From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Feb 02 2006 - 01:44:00 EST
Some here may find John Hobson The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization interesting. I found it to be a compelling and at time breathtakingly interesting work. To be sure, many Marxists will be irked by his understanding of "oriental trade" and Islamic globalization between 500-1500 AD capitalist. But the strength and sophistication of mercantile activity and commodity production are rather astonishing; especially arresting is the discussion of the advances of the Sung economy. The enmeshment of what came to be known as the West in what Hobson calls oriental globalization seems to have been rather profound, and Hobson's account is spirited, massively detailed and endlessly interesting. Of course there was probably nothing like the contemporary global market in which the law of one price prevails, as Cyrus Bina has shown in his analysis of the globalization of the oil market. This may be a general problem in the book. To the extent that he wants to argue for the Eastern origins of Western civilization he has to underestimate the qualitative breaks effected by Western capitalist modernity. So we learn of debts to especially Arabic mathematical and experimental thought, but are given little analysis of the ways in Galilean and Newtonian mathematical physics represents a novel form of thought. For example, didn't Joseph Needham argue that the mechanistic world view would not likely have developed in China? And we are not given any diagrams or detailed analysis to judge how indebted English steam engines were to Chinese technological advances. On the other hand, Hobson would doubtless agree with Kenneth Pomeranz that the servile colonial system based on a brutal and racially exclusive slavery that Europe developed in the New World had no precedent. Hobson also reprises several criticisms of the image of oriental despotism, though he does not focus on its theorization by James Mill and Richard Jones who as Brendan O'Leary has argued were the most important precursors to Marx's own theory of the Asiatic mode of production. While Hobson's criticisms are well taken, one does wish that he would have paid more attention to intra European difference in political form: did the nature of sovereign power in Spain and Portugal curtail the kind of mercantile activity by which the English enriched themselves? On the question of the role of slavery in industrialization, Hobson makes a strong and empirically rich argument for the former's centrality to the latter. The nursery rhymes of capital's origins in fortitude , savings, ingenuity, etc are replaced with a sharp account of the role of force abroad and at home--in the slave system and in the regressive tax system-- in the amassing of profits with which industrial investments were made. Those who would sanctify the present due to its putative origins in just transactions--what Andrew Collier has called the genetic fallacy of the myth of primitive accumulation--are sharply undercut by Hobson. (See also Acemoglu, D., Johnson S., Robinson J.A., 2002. The rise of Europe: Atlantic trade, institutional change and economic growth. NBER Working Paper #9378) The conquest of the Americas allowed for the unexpected rise of Northwest Europe and called forth subsequent myth making about the West as an autonomous society cut off from the rest of the Eurasia and about its rise being due to its own cultural resources. In this way, Hobson accepts and deepens Martin Bernal's understanding of the replacement of the Ancient by the Aryan model. Hobson is critical however of James Blaut whose arguments anticipate many of his. For Hobson, Blaut paid insufficient attention to ideas and culture, for the opportunity of the Americas did not foreordain that the indigeneous people would be exterminated and a permanent racial slavery deployed. It was not foreordained that culture itself would provide a set of reasons to exterminate the Indian peoples and develop a kind of slavery that was reserved for one people and that eliminated connubial rights, previous protections against cruelty, possibilities for manumission, and many opportunities for some entrepreneurial exertion and that stigmatized even the free or freed members and children of the persecuted 'race'. For Hobson, only the West seems to have been capable of developing and did in fact a culture that made available to actors socially valid reasons and incentives for said behavior. It was not to be expected that culture would provide so little resistance to extermination and a racially exclusive completely degraded slavery. It was not given by economics that such a culture would develop. A cultural revolution had to be won, and Hobson thinks the racists happened to have won it in the West (as the success of the Nazi movement would later reveal to those for whom only European lives taken by racism really counted), and had the racists not won, even the opportunity of the Americas would possibly not have allowed for the rise of the hegemonic West. Hobson insists that he is not prioritizing ideas and culture in the development of a Euro America founded on colonization and slavery. But it is difficult to understand why he does not propose a materialist reading of the origins of racism. Hobson recognizes that his ideas about the importance of identity are controversial, but I think he is here as elsewhere trying to unsettle and provoke debate and to do away with comfortable ideas. The book is successful and inspired and massively scholarly in its research (though often polemical in style), though the actual revisioning of world history will not come easily at all. This book will stay with me for many years. I do hope many take up its challenge. Rakesh
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