecting on the World History that People have been used to -Chinese academia paying attention to the ReOrient]; Ye Tan [On the ReOrient]; Wei Si [Reading the ReOrient]; Xiao Jun [ The Debate {on the ReOrient} that I Don't Understand]. (PDF format)
NANFANG ZHOUMO JUNE 16, 2000 Xu Youyu [Questioning the ReOrient] (PDF format)
NANFANG ZHOUMO JULY 27, 2000 Liu He [Whom on Earth Has the ReOrient offended?] (PDF format).
CHINA ECONOMICS NETWORK   (Introduction of the author of ReOrient, Table of Content, and two prefaces by Chen Yangu and Bin Wong). (PDF format)
DUSHU & SHINJIAO (Vol. 21 No. 1) JANUARY 31, 2002 Guang Lei [Frank and Global Perspective on Studies of World Political Economy"]
JAPAN
RYUKYU SHINPOU (a newspaper) 25 June 2000 "Asian Age Again" by HEITA KAWAKATSU
SHUUKAN EKONOMISUTO (Weekly Economist) 4 July 2000 "Anti-Eurocentric View of History at the Age of Global Economy" by MINORU KAWAKITA
NIKKEI BIZINETSU (Weekly Nikkei Business) 24 July 2000 "Asian Perspective: Critical Re-Assessment of Eurocentric Worldview" by KUNIKO INOGUCHI
YOMIURI SHINBUN (a newspaper) 6 August 2000 "Asia, the Leader of World Economy" by HIROFUNI YAMAMOTO
NIHON KEIZAI SHINBUN (a newspaper) 3 September 2000 "World History and World Economy in Asian Perspective" by TAKESHI HAMASHITA
ENGLAND
TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT   JACK GOODY
ECONOMIC HISTORY JOURNAL 8/99 N.F.R. CRAFTS
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ECONOMICS   H.-J. ENGELBRECHT
BUSINESS HISTORY 42:2 April 2000 DAVID RICHARDSON
FRANCE
REVUE BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE DE SINOLOGIE 1999 R. BIN WONG
CRITIQUE INTERNATIONALE FALL 1998 J.-F.B.
ANNALES No. 4, 2000 SANHA SUBRAHMANYAN
SPAIN
PAPELES DES QUESTIONES INTERNACIONALES 1998 JOSE MARIA TORTOSA
GERMANY
ANTXRHPOS 95 2000/1 WOLFGANG MARSCHALL
YUGOSLAVIA
POLITICA July 1, 2000 DUSAN PETROVIC
NETHERLANDS
ITINERARIO   PEER VRIES


Chapter Abstracts

The Preface gives an account of the 40 years over which the ideas of this book have developed, from dependence theory, to world system theory to the present globalism. It refers specifically not only to the various stages of the work by Frank, but also its mutual interaction with that of other contemporary authors, such as Abu-Lughod, Amin, Arrighi, Bergesen, Blaut, Chase-Dunn, Chaudhuri, Chew, Denemark, Ekholm, Friedman, Gills, Hall, Hodgson, McNeill, Wallerstein, and Wolf.

The Chapter 1 Introduction presents the 'unity in diversity' theme of this book and its general idea that the whole is more than the sum of, and also shapes, its parts and their relations. It applies this ground rule to the study of the global economy and world system between 1400 and 1800, which this book analyzes as an alternative to the past two centuries of Eurocentric historiography and social theory. The chapter contains very critical examinations of the work of classical authors such as Durkheim, Maine, Marx, Smith, Sombart, Toynbee, and Weber. It also reviews and challenges twentieth century economic historians and social theorists in general and in particular the resistance to the present thesis by Abu-Lughod, Amin, Arrighi, Bairoch, Blaut, Braudel, Brenner, Chase-Dunn and Hall, Chaudhuri, Cipolla, Gates, Jones, Landes, McNeill, Mann, Modelski and Thompson, North, O'Brien, Parsons, Polanyi, Redfield, Rostow, Sanderson, Wallerstein, White, and Wolf. On the other hand, the chapter recommends as complementary to the present book the recent and oft still unpublished work of Asiniero, Fletcher, Hodgson, Perlin, Pomeranz, and Wong.

Chapter 2 examines the structure and flow of trade, starting in the Americas and going eastward literally around the globe. It examines the pattern of trade imbalances, and their settlement through payment in money, which also flowed predominantly eastward. A dozen regions and their relations with each other are examined, going from the Americas, via Africa and Europe, to and through West-, South-, and Southeast- Asia, to Japan and China and from there both across the Pacific and also back across Central Asia and Russia. This review reveals both information about the strength and growth of these "regional" economies and their trade and monetary relations with each other. It also shows, at least implicitly, what kind of a world economic division of labor existed, expanded, and changed in the early modern period from about 1400 to 1800. At the very least, this chapter demonstrates that there was such world-wide division of labor. It identifies many of the different products and services, sectors and regions, and of course enterprises and "countries" that effectively competed with each other in a single global economy. Thus, we will see that all received economic and social theory based on the neglect or outright denial of this world-wide division of labor is without historical foundation.

Chapter 3 examines the role of money in the world economy as a whole and in shaping the relations among its regional parts. There is a large literature on the flow of money from the silver mines in the Americas to Europe, and there has been some concern also with its onward remittance to Asia. However, insufficient attention has been devoted to macro- and micro- economic analysis of why the specie was produced, transported, minted, re-minted, exchanged, etc. Beyond macro- and micro-economic analysis of this production and exchange of silver and other species as commodities, one section of this chapter also examines the very circulatory system through which the monetary blood flowed. Moreover, this monetary system is itself shown to have played an essential role in connecting and expanding the world economy.

Thus, another section examines why and how this capillary monetary system, as well as the oxygen carrying monetary blood that flowed through it, penetrated and fuelled the economic body of the world economy. We examine how some of these monetary veins and arteries were bigger than others, and how smaller ones reached farther into, and even served to extend and stimulate production on, the outward reaches of the world economic body at this and that, but not every, frontier. The hoary myth about Asiatic "hoarding" of money is shown to be without foundation, especially in the "sinks" of the world monetary supply in India, and even more so in China.

Chapter 4 examines some quantitative global economic dimensions. Although hard data are hard to come by, one section devotes some effort to assembling and comparing at least some world-wide and regional dimensions of population, production, trade, and consumption, as well as their respective rates of growth, especially in Asia and Europe. We will see that not only were various parts of Asia economically far more important in and to the world economy than all of Europe. The historical evidence also demonstrates unequivocally that Asia grew faster and more than Europe and maintained its economic lead over Europe in all these respects until at least 1750. If several parts of Asia were richer and more productive than Europe was, and moreover their economies were expanding and growing during this early modern period, how is it possible that the "Asian Mode of Production" under any of its European designations could have been as traditional, stationary, stagnant and generally uneconomic as Marx, Weber, Sombart et al alleged? It was not, and this also Eurocentric proposition should already appear as absurd as it is prima facie. Other sections also bring evidence and the judgements of authorities to bear on comparisons of productivity, technology as well as of economic and financial institutions in Europe and Asia, especially with India and China. These comparisons show that the European put-down of Asia is unfounded in fact; for Asia was not only economically and in many ways technologically ahead of Europe at the beginning but still also at the end of this period. However, this chapter also launches the argument that production, trade, their institutions and technology should not only be inter-nationally compared, but that they must also be seen as being mutually related and generated on a world economic level.

Chapter 5 proposes and pursues a "horizontally integrative macrohistory" of the world, in which simultaneity of events and processes is no coincidence. Nor are simultaneous events here and there seen as differently caused by diverse local "internal" circumstances. Instead, one section after another inquires into common and connected causes of simultaneous occurrences around the world. Demographic/structural, monetary, Kondratieff and longer cycle analysis is brought to bear in different but complementary attempts to account for and explain what was happening here and there. Such cyclical and monetary analysis is used to help account in the 1640s for the simultaneous fall of the Ming in China and of revolution in England, rebellion in Spain and Japan, and other problems in Manila and elsewhere. The French, Dutch Batavian, American, and industrial revolutions in the late eighteenth century are also briefly examined in cyclical and related terms. Another section inquires whether the so-called "seventeenth century crisis" of Europe was world wide and included Asia; and I explore the important significance of a negative answer for world economic history. Observation of the continuation of the "long sixteenth century" expansion through the seventeenth and into part of the eighteenth century in much of Asia is used also to pose the question of whether there were very long, about 500 year long, world economic and political cycles.

Chapter 6 opens with this question about very long cycles opens on how and why the West "won" in the nineteenth century, and whether this "victory" is likely to endure or to be only temporary. In previous works (Gills and Frank 1992, Frank and Gills 1993, Frank 1993), I claim to have identified half-millennium long world economic system wide cycles of expansive "A" and contractive "B" phases, which were some two-three hundred years long each. I traced these back to 3000 BC and up to about 1450 AD. Three separate test attempts by other scholars [cited below] offer some confirmatory evidence of the existence and my dating of these alleged cycles and their phases. Did this pattern of such long cycles continue into early modern times? That is the first question posed in this section. The second one is that, if they did, do they reflect and can they help account for the continued dominance of Asia in the world economy through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, as well as for its decline and Europe's rise thereafter? The chapter also culminates the book's historical account and theoretical analysis to argue how the "Decline of the East" and the "Rise of the West" may have been systemically related and mutually promoted. To do so, one section examines the unequal regional and sectoral structure and the uneven temporal or cyclical dynamic the growth of production and of population in the single global economy. The argument is that not Asia's alleged weakness and Europe's alleged strength in the period of early modern world history, but rather the effects of Asia's strength led to its decline after 1750 and that Europe's actions reflected the weakness of its perviously marginal position in the world economy and led to its ascendance after 1800. This development also took advantage of the "Decline of Asia" after 1750, whose roots and timing are also examined in a separate section of the chapter. Moreover, the suggestion is made that within the same still continuing process of global development, a possible twenty-first century reversion of the balance of economic, political and cultural power to Asia may already have begun again. "The Rise of the West" is also examined more concretely in the last section. My thesis - echoing but extending that of James Blaut - is that the West first bought itself a third class seat on the Asian economic train, then leased a whole railway carriage, and only in the nineteenth century managed to displace Asians from the locomotive. One section examines, and cites the analysis of Adam Smith about how the Europeans managed to do so with the use of American money. They used it not only to expand their own economies, but also or even especially to buy themselves into the expanding market in Asia. Thus, the industrial revolution and its eventual use by the Europeans to achieve a position of dominance in the world economy cannot be adequately explained on the basis only of factors "internal" to Europe, not even supplemented by colonially based accumulation of capital. We need a world economic accounting for and explanation of this world economic process and event. This section proposes and then examines a hypothesis based on world-wide and subsidiary regional demand-and-supply relations for labor-saving and power-producing technological innovation.

Chapter 7, the conclusion, re-examines the implications of this need for holistic analysis and our derivative findings and hypotheses for further research about historiography, received theory and the possible and necessary reconstruction of both. That is, since the whole is more than the sum of its parts, each part is not only influenced by other parts, but by what happens in the whole world [system]. There is no way we can understand and account for what happened in Europe or America without taking account of what happened in Asia and Africa - and vice versa- nor what happened anywhere without identifying the influences that emanated from everywhere, that is from the structure and dynamic of the whole world [system] itself. In literally a word, we need a holistic analysis to explain any part of the system. The first part of the chapter summarizes the historiographic conclusions of what not to do, especially the divisionism of Fukujama's 'end of history,' Huntington's 'clash of civilizations,' and Barber's 'Jihad vs. McWorld.' The second part of the final chapter goes on to suggest better alternative theoretical directions for new historiogrpahy and theory to promote unity in diversity.

Table of Contents

  • 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 WIN [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)


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