Unlike Gunder and Chris and Tom, I do not have a book under review or in
press - so my response will be briefer (actually, my book on this
question should be finished in a year). I agree with some of what has
been said (not surprisingly, I find myself most closely aligned with
Terry's initial comments) by everybody. We are all guilty of
Eurocentrism and need a focus based on the emergence of the Afroeurasian
world economy (which I think began to emerge some 6000 years ago). But I
don't think a sinocentric bias is any more supportable than a eurocentric
one unless one is careful to specify precisely when one is talking
about. That is, at various points in time, different parts of the
eurasian economy have been more central than other parts. More directly
focused on the major issue under discussion, I think many of the
participants are not giving sufficient credit to what I regard as the
globalization of a Mediterranean institution, especially after 1500. I
am referring to the oddity of the flourishing and survival of maritime
cities oriented to state directed/protected seapower and commercial
networks. These actors were odd because, for short periods of time, they
beat the odds and avoided being swallowed by adjacent land empires. They
were not exclusive to the Med. but they were more prominent there (lasted
longer) and a very rough chain can be traced from
Crete/Phoenicia/Carthage/Athens and then to
Venice/Genoa/Portugal/Netherlands/Britain/the US. In the process of
playing out this string, several things happened. One, is that the
Portuguese extended this concept from Europe to Japan with just enough
naval power to survive in a world characterized by strong land powers
from Europe to China. No assertion of hegemony is made but this
concept/technique (militarized seapower to advance commercial gains and
relative avoidance of territorial conquest beyond bases needed for
network maintenance) was the conduit for successive waves of European
(first the Dutch and then the British) increased participation in the
Afroeurasian economy with equally successively stronger technological
edges. Combined with the decay of the Asian land powers (as Gunder
emphasizes), by the 19th century, the European seapowers were able to
penetrate farther and farther into the hinterland (if not always able to
survive the climate and local diseases). I agree that to call this the
incorporation of the periphery is wrong but something novel did get
underway around 1500. Therefore, it is possible (as Tom suggests
although perhaps for a more restricted period) to examine processes in
periods or phases without assuming that these processes work/worked the
same way in all other periods or phases. Needless to say, there is more
to be said about this novelty but that is what books are for. I simply
wanted to interject another point of view into this interesting
discussion. Bill Thompson