Dear Colleagues: I was really pleased to get some responses to my post
about early modern world-systems and East Africa. And yes, Prof Fahey [on
H-World], Ricardo is alive and well in the Land of OZ; my piece though was
located specifically in a WSN context.
I would like to take the opportunity to reply to Andre Gunder Frank, and
raise a more general matter to do with his work. This is NOT a personal
attack. Indeed I do this with some concern, for I consider Gunder Frank to
be an iconic, even if not hegemonic or canonical, figure in the field of
political economy. Yes, I have read the various pieces he mentioned in his
reply to my post, and indeed I've long been interested in matters like
bullion flows before 1800. My problem is that there seems to be in all his
work a disturbing underlying synchronic element. His work on Latin America
so many years ago was the first, or at least the most effective, rebuttal
of modernisation theory. However, he seemed to be telling us that
essentially the 'development of underdevelopment' began as the Spanish
arrived in the sixteenth century, and the 'creation of poverty' proceeded
thereafter, with very little change. Yet surely the world-historical
context changed dramatically between say 1550 and 1950?
Now Gunder Frank is asking us to accept the notion of world systems going
back 5,000 years or more. To the extent that exchange has occurred over
all human history, this is an unexceptional claim. However, heuristically
this is not very useful. It reminds me of Eric Wolf's 'tributary mode' of
some fifteen years ago, where it seems that most of the world for most of
the time is to be located in this broad category. Yes, Wallerstein and
Amin and so many others are 'right,' for capitalism DOES make a difference.
When capital penetrates production this marks the major transition in
human history since maybe the agricultural revolution. This happened not
sometime in the sixteenth century as Wallerstein et al would have it, but
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maybe I'm just
unreconstructed, but Marx knew this, and here at least he was right. Thus
to find world systems from the dawn of 'civilisation' and to see no generic
change from then to now is to obscure the seismic impact of capitalism
[which does not mean merely the accumulation of capital]. Analysis of
movements within world systems, and changes in the location of their
centers, over the last 5,000 years is all very well, but when one of these
pre-capitalist world economies becomes a modern world-system [following of
course Wallerstein's schema] human history changes dramatically. This is
not to privilege 'Europe,' it is to recognise what's important, and for
better or worse this happened in Europe. There's no question that the
Indian economy in say the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was the center
of a vast world economy stretching all around the Indian Ocean area, but
all the evidence shows that this structure could not compete with newly
emergent capitalism in Europe.
As an historian I'm always keen to find change, to attempt diachronic
analysis. My charge is that Gunder Frank falls short here. What do all of
you out there think?
Michael Pearson
Adjunct Professor
Faculty of Arts
Southern Cross University
PO Box 157 Lismore 2480
Phone: (066) 20 3946 Fax: (066) 22 1683
Email: mpearson@scu.edu.au