I really think that we've gotten carried away with all this stuff about
Eurocentrism. Europe was distinctive in that it did experience a transition
from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production around the 16th century, a
transition that prepared the way for the industrial revolution of the 18th
century. However, this is not a simple question of Europe vs. Asia, for Japan
during the same time period also experienced a very similar capitalist
transition. In an article I published in REVIEW in 1994, I tried to identify
the common factors shared by Europe and Japan that set them apart. The
argument is developed at somewhat greater length in my SOCIAL TRANSFORMATIONS
(Blackwell, 1995).
The features that Western Europe and Japan had in common involved climate,
geography, size, demography, and political structure. These operated, I argue,
within the context of a steadily expanding level of world commercialization to
produce the first capitalist revolutions. In a recent book, THE DYNAMIC
SOCIETY, Graeme Snooks has added a very important sixth factor: the fact that
European states were on a fairly equal plane and competed severely with each
other. Because of this, he says, they could not employ a conquest strategy --
no state was strong enough to conquer the others -- and thus adopted a
combination of commercial and technological strategies for economic success.
I don't buy the argument of Weber about the Protestant ethic or some sort of
unique rationality that made Europe a privileged place, but Europe was
privileged nonethless (as was Japan). Also, Marx was wrong to see history
dominated by a system of simple commodity production based on use values.
There was a lot of capitalism in history, as Weber clearly acknowledges
(although I would call this "protocapitalism" to distinguish it from modern
capitalism). But wholesale revisions of Marx and Weber for alleged
Eurocentrism are, I think, completely unnecessary and theoretically misguided.
Stephen Sanderson