Boswell, Chase-Dunn and Babones have responded to Randall Stokes' query
on recent breakthroughs/refinements in development theory. They have all
done so without conveying the impression that theirs were an effort at
self-promotion. I would wish to humbly claim that I have been active in
this area and IPE from my doctoral student days (which only ended a year
ago). While my area study was on the anglophone Caribbean within a
reconfiguring Americas, my normative concern has been with the
issue of ascent. My immediate source of worry related to the much spoken
of, but limited historical cases of ascent in the last 500 years. But
then that turned out to be a limited historical snapshot of world
development on my part when I discovered the edited work of A.G. Frank
and B.K. Gills (incidentally he was my supervisor) entitled The Modern
World System: 500 or 5000, and Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European
Hegemony. I believe these texts call into question much of what we have
come to accept about capitalism by way of the Smithian and Marxist
(ideological?) heritage. I recognise that the concept of capitalism
still has heuristic value but it was especially immobilising, clumsy,
Eurocentric, and subversive whenever I tried, like Caribbeannists before
me, to read the Caribbean development experience and prospects within
the conventional 500-year world-system structure. No point arguing that
the reconfiguring Americas (read NAFTA and the FTAA) presents a
structural development opportunity for a few in the hemisphere if the
overwhelming perception is that the power assymetries between the North
American core and the Caribbean and Latin American periphery are
fixtures arising out the historical emergence of `capitalism'. Research
that extends world system history back before 1500 AD invariably reveals
that the feature of `rise and fall' recurs, that there is constant
movement in the political economy of the system. I learnt that
development for a few at a time, and core-periphery relations are not
specific to the modern world.
Chase-Dunn and Hall's work can provide insights on historical cases on
ascent; see R.P. Palan and B.K. Gill's (1994) edited book Transcending
the State-Global Divide for a discussion on neostructuralism; my piece
in TWQ Vol. 17 (3) 1996 (`From the Triangular Trade to NAFTA') applies a
variant of neostructuralist understanding to the Caribbean development
experience deploying insights from the work sensitive to the long
history of capital accumulation. Colin Leys recently in NPE (inaugural
issue 1996) has written along parallel lines outlining the importance of
engaging those views that cast doubt on a presumed uniqueness in world
system's logic when the centre of gravity shifted from `East' to `West'.
Yes Chris, most of the globalisation literature is a muddle helped none
by the reflexive tendency by some to proclaim uniqueness and globality
because the axis of the world system shifts in the direction of
accumulation-expansion. (This would seem to occur each time technology
and capital can effect such at greater efficiency: 1492 and all that
e.g. canon, new frontiers, ship-building, insurance companies; 1750 and
all associated with the so-called `First Industrial Revolution'; and
post-1950 with the advent of the Computer Age and growth of finance
capital.) But we perhaps are at the tip of the iceberg of paradigmatic
breakthroughs in development theory, even now it would not be too much
to suggest that eclectic refinements are pretty much in view.
Got to go.
Don D. Marshall
Department of Government, Sociology and Social Work
University of the West Indies
Cave Hill Campus
Barbados.
christopher chase-dunn wrote:
>
> Randall Stokes asks what's new in development theory.
> i would say three things:
>
> 1. a model of systemic cycles of accumulation that focusses on the
> importance of finance capital and its relationship with states (Giovanni
> Arrighi, _The Long Twentieth Century_, VErso, 1994)
>
> 2. a truly humanocentric study of the rise of the West (A.G. Frank,
> _Reorient:Global Economy in the Asian Age_ (Forthcoming, University of
> California Press) see
> http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/archive/bios/gunder/gunder97cd.html
>
> 3.a theory of social evolution that uses world-systems as the unit of
> analysis (Chase-Dunn and Hall, _Rise and Demise_, Westview 1997). see
> http://www.jhu.edu/~soc/cd/books/cdbooks.htm
>
> Not much else. the globalization literature is mostly a muddle.
>
> chris