chriscd@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu; Sun, 15 Sep 1996 13:12:27 -0400 (EDT)
chriscd@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu; Sun, 15 Sep 1996 13:12:26 -0400 (EDT)
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 13:11:20 -0400
From: "A. Gunder Frank" <agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca>
Subject: Benton comment (fwd)
To: Chris Chase-Dunn <CHRISCD@jhu.edu>
Any comment? YOU all also appear in Benton's "review"!! g/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 12:51:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: FRANK@husc3.harvard.edu
To: agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca
Subject: Benton comment
Alas, the recent invitation on this net to discuss Lauren
Benton's interesting article in THE JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY
7,2,fall 1996 on "From World-Systems Perspective to Institutional
World History" has had no takers, perhaps because everybody is
busy starting a new school year. Alas, I am not so busy. So after
waiting a prudent time for someone else to start a debate, I
reluctantly do so myself, because I regard Benton's challenge as
important if only because it seems designed to head us in the
WRONG direction. Alas!
Benton usefully reviews world system theory [WST], its critiques,
and its extensions/modifications, before presenting Benton's
alternative "institutionalist" theory-of-the-middle-range, as
counselled long ago by Merton. Four previous "alternative"
modification/extension are considered and rejected. Their
partisans of may wish to rise to defend the other three.
I rise to the defense of the fourth, which Benton attributes to
me and rejects on grounds that are not well defended by Benton,
if the are not altogether indefensible.
The fourth variant considered by Benton "has been to broaden the
historical range of application of the world-systems perspective
.... [as] argued by Frank" [p.272]. Benton first rejects this as
"of course ... flawed ... [because it] produces such a stripped-
down version of WST that the power and originality of the
perspective is lost" [273]. I don't know if the "originality" is
lost, since I have been working within this perspective and
publishing with this terminology since the mid 1960s. But I do
know that its power, far from being lost, is quantitatively
deepened and broadened, indeed qualitatively transformed. That
is demonstrably so both where the "broadened...stripped-down
version" subtracts some alleged power from the "original" and
where and how the scope and therefore the real power of the
latter is significantly increased.
Indeed far from being a loss, it is an all to the good gain to
strip the original procrustean bed of some of its "comforts" by
broadening it. An important case in point is already exemplified
by the alleged core-periphery structure Benton mentions and its
alleged relation to hegemony/rivalry. For both the [incidentally
different! ] political ECONOMIC hegemonies "identified" by
Braudel and Wallerstein and the POLITICAL economic ones that
have been prominent in the international relations literature are
no more than optical illusions. They are the result precisely of
a [lack of world] perspective that confines the "World-System"
to a procrustean one that allegedly originated and centered in
the European "core," from which first Portugal and then the
Netherlands allegedly exercised "world hegemony." But these
little countries were geographically and structurally located at
the very margin of the real world economy and system and of
course lacked even the slightest power to impose any "hegemony"
whatsoever on Mughal India and much less on Ming/Qing China, or
even on "Dutch" Southeast Asia or on Safavid and Ottoman West
Asia. Each of these individually and a fortiori all of them
collectively were very much more in the "core" of the world
economy than any part of Europe or even all of Europe put
together [which it was NOT, since it only contained rivals that
bickered among each other]. So contrary to Benton, to divest
ourselves of these illusory notions about Europe and its world
"system" can only be a GAIN for real world history and a loss at
BEST for the Eurocentrism that we need to divest ourselves of
anyway.
The positive gain from a "broader perspective" can also be easily
demonstrated by citing Benton further on in the same paragraph:
"the search for continuity [and further down] ... a single world
system with characteristics so broad that one would be hard
pressed not to find them ... distracts from an understanding of
real historical change, even fundamental change in economic
organization and productive capacity" [273]. Alas for Benton but
fortunately for historiography and social theory, the very
opposite is true: Extending the European based "world-system"
[with a hyphen] to a global REAL WORLD system [without a hyphen]
permits us to see that two centuries of Eurocentric
historiography and social theory have been [based on] no more
than ethnocentric ideological myths. These myths about "The Rise
of the West" in and out of Europe and its alleged
"exceptionalism" were recently denounced as a COLONIZERS MODEL
by Jim Blaut. A "single world system" perspective permits us to
see instead the predominance of ASIA and especially of China and
India in the world economy until at least 1800, while Europe [and
its "world-economy"!] remained entirely marginal in the REAL
WORLD economy.
Additionally moreover, study of this single world economy is
NECESSARY if not sufficient for any REAL "understanding of real
historical change," which took place IN and because of the WORLD
economy, and not primarily or even simply in Europe. Indeed,
"even the fundamental change in economic organization and
productive capacity" that Benton wants to understand can be
understood ONLY as a function of the structure and development
of this SINGLE WORLD ECONOMY -- and not of or in Europe! - both
in Asia before 1750 and in Europe after that. My forthcoming book
on the global economy 1400-1800 analyses [at least some ways] HOW
this was the case. I will not try here to reproduce the
substantive argument of a whole book.
However, I do insist on some revealing theoretical and
empirical/historiographic implications, for they are the exact
opposite of those claimed by Benton: "The search for continuity
[in] a single world system" reveals NOT "characteristics so broad
that one would be hard pressed not to find them," but precisely
the characteristics in the system as a whole that generate "the
fundamental change in economic organization and productive
capacity" in the world economy. Yet the real world economic
reasons for and even evidence of these changes seems to have
escaped the attention of Marx, Weber, Tawney, Toynbee, Polanyi,
Braudel, and Wallerstein, and their many disciples, not to
mention almost all historians and especially all economic
historians, as well as apparently still of Benton. They all look
for their watch under the European/centric streetlight [or
alternatively an "institutional" lantern somewhere in Asia], when
the only way to "find" it is to look at the whole world economy/
system and especially in its Asian parts, with the illumination
of a "perspective" that Benton rejects as "of course flawed."
Well, it may well be flawed.
However, the world system approach is vastly more illuminating
than any "institutionalist" ALTERNATIVE. Granted that some
"institutionalism" can be locally illuminating as a COMPLEMENT
to WST. However, as an ALTERNATIVE to WST the "institutionalism"
can only OBSCURE what happened. How so? Benton rightly observes
that "the institutional approach does not offer an alternative
to supplant world-systems analysis in part because it is not
truly a global perspective" [278]. Quite so. For notwithstanding
the Eurocentrist analysis of institutions by economic Nobel prize
laureate Douglass North, Steve Stern and others cited in support
by Benton, all the examples of institutional forms and their
function and adaptation are due far more to GLOBAL relations than
to any of the local "cultural" factors cited by these authors and
Benton. However contrary to Benton, there was NOT "a global
institutional matrix controlled by Europe while institutional
ties to Asia would be much thinner." For a Europe that remained
entirely marginal in and to the world economy was unable to
control anything in the world before 1800. Even the plantation
and other institutions mentioned by Benton that Europe forged in
the Americas were a function of Europe's subordinate place and
role in the world economy, in which several parts of Asia
remained far more dominant than Europe. Indeed, Europe's American
enterprise was after all itself an attempt to buy itself into the
vastly bigger and more attractive Asian market. And only its
supply of American money permitted Europe to become even a bit
player in the world economy and market dominated by Asia. The NOT
sufficiently global perspective of Benton, not to mention those
of the cited Eurocentric "authorities," itself prevents them from
"finding" the whole real or real whole world sources of what they
see in any part thereof.
We may agree with Benton's reservation that "institutional
analysis has proven far more productive for complex regional and
subnational analysis than for global analysis" [278]. Of course.
But the real point is that regional or [sub]national
institutional analysis that is not complementary to and embedded
in global analysis can NOT even understand the regional
institutions it "analyzes." For the whole [world system] is not
only more than the sum of its [regional/national/sectoral] parts.
The whole also shapes its parts and generates both similarities
and differences among them. Therefore, no "institutional
analysis" alone in or of any part -- and certainly not of a minor
European part -- can possibly account for or understand even its
own [partial] history or of any "fundamental change" therein.
ONLY world history can do that. Yet the entire globus of
"institutional analysis" of the "Rise of the West" and of
"capitalism" in Europe by Marx, Weber, and still by Braudel and
Wallerstein and all their followers is ample proof of how their
and still most of our historiography and social theory is
vitiated by the original sin of Eurocentrism. It still blinds us
to the globalism we need to recognize [institutional and
cultural] diversity in unity and unity in diversity.
Yet even some European historians recognized as much. Not for
nothing did Herodotus write that history is marked by alternating
movements across the IMAGINARY line that separates "East" from
West in Eurasia. Or more recently as Marc Bloch still recognized,
"il n'y a pas d'histoire de l'Europe, il y a une histoire du
MONDE!" And many remember Leopold von Ranke's plea for writing
history "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" but like to forget that
he also said that what REALLY was so is that "there is no history
but UNIVERSAL history."