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Should we really ReORIENT?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Peer Vries
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Extract

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 what according to him are the received opinions in historiography and social science on the making of the modern world. He does so relentlessly and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, of almost everybody who has ever touched upon the subject. All these misled if not downright misleading scholars are thought to suffer from Eurocentrism. Which of course is a Bad Thing. Frank uses the word to refer to people who profess to tell the history of the world but do so by preponderantly gazing at their European navel, unduly magnifying Europe's uniqueness and role in world history.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , November 1998 , pp. 19 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1998

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References

Notes

1 Frank, Andre Gunder, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Los Angeles and London 1998) 226–257.Google Scholar

2 Landes, D.S., The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York 1998) 513.Google Scholar

3 Frank, , ReORIENT, 276–277.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., 4.

5 Ibid., 117–123 and 182–183.

6 Frank does not substantiate this statement by presenting price data for Europe and Asia. That is a pity because not everybody would agree with his thesis. Compare Frank, , ReORIENT, 153–164, with for exampleGoogle ScholarGoldstone, J., Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modem World (Berkeley and Oxford 1991) 359–362 and 368–375Google Scholar.

7 Frank, , ReORIENT, 126–130.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 185.

9 Ibid., 204

10 Ibid., 190.

11 Ibid., 204.

12 Pomeranz, K., A New World of Growth: Markets, Ecology, Coercion, and Industrialization in Global Perspective (unpublished manuscript 1997);Google ScholarFrank, , ReORIENT, 222Google Scholar.

13 Frank, ReORIENT, 206.

14 Ibid., 224.

15 Ibid., 276.

16 Ibid., 263–264.

17 Ibid., 349.

18 Ibid., 349.

19 Ibid., 276, 334.

20 Ibid., 266.

21 Ibid., 259.

22 For similar statements see for example 263, 266, 273, 276, 283, 304–305, 318, 349.

23 For further explanation of this concept, which is introduced in the debate by Mark Elvin, see Elvin, M., The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford 1973) andGoogle Scholaridem, Another History: Essays on China from a European Perspective (Broadway Australia 1996) 20–63Google Scholar.

24 Frank, , ReORIENT, 286, 300, 304, 307, 314.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 367, 300–301.

26 Ibid., 288.

27 Ibid., 300.

28 Ibid., 277.

29 Bairoch, P., Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (New York 1993) 101–110;Google ScholarMaddison, A., ‘A Comparison of Levels of GDP in Developed and Developing Countries, 1700–1980’, Journal of Economic History 43 (1983) 27–41 andCrossRefGoogle ScholarBraudel, F., Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme: XVe-XVIII siècle III: Le temps du monde (Paris 1979) 460–461Google Scholar.

30 Goldstone, J.A., ‘The Problem of the “Early Modern World”’, The Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient 40/4 (1998) 1–36.Google Scholar

31 Adas, M., Machines as Measures of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance I: Before the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca 1989) 17–127. See forGoogle ScholarOsterhammel, China J., China und die Weltgesellschaft I: Annährungen (München 1989) 1–40 andGoogle ScholarMurphey, R., The Outsiders: The Western Experience in India and China (Ann Arbor 1977) chapter 9Google Scholar.

32 See for example Bairoch, P., ‘Commerce international et genèse de la révolution industrielle Anglaise’, Annales ESC 28 (1973) 541–571;Google Scholaridem, Economics and World History, 80–87 and O'Brien, P.K., ‘European Industrialization from the Voyages of Discovery to the Industrial Revolution’ in: Pohl, H. ed., The European Discovery of the World and Its Economic Effects on Pre-industrial Society: 1500–1800 (Stuttgart 1990) 154–177Google Scholar.

33 If there existed something of a real world system in the early modern world, I think it did not exist in the field of the production and distribution of goods, but in the field of the production and distribution of ideas, and to a lesser extent in the exchange of people.

34 Frank, , ReORIENT, 182.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 184.

36 Ibid., 237.

37 Murphy, , The Outsiders, 204. See passim chapter 11. CompareGoogle ScholarLippit, V.D., The Economic Development of China (New York and London 1987) 45 and 55–65Google Scholar.

38 Frank, , ReORIENT, 295.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., 42.

40 Compare J.L. Rosenbloom, http:/www.eh.net/ehnet/lists, 28 May 1998.

41 For Elvin's point of view see his The Pattern of the Chinese Past, chapters 13 and 17 and Another History, 20–63. For an analysis of Needham's ideas regarding this problem see Cohen, H.F., The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago and London 1994) 439–488Google Scholar.

42 Compare Elvin, , The Pattern of the Chinese Past, 175–178 andGoogle ScholarVries, j. de, European Urbanization 1500–1800 (London 1984) 348–350Google Scholar.

43 Jacob, M.C., Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York and Oxford 1997).Google Scholar

44 Frank, , ReORIENT, 219.Google Scholar

45 Ibid., 171.

46 Ibid., 168 and 170.

47 Ibid., 222.

48 Macfarlane, A., The Savage Wars of Peace:Japan and England and the Malthusian Trap (Oxford 1997).Google Scholar That this is the case in Japan can be inferred from figures Frank himself gives on pages 168 and 170 and from his remark on page 106: ‘After that [the year 1721, P.V.] all sources show population leveling off in Japan’.

49 Frank, , ReORIENT, 308.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 305.

51 Lippit, , The Economic Development of China, 78–99.Google Scholar

52 For an analysis of income distribution in early modern Europe see Zanden, J.L. van, ‘Tracing the Beginning of the Kuznets Curve: Western Europe During the Early Modern Period’, Economic History Review 48 (1995) 643–664CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 That is, if it exists. I have not been able to trace where Goldstone formulates this generalisation. Frank only refers to Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion, which is a book of some 600 pages!

54 Of course it all depends on what you call an agrarian society, but there a several preindustrial societies where population growth did not imply a lowering of real wages and effective demand. For data on real wages in the early modern Dutch Republic - and England — see Woude, A. van der and Vries, J. de, The First Modem Economy: Succes, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge 1997) chapter 12. For data on income and wealth in early modern Europe see Van Zanden, ‘Tracing the Beginning of the Kuznets Curve’Google Scholar.

55 Only then did Europe really ‘undercut’ the Chinese in some productive sectors. And even then the Chinese market was never really flooded by Western goods. See, for example, Murphey, The Outsiders, chapters 7 to 12.

56 For a, what I think, very convincing critique of the high-level equilibrium trap explanation of China's stagnation see Lippit, , The Economic Development of China, 68–73 and 85–86.Google Scholar

57 See for example Bairoch, , Economics and World History, 72–79Google Scholar and the literature mentioned in notes 1 and 3 of that text.

58 Frank, , ReORIENT, 285.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 293, 316.

60 Wong, R.B., China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca and London 1997).Google Scholar

61 Landes, , The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 516.Google Scholar

62 Landes, , The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, XXIGoogle Scholar ‘A third school would argue that the West-Rest dichotomy is simply false. In the large stream of world history Europe is a latecomer and free rider on the earlier achievements of others. That is patently incorrect. As the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity.’

63 To give only a few examples. Cohen in his book on the Scientific Revolution does explicidy not reject the use of the concept ‘Scientific Revolution’ as Frank wants his readers to believe. See Cohen, The Scientific Revolution, 500–501.Google Scholar Compare Frank, , ReORIENT, 192.Google Scholar Cohen nowhere suggests, as again Frank want his readers to believe, that there would be a direct relationship between the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and the Industrial Revolution. See, for example, Cohen, , The Scientific Revolution, 195, 427–428.Google Scholar Cohen's book is about the Scientific Revolution, not about the industrial one. Compare Frank, , ReORIENT, 188–192.Google Scholar The fundamental thesis of trilogy, Braudels Civilisation matérielle, économie et capilalisme is that only in Europe ‘[…] la construction [of capitalism, P.V.] réussit’. See part two of theGoogle Scholartrilogy, , Les jeux de l'échange, 519.Google Scholar Frank passes this over and only quotes Braudel as somebody who can be brought in line with his thesis that there were no significant institutional differences between Europe and Asia. See Frank, , ReORIENT, 213–214.Google Scholar Bairoch is quoted with approval when he compares GNP per capita in various civilisations at the end of the early modern period and concludes there was something of an economic parity, but when he claims intercontinental trade accounted for only a small part of European GNP at this same moment in time — as you will remember income from trade is part of GNP - his calculations are dismissed out of hand. Compare Frank, , ReORIENT, 171–174Google Scholar with 41–42 and 295–296. I would be surprised if for example Goldstone, Wong or Elvih would fully agree with the way their work is interpreted and fitted into Frank's thesis. See for example notes 6, 41, 53, and 60 of this article.