Gunder's review of Landes

Mon, 11 May 1998 16:27:19 -0400
christopher chase-dunn (chriscd@jhu.edu)

> > The following is a response to a review in the _New York Review of
> > Books_ about David Landes' work, _The Wealth and Poverty of
Nations_.
> > This response is by Andre Gunder Frank, University of Toronto,
whose
> > own work, _ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age_, will be
> > published May/June 1998 by the University of California Press.
> > Professor Frank has been communicating with Professor Landes about
> > making this a dialogue and we welcome and will publish a response
> > from Professor Landes in the hopes of making this a better dialogue.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS AND THE POVERTY OF DAVID LANDES

by

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

University of Toronto

96 Asquith Ave. Toronto, Ont. Canada M4W 1J8
Tel:416-972 0616 Fax:416-972 0071
e-mail: agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca
http://www.whc.neu.edu/whc/resrch & curric/gunder.html

The opening sentence of David Landes' The Wealth and
Poverty of Nations [reviewed in NYRB April 23, 1998] is
that "my aim in writing this book is to do world
history." The reviewer, William McNeill, shows that
Landes missed his target completely. Indeed, "Landes
does not try to understand this history....[Instead
his] vision of the human past remains shaped (and I
would say skewed) by ... European economic history ....
Nothing else matters much to him." I join McNeill in
arguing "that there are serious defects in his
approach," but I shall demonstrate several of the many
more that McNeill missed or was too diplomatic to point
out. It is alarming therefore that this book has
received rave reviews in other media and is endorsed by
Nobel laureates in economics and by the statement of
John Kenneth Galbraith that this book is "truly
wonderful." For in reality, it is instead dreadful
that Landes fails even to attempt any global world
history, which also leads him to misinterpret the
comparative not to mention relational places of the
West and the rest within it. Following my more
detailed critiques, below I offer the outlines of an
alternative much more world historical, not to mention
realistic, analysis in which the predominance of Asia
until 1800 foreshadows its re-emergence today.

The opening sentence of McNeill's review is a quotation
from Landes, which is reproduced in all other reviews I
have seen as well: "If we learn anything from the
history of economic development, it is that culture
makes all the difference." For other reviewers, that
seems to be the principal virtue and success of the
book. For McNeill and myself it is the second major
failing of the book and its author. Granted that we
all make mistakes, but some of us try with time to
correct them. McNeill (1990) himself revisited his own
the Rise of the West twenty-five years later and found
that he had been mistaken in neglecting world systemic
connections in the past and excessively reflecting
American domination in the present. I myself now revise
the 1967 core-periphery and the 1978 world accumulation
versions of development/underdevelopment that were
based on presumptions of Eurocentrism and replace them
by ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998).
But what has Landes learned since he addressed the same
issue in his Unbound Prometheus in 1969? Only more of
the same 'West vs. the Rest' to quote Samuel
Huntington's similarly misguided and [temporary]
winner-take-all version of history.

However doing any kind of history, let alone world
history, like that had already been shown to be wrong
three decades ago, and it is even more clearly wrong
again to do the same now. For, as the Islamicist and
world historian Marshall Hodgson already wrote before
his death in 1968

All attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre-
Modern seminal traits in the Occident can be shown
to fail under close historical analysis, once other
societies begin to be known as intimately as the
Occident. This also applies to the great master,
Max Weber, who tried to show that the Occident
inherited a unique combination of rationality and
activism (Hodgson 1993:86).

Hodgson (1993) and Blaut (1991,1992,1993,1997)
derisorally call this "tunnel history" derived from a
tunnel vision, which sees only "exceptional" intra-
European causes and consequences and is blind to all
extra-European contributions to modern European and
world history. But Landes remains steadfast and still
ignores or denies all of the world history we have
learned since then.

Witness that McNeill can justly write that Landes
"assumes an unchanging culture [in China] ... and his
chapters on Latin America, the Muslim lands and China
[also Russia] bluntly attribute their fumbling in
making progress toward modernity to defects in the
culture and institutions of the peoples concerned."
McNeill calls many of these "assumptions" "unabashedly
triumphalist dubious assertions" that are reflected in
Landes' terminology like dour, dull, diligent;
avaricious, sanctimonious, hypocrites; intrinsic
capabilities, curiosity quotient, highly competitive,
dumb submission; simulacrum of homogeneity and docility
in Iberian society where skills, curiosity, initiatives
and civic interests wered wanting; Gallic bete noire
and can't trust the Brits; Mediterranean religious and
intellectual intolerance; self-imposed archaism,
cupidity and inefficient Ottoman yoke; Egypt's social
and cultural incapability; the Russians were worse
[and] used to poverty and ignorance. India dreamt
wistfully of technological revolution but was not ready
for it because that would have required imagination
outside the Indian cultural and intellectual experience
and used to poverty and ignorance. Yet India not only
dominated the world cotton textile market as we all
know; but the Indians produced better, longer lasting
and cheaper sailing vessels, which the British East
India Company bought and even commissioned until after
1830 they were replaced by steamships.

Although Landes writes "anyone who wants to understand
world economic history must study China," [23] his
'study' finds that also the Chinese lacked range,
focus, and above all, curiosity; they were a culturally
anbd intellectually homeostatic society that could live
with little change; they had indifference to
technology, technological and scientific torpor; lacked
institutions for finding and learning [in the world's
most literate society!]; abhorred mercantile success,
and were not motivated by greed and passion. They
showed deliberate introversion, isolationism, risk
aversion, irrationality, xenophobia, arrogance,
haughtiness, stunned submissiveness, self-defeating
escapism; were insecure and brittle, and so on and on.
Yet even Landes seems aware of some contradiction with
reality, and indeed with himself, since he also writes
that "some of these may sound like a collection of
cliche's" [523] and he even observes that "these
stereotypes held an ounce of truth and a pound of lazy
thinking" [174] by others. Then what about his own
assumptions and allegations of "what lay inside:
culture, values, initiative" [253] and the institutions
that "make all the difference" ?

Moreover, Landes contradicts himself and the evidence
again and again elsewhere as well, for as McNeill
rightly notes "Landes seemingly cannot make up his
mind": Portugal had intellectual shortcomings [137] and
Iberia missed the train of the so-called scientific
revolution [180], but a Portuguese professor of
astronomy and mathematics invented the nonius to give
navigational and astronomical readings a major boost
[204]. Spain easily conquered the Aztecs because they
were divided [102]; but "Spain, though nominally
united, was divided" [249] and Catalonia was
"exceptional" [250]. Guilds assumed a zero-sum game of
costs and benefits [42]and therefore offered resistance
to change [445], but "guilds were found all over the
world - in Europe, but also in Islamic lands, India,
China, and Japan" [242].

These and many other instances in which Landes' account
is contradicted by the evidence and indeed often by
himself all derive from this original Eurocentric sin
that McNeill also identifies: "his assumption that only
what happened in Europe really mattered, while the rest
of the world reacted to innovations that Europeans
thrust down their throats. This is intrinsically
improbable ... [as is] dismissing economic changes
elsewhere as trivial ... [since] most of humankind -
four fifths or thereabouts - descend from non-European
peoples." However, neglecting to look seriously at the
historical reality of the much of rest of the world,
not to mention of the world as a whole, also leads
Landes to make at least three dozen 'factual'
statements and propositions about them that are flatly
contradicted by the bulk of historical evidence itself.
That in turn also vitiates his comparisons with 'the
rest' of the alleged 'exceptionalism of the West,'
which has long since been disconfirmed by historical
research and social theory, most recently again by Jack
Goody (1996) under the title The East in the West. So
many of Landes' central and derivative propositions
reflect factually mistaken Eurocentrist assumptions
whose uses and repetitions he could have avoided
it he had taken due account of the past three
decades and more of serious scholarship.

Yet Landes also goes on to make many other statements
that are totally contrary to fact, such as
"interruption of Islamic and Chinese intellectual and
technological advance" [200] "clearly Chinese
agriculture could not run fast enough" [24]; Europe's
shipping could have run circles around the Chinese in
1450 and then "Europe could now plant itself anywhere
on the surface of the globe within reach of a naval
cannon" [89 Landes' italics]; and "two hundred and
fifty years ago, this [income] gap ... between Europe
and, say East or South Asia (China or India) was
around 1.5 or 2 to 1." In reality, none of the above,
and many more of Landes' beliefs have any basis in
reality. Indeed, mostly the opposite has been
historically and empirically demonstrated again and
again. But not to Landes, who also instead makes claims
such as "Britain made itself" [215] and "in Britain,
enterprise got nothing from the state" [265], which
also draws critique from McNeill for disregarding state
military demand and protection.

So why does and how can Landes incur all these and so
many other grievous historical errors? He himself
provides the answer when he writes "just because
something is obvious does not mean that people will see
it, or that they will sacrifice belief to reality"
[493] and in his dismissal of it regarding India in one
page [165]: "Numbers deserve credence only if they
accord with the historical context." Therein Landes
himself hits the nail on the head, and indeed into his
own. He does not realize how much he hangs on to his
beliefs against all reality precisely because he got
the world historical context all wrong. That is why all
the long since historically and empirically
demonstrated facts that Landes either cannot see or
still denies "seem to me [Landes] implausible in the
light of the gulf between European and Asian
techniques," which contrary to Landes vastly favored
Asia until 1800. For the problem, as McNeill stresses
but still insufficiently documents, is that Landes'
extreme Eurocentrism and Weberianism [yes and Marxism!]
totally blinds him to the realities of the world
economy and its history.

In claiming that "culture makes all the difference;
(here Max Weber was right on)" [516] Landes does
exactly what he himself criticizes in Aristotle, "to
explain phenomena by the 'essential' nature of things"
and neglects and denies the very world history he
'aims' to write. Instead, as McNeill notes, fully one
third of Landes' chapters are devoted to European
"exceptionalisms." The most important is the alleged
European "invention of invention" [chapter 4] and the
"seventeenth-century scientific revolution." Yet Landes
himself cites Newton's belief in alchemy and the
transmutation of matter and writes that still
"scientists of the eighteenth century could not have
explained why and how a steam engine worked" [206]. So
how could it be, as Landes also claims on the same page
206 that "scientific method and knowledge paid off in
application - most importantly in power technology"?
"The fact of Western technological precedence is
there.... My assumption of the ultimate advantage and
benefience of [Western] scientific knowledge and
technological capability is today under sharp attack,
even in the Academy [and is] couched in preferences for
feeling over knowing.... (514, 513 italics in the
original and exemplifying footnote reference to "thus
A.G. Frank").

But whatever his or my feelings, Landes' own knowledge
and assumptions are based on "facts" that are wrong.
The fact is that Western science did not contribute to
technology before 1870, as was recognized by scientific
authorities from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Thomas
Kuhn (1967). Robert Adams (1996) reviews case studies
and the work of other authorities on the question and
himself concludes on a dozen occasions that science had
no impact on technology whatsoever until a full century
after the industrial revolution. Indeed Steven Shapin
(1996) even denies that there was any so-called
seventeenth century scientific revolution and Floris
Cohen (1994:500) says that "the concept has by now
fulfilled its once useful services [to the likes of
Landes]; the time has come to discard it." But not for
Landes.

Apart from the logical fallacy stressed by Jack Goody
(1996) of deriving novel changes like scientific and
industrial revolution in the world from permanent
"qualities" in Europe, not only are the alleged causes
of this transformation historically or empirically
false, but so are many of his other assertions. For not
only are, as McNeill rightly insists, four fifths of
the world non-European; but Asian, and particularly
Chinese and Indians, were also richer, more productive
and much more competitive than the still quite marginal
Europe in the Eurasian world economy and history before
1750-1800, as Adam Smith noted time and again in 1776.
The legendary East-West "Oriental" trade earned them
far less than the silver the Europeans brought to the
intra-Aasian "country" trade; and in that, as the
Director of the British East India Company himself
recognized in 1688, at any major Indian port all
Europeans' share put together was less than ten percent
of the Asians' Indian Ocean trade among themselves.
In the flourishing South China Sea trade, the Europeans
were even more marginal; and in the North China Sea,
not to mention in China itself, Europeans were
altogether absent. Nor was Europe and the West nearly
as dominant there more recently as Landes' triumphalism
falsely alleges.

McNeill mentions several other reasons for Landes' many
failings, including a crucial one: "Landes simply
neglects demography ... a fundamental aspect of the
human condition - population growth and decay ... [and
makes] a misleading, and probably false, proposition."
Not just probably, but certainly! All recent empirical
estimates, including those by the European authorities
Bairoch and Maddison, whom Landes cites and whose help
he even acknowledges in his preface, agree that in 1800
per capita income was still higher in China than in
Europe in 1800. Their and other estimates all show the
same basic pattern of total world and comparative
regional growth of population, production, and income,
which is exactly contrary to what Landes alleges: In
the centuries leading up to 1800, European population
remained stable at about 20 percent of the world
population and produced less than that share of world
output, while production in Asia grew enough to support
the increase in its share of total world population
from 60 percent to 66 percent, which also produced a
significantly higher 80 percent share of world
production (Frank 1998). That is contrary to Landes,
still through the eighteenth century Asia and
particularly China and India were far more productive
than Europe; and their per capita levels of income and
consumption, as well as their productivity and life
expectancy, were also correspondingly higher and still
rising faster than in Europe and even in Western Europe
and Britain.

McNeill also justly rebukes Landes for claiming that
the world of Adam Smith was already taking shape 500
years before his time and that the sources of the 'Rise
of the West' and the industrial revolution began in the
year 1000. Yet after all that time, Smith was still
unable to recognize them or even the industrial
revolution itself in 1776; nor, as Landes himself
notes, did Malthus and Ricardo one and two generations
later. Yet with hindsight Landes now claims to see the
causes of this sudden and unexpected transformation and
that "the key factor - the driving force has been
Western civilization and its dissemination" [513],
which moreover have been embedded in almost time-less
"Judeo-Christian" values since Biblical times [38,58],
but only in Europe! Against the contrary proposition
that "Europe is a latecomer," Landes claims "that is
patently incorrect. As the historical record shows, for
the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the
prime mover of development and modernity" [xxi]. For
still more alarming is that this counter-historical
opinion is shared by the two dozen editors and scores
of consultants who produced LIFE magazine' September
1997 special issue on "the Millennium" in which 83 of
the 100 most important "movers and shakers" were of
European extraction. Fernand Braudel exaggerated a bit
when he said that Europeans invented history, but not
when he added that then they put it to good use - for
themselves. For all historical and conceptual challenge
to this European "invention" of history, Landes
dismisses as mere "Europhobia" and "anti-Eurocentric
thought [that] is simply anti-intellectual; also
contrary to fact" [514].

Nonetheless, it is Landes' own claim that is contrary
to fact and patently incorrect: The historical record
shows quite unambiguously that during the whole first
half of that millennium Europe was only the most
marginalized western peninsular outpost of development
in Eurasia and especially in China, as McNeill also
points out. Yet according to my reading of the
historical evidence, even for the following three
centuries from 1500 to 1800 Europe still remained at
most a very minor player in the world economic casino,
in which the only chips it had to ante up were the gold
and particularly the silver from the Americas.
Moreover, the calories derived from imported colonial
sugar and Baltic wheat and the Indian cotton textiles
that replaced home grown wool [thus requiring less
sheep to eat less grass and "men" as the saying went]
all supplemented capital and freed natural and human
resources that could be used for investment and
development in Western Europe. But all these
supplements and replacements were prduced elswhere by
slaves and serfs and/or were bought with American
supplied silver and gold. Even so, just to be able to
get and keep this parasitic seat at the world economic
table, Europe had to ship and pay out the only export
good it had, the silver that Europe was looting from
the Americas. With that, Europe had to pay for its own
the perpetual balance of trade deficit and help settle
that of China, whose agriculture and manufacturing were
the world's most productive and competitive, as Adam
Smith still noted in 1776.

So paraphrasing the motto of the New York Times that so
highly praised Landes' book, everything that fits, we
print. Alas, four-fifths of the world and its history
does not fit into Landes and The Times Euro-Western
centric scheme of things and is either omitted, or
stereotyped and skewed, or dismissed as "a weird
pattern of isolated initiatives and sisyphean
discontinuities," as McNeill also notes. Again to
quote Landes himself, "this is history cart before
horse, results before data, imagination before
experience. It is also wrong" [197]. Wrong indeed is it
for Landes to make his dozens of mistaken comparisons
of alleged essential essences, and wrong for Landes to
write "no one has abrogated the law of supply and
demand" [522]. For he has sought to abrogate it
himself, albeit unsuccessfully so, in the next
paragraph when he adds that "culture can make all the
difference" for his many wrong assumptions about
institutions here and there.

Landes is even more wrong in failing to apply this law
of supply and demand on a world-wide competitive market
basis. Indeed Landes' theoretical and analytic
procedures are the very opposite of being world
historical or holistic, as he self-styles them on page
120. Landes observes that British coal "was [a]
fortuitously suitable... lucky strike" [189] and that
wages were high in Britain relative to continental
Europe. But his analysis, if any, is only parochial. He
does not even attempt to examine how local relative
factor prices and availability of capital were derived
from and responded to demand and supply in a
competitive world market, eg. for textiles not to
mention capital. Much less does he consider how
differing but related demographic and ecological
pressures [high wages and expensive wood] made
investment in labor saving and energy producing
technological change suddenly rational in some 'Newly
Industrializing Economies' in Europe but temporarily
not so in Asia where labor costs were lower even with
higher incomes. Again to quote McNeill also regarding
other shortcomings in this book, "Landes does not raise
the question, much less answer it.... All this is
absent from Landes's pages. Surely it belongs in any
adequate explanation of how we got to where and who we
are." In Landes' book instead, "Britain made itself"
and his "explanation" is its alleged "nonmaterial
values (culture) and institutions"! [215].

Landes also dismisses the contrary findings of the "New
Economic History, beguiled by numbers" [231,193],
Marxists [274,382] "leftist political economists and
economic historians" [252}, "Europhobia [and]
globalists" [514] and others, especially "the H-World
site on the Internet - a magnet for fallacies and
fantasies [and] the invention of folklore" [54n].
Moreover on the basis of only the briefest e-mailed
excerpts on the H-World and Economic History nets based
on my still forthcoming book, Landes also seems to
apply these dismissals to me and writes that I am only
an "iconoclast" [89n] who "would argue (thus A.G.
Frank) that Europe's knowledge and know-how did not
surpass those of other civilizations until the
Industrial Revolution. Bad history" [514n].

What I write may today indeed be the work of what
Landes calls an iconoclast. But it was still
historical reality and standard knowledge even for
mainstream Europeans like Leibnitz, Voltaire and Smith,
whom Landes [mis]cites out of all historical context.
Indeed Adam Smith's successors Malthus and Ricardo
still held the same opinion, and except for a couple of
iconoclasts in their own time like Montesquieu,
"economists have not always felt this way" as Landes
recognizes himelf. It was only since the mid-
nineteenth century that Marx, Maine, Durkheim, Sombart,
Weber, Parsons, Polanyi, Rostow and still Landes and
their followers invented their own Eurocentric
folklore, fallacies and fantasies, which are still all
too widely shared today. I can only hope that, if not
immediately iconoclast, such unabashed Eurocentrism and
triumphalism will at least soon again become obsolete,
the moreso as Asia is REgaining its 'traditional' place
and role in the world, which itself ReOrients.

My modest contribution to that end is my own book
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age {University
of California Press May/June 1998), which addresses -
and redresses - the main theoretical concerns voiced
by McNeill and myself about Landes, especially his
disregard of the history of four fifth of humanity and
his Weberian and other unfounded assumptions about
their and Western institutions and culture. My only 400
page book also remedies many of the ommissions that
McNeill noted in the 600 page book of Landes:
Demography, agriculture, military and other technology
as well as production and trade in Asia. Moreover, my
book traces the historical development of the real
world economy in which, until 1800, China and
secondarly India have predominant roles, which are
omitted or even denied by Landes and others. Most
important unlike Landes and others, my book offers a
truly global world economic/ demographic/ ecological
analysis of how and why the subsequent Decline of the
East and Rise of the West were mutually related and
derivative from the structure and dynamic of the world
economy itself, and not from any European miracle or
exceptionalism. If if Landes will that he does none of
the above and therefore also no world history at all, I
will readily agree with Landes that I [still] do them
badly.

Indeed Landes himself observes rightly, alas not about
himself, that "just because something is obvious does
not mean that people will see it, or that they will
sacrifice belief to reality; in the effort to have
things both ways, or every way, to appease old
interests, to encourage new" [493]. At least we can
agree that "a good historian tries to keep his balance"
[62] and "without controversy, no serious pursuit of
knowledge and truth" [203]. So after Landes and others
have had the opportunity to read both books and
whatever else we may write, let reality, history and
our readers themselves be the judge of the wealth of
nations and the poverty of David Landes or myself. For
let controversy, balance and cooperation flourish even
between Landes and myself; and when all is said and
done, let's just all try to do better.

In closing, I wish to cite and make my own the very
words with which Landes himself closes: "The one lesson
that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles.
No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must
cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and
watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better
to chose the means" [524]. Then, instead of promoting
Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," perhaps
even David Landes and I could agree to summarize the
end with Wendell Wilkie's motto of "One World" and the
means through the "Unity in Diversity" that Mikhail
Gorbachev proposed to the United Nations.

Respectfullly submitted
Andre Gunder Frank
May 6, 1998 [53rd anniversary of VE Day] .

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----- 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolution.
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