Prof Barendse's Discussion

Thanks to Prof. Barendse for his cogent comments on the _Baltimore Sun_
article that summarized my book with Terry Boswell, _The Spiral of
Capitalism and Socialism_.
I am off for a trip and do not have time for a complete response, but
would like clear up a couple of apparent misunderstandings.

The first is regarding the mention in the Sun article of hegemonic
overextension. Apparently Michael Hill, the excellent journalist who
wrote the article, had been influenced by Paul Kennedy's work. I did not
discuss my explanations of hegemonic decline with Mr. Hill.  It is a big
topic that is discussed in detail in Chapter 9 of my _Global Formation_.

Secondly, Prof. Barendse questions the idea of Dutch hegemony in the
seventeenth century. Professor Barendse knows much more than I do about
the history of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. But some of his
criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of what Boswell and I think
about the role of the Dutch in the history of the European-centered
subsystem, and in world history.

We do not claim that the Dutch state was hegemonic over the globe in the
17th century. Important other core regions had not yet been incorporated
into the expanding European-centered system. In this we agree with
Gunder Frank.
Remember that we are talking about a regional system that is expanding.
Europe was undergoing a long process of core formation even while it
remained peripheral and semiperipheral in the larger Afro-Eurasian
world-system.(See C. Chase-Dunn and T. Hall, _Rise and Demise 1997).
 The significance of the Dutch revolution and subsequent economic and
political/military leadership was as an agent of the development of
capitalism. Here we disagree with Frank, who claims there was no
transition to capitalism.

As Peter Taylor (The Way the Modern World Works, 1996) has said, the
United Provinces were half way between a capitalist city state and a
modern capitalist nation state. There had been semiperipheral capitalist
city states in the interstices of the tributary empires at least since
the emegence of the Phoenicians. (Indeed ancient Dilmun may have been
one - see Chapter 6 of _Rise and Demise_). But the reemergence of
commodity production the context of fuedal  Europe, an exceedingly
decentralized form of the tributary mode of accumulation, created first
a number of rather strong and adjacent capitalist city states in Europe,
and eventually the capitalists of Amsterdam took effective control of
the Dutch state.
This was the first capitalist core state on Earth. It acted to use state
power at the behest of the accumulation of profits rather than to tax
peasant or extract tributes. And it did this on an intercontinental
scale. True it was not the largest military power in Europe. But it was
a significant naval power with intercontinetal reach. In this regard it
was truly transitional between the earlier capitalist city states and
later British hegemony of the 19th century.  So the Dutch hegemony was
an important part of the development of capitalism as well as of the
expansion of European power.

Important research that supports this approach has been published by
Joya Misra and Terry Boswell 1997 "Dutch hegemony: global leadership
during the age of mercantilism" _Acta Politica_ 32:174-209 and George
Modelski and William R. Thompson 1996 _Leading Sectors and World
Powers_.

Chris Chase-Dunn