full title version of previous post revealed and forwarded message about

my other post's full title:

Re: Recent Macrohistories, wool and cotton in the world/Britain, tweaking world
systems theory: so far monopsony biased?

(the list cut off the title, as well as likely the incentive to read). ;-)

and *this* post's full title, in case it gets cut off: 

full title version of previous post revealed and forwarded message about world
systems theory, and nice macro history review article

---------------and what I said I would forward as background:




At 01:22 PM 5/4/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Date: May 3, 2001
>From: David Fahey
>        Miami University, Ohio
>        faheydm@muohio.edu
>
>The American Historical Review 106:2 (April 2001) includes a review essay
>by Gale Stokes (pp. 508-25), "The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of
>Recent Macrohistories."

from that article, I took two quotes:

"Practitioners of the new field of world history have begun to sidestep or
ignore questions such as these in favor of what Pomeranz calls "reciprocal
comparisons." This approach recognizes that a truly comprehensive account
of the
past thousand years must concentrate on polycentric interactions rather than
questions of priority or hegemony that have exercised scholars like Landes or
Frank for the past generation. This approach—less essentialist, less polemical,
and less focused on origins—is on the verge of entering the mainstream of the
American historical profession."

and

"Many of the critics of the European perspective are, or consider themselves,
world historians, of course, but what I mean by the term here is the growing
group of scholars who put aside questions of hegemony and ressentiment and
attempt to write truly comparative history."

and made three points:

One: Using the terms above, I would offer that I have recently finished
something I would characterize as a 'reciprocal comparisons' piece. However, it
'does world history' less through the polycentric interactions described above,
and more along the lines comparative world history: exploring the same process
of urbanization comparatively (in world history), and the social, technical and
political ramifications of using different raw material substrates, which have
different endemic consumptive scales and organizational frameworks attached to
them. Thus it is both nomothetic (e.g., comparing urbanization processes) as
well as ideographic  (e.g., the different socially institutionalized
consumptive items).  Most world history only takes the latter ideographic
course. 

Two: This paper simultaneously has a "why Europe/England" question, for what we
refer to as "industrialization," similar to Pomeranz. However, I want to make
clear that this is very different than Pomeranz because, temporally speaking, I
am arguing that phenomenologically as a process, there is nothing novel in
"industrialization" except scale issues in urban consumption--particularly of
imported (socially available) cotton. In other words I would characterize this
as history, yes; however, history that explores 'atemporal' issues of social
relations in world history around particular raw material substrates,
urbanization processes, and the state.  

        Connected with this relational 'atemporal' issue, I take pains to
disagree with the idea that there is ever (in the past or the future) going to
be something called "abstract industrialization," or an "abstract" sense of
financial power separated from the particularities of raw materials, or an
abstract sense of particular interests in the state separate from raw materials
as well. By the first, I mean that technological implements are inherently
embedded in the particularities of the raw materials they manipulate instead of
the typical unfortunate view that sees of something abstract in the use of
'technology.' A great length, I discuss the 'why technology' issues around
cotton and the 'why not technology' issues around wool particularly, despite
their similar penchants in world history to be institutionalized in textile
fibers. Connected with this, I discuss what I feel is a comprehensive
definition of urbanization, as a process called up to differentiate spatially
from the relations of how consumptive scales for different raw material
substrates have different spatial requirements to socially institutionalize
scale consumption. The scale issues of raw materials (when allowed for by the
state) influence technological implementation, because technology is a human
choice of investment around particular consumptive paths and a rejection of
them around other raw materials. Second, I discuss how the particularities of
finance are embedded differentially in particular raw material paths and
supplies as well, at least in this period. Third, I discuss a bit about the
state's embeddedness in preferential treatment of consumptive organizational
relations, in what I am calling the 'raw material regime' of the English state
around wool (institutionalized in consumptive habits, in the laws, and in
legitimation discourses) and how this arrangement was challenged by peripheral
cotton interests in the early 1600s, and then in the early 1700s. The story is
of the large degree of social foundations that were required to be established
decades earlier: the erosion of wool's preferential treatments. For cotton,
there were legal and social movement requirements--long before the presumably
'automatic' 1794 expansion of the British Midlands cotton textiles trade when
American cotton-ginned cotton became available.

Three: I take the work as a whole as a caveat against world systems narratives
of generalized peripheries, semiperipheries, and cores (while accepting the
positionalities of them) in my discussion of the global trade mechanics of how
British wool, presumably an "exporting periphery destined to remain so"
actually could become such a core area hundreds of years later. I'm interested
in the raw material specificity and the geographic specificity of such 'rank
changes' from periphery, semiperiphery, and core--and I see very little in
present world systems theory that has been able to approach what I am arguing
is the raw material specifics of all these social changes, explaining why, in a
generalizable sense some do and some "remain peripheries." 

For the curious, I have posted the introductory pages at:

http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~mrkdwhit/intersci-l/files/RMADOL/RMADOLsummary.html

"Raw Materials and the Division of Labor."

Or, see me present this at this year's Anaheim ASA conference, in August. When
I have a moment in a month or so (or tell me where I could apply for a grant to
do it now ;-)  ), I will be submitting 'article length' versions of these
points and others to various journals.



Regards,


Mark Whitaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison