I hope I'll be permitted shameless self-advertising in this posting.
I would like to point out here that this week the Dutch version of my
magnus opus "Arabian seas 1640-1700" has appeared (475 pages, 200.000
words, 1.675 footnotes). I do not have further information available as yet
(price, ISBN etc.) and will post these when I have returned from a long
trip to the Australian outback (from 9 th of july) at the end of august.
Now, relevant to the Landes-Frank discussion and especially Pommeranz
posting to H-world, apart from many other matters (such as legal and social
history) Arabian seas deals with many things which are directly relevant.
Gunder would now probably say that I'm only looking under the Arabian seas'
streetlight but, then, the Arabian seas are the Arabian seas, they are of
no minor importance. And we know much less about the western Indian Ocean
than we do about China (or Western Africa):
A.)It shows that in spite of the huge total size of the production Indian
manufacturing (I logically focus on textiles but this also relates to
metal) was not likely to have led to an industrial revolution. The market
was too much segmented as to region, class, yes, caste and taste and too
unpredictable and manufacturing was organized according to the
`quasi'-unlimited supply of labour in India. The problem was not how to
produce goods it was how to sell them.
While the eighteenth century in Britain witnessed both a standardisation
of demand and a rapidly growing demand from the West Indies and North
America, demand in India and the Middle East was still segmented. Indian
manufacturing was more efficient in it's segment of the market than imports
though as labour-costs could almost indefinitely be pushed down by an ever
more intricate division of labour. Therefore, mechanisation would not have
made sense. (By comparison remember that even now it is more efficient to
use manual labour than cranes in construction-work in India.)
B.)Most critically, the discussion on the `American factor' has too much
focussed on South America and on silver. For, indeed, bullion was
merchandise in Europe-Asian trade but it was NOT (as Flynn argues) traded
because it was profitable - this is, alas, all too complicated to dwell on
it in a single posting.
Sure, silver was the most conspicious product traded by the Europeans. And
it was traded to some extent since they enjoyed a comparative
cost-advantage in this product (but this was not the main reason). I will
not go into the issue of inflation at length here either but I argue Jim
Blaut is partly right but for the wrong reasons: imports of silver indeed
contributed to income-inequalities in the Arabian seas but not (except in
Iran) because of inflation.
In `Arabian seas' I spent a good 200 pages proving that the silver-imports
were merely the beginning of a world-wide process of product-substitution.
This was basically away from `Asian' land-intensive agriculture to
American land-extensive agriculture which I call in the terms of the `old'
Gunder the development of underdevelopment. Not only was a wide range of
products imported from Asia in Europe being substituted by American
products in the 17 th century but American products were substituting for
Asian products in inter-Asian trade as well. I treat a long series of
examples which together make up much of the trade in the Arabian seas:
coffee, sugar, tobacco, indigo, cotton, wood and pearls. And, yes, much of
this was increasingly coming from Maryland and Virginia.
The rise of the Atlantic economy leads, I further argue, on the one hand
to an expansion of demand for labour-intensive Indian products: Guinee
textiles from the Coromandel coast have that name for a reason, whilst the
buccaneers in the Arabian seas were mainly smugglers of Indian textiles to
colonial New York and the West Indies. On the other hand it leads to an
accumulation of money in the city of London which can then be invested in
the East India Company and, more importantly, in the British inter-Asian
trade.
For - as I show this for the British and the Portuguese - much (for the
British), most (for the Portuguese) of the funds invested in Asian trade
derived from American revenues.
The American edition which is in preparation will deal in more detail with
the effects of the growth of the Atlantic economy (slavery in particular)
on East Africa which bears a strong, and not at all coincidental,
resemblance with developments in West Africa described in an earlier
posting by Pat Manning.
C.)I argue furthermore that, because of these investments from the City,
the British in particular (to some extent the French and the Portuguese but
not the Dutch VOC) were able to construct a powerful system of private
banks (or better `agency houses') in India which financed both British
private trade and the British military. The British therefore were
financially superior to most Indian princes. But this was not because
Indian banking was primitive, far from it - As I show in a 45-page section
trade in Surat (Gujarat) was as sophisticated as in Amsterdam because both
were focal points of global trade but it was structured very differently -.
D.)The history of European expansion is a single process but its study has
become separated between specialist on the Atlantic (America and Africa)
and on Asia and this has seriously distorted our vision. (I would add now
that treating East Africa as `African' and neglecting its Indian links
seriously distorts our vision of the African past too.)
I argue two cases at length: the American slave-trade with Madagascar
which was a mainstay of the economy of colonial New York and the Portuguese
empire in India which at the end of the seventeenth century became
increasingly a sub-colony of Brazil.
Now, since both empires were constructed on the `American conncetion' why
the British and not Portugal? That is partly related to the different
structures of the Brazilian and New England economy (basically New
England's agriculture generated more purchasing-power than Brazil) but it
is mainly caused by different initial positions: to wit Portugal's
`semi-peripheral' position in European trade and basic weaknesses in the
metropolitan economy.
`Arabian seas 1640-1700' was originally written five years before Gunder's
`Asia' book was, but, I guess, in the Landes-Frank discussion which
developped since this leaves me (with many other discussants) in the
position that both are to some extent right.
Pro Landes I would argue that not all institutions were the same in
Western Europe and South Asia and some may indeed have been important for
the industrial revolution. Thus, English common law, thus, financial
institutions, thus `the scientific revolution'. The `energy-base' argument
is a weak one, I think, though.
And, to come back to Arabian seas, I would not deny that Europe WAS having
an important impact on Asia in the 16-18 th century - and probably less so
vice versa. "Indian ships might well have sailed to England but there were
no Mughal factories in Britain" I write in `Arabian seas'. And the
empirical problem is that if Asian trade in the 17 th and 18 th century
grew, European trade in Asia grew much faster. Moreover, the Portuguese and
the chartered companies did indeed drive out Asian merchants out of the
trade and not only through violence but also as they were better organized.
So, some roots of the Europe-Asia bifurication DO lie at least in the 16 th
century.
But pro Gunder - and I do sympathize with the main tenants of Gunder and a
fortiori of the so-called `California school' - this does NOT mean that
Europe was in the 18 th century in all respects superior to Asia, let alone
earlier. There is also no denying that Asia was still very important for
`world-trade'. And moreover we should remind W.H. Moreland old remark that
the entire long distance-trade of the Arabian seas might just have filled
one freighter (I would say a supertanker) for maybe 90% of trade in the
Arabian seas was regional and local. Therefore, the European impact on the
economy as a whole was very, very limited until at least the mid-nineteenth
century. And it is also certainly true that some parts of Asia were even in
the eighteenth century at least as wealthy as Britain (and that parts of
the British isles such as Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were as poor
as the poorest parts of Asia.) The `third world' only arose from the
mid-nineteenth century onward.
Gunder would probably say this is a half-baked `both and' position but
there are no sharp `either-or' positions in answering large historical
questions (however hard that may be for economists and sociologists to
accept). And I would emphasize contra Jack Goldstone that in `Arabian seas'
which is based on fifteen years work in original sources in seventeen
languages I do attempt to transcend the mere criticism of the `Eurocentric
school'.
Let me emphasize finally though, that even if I'm no `Californian', I
sympathize with their position. For if history is as W.H. Mc Niell argues
to a large extent myth-making (and the sociology and economics of our
Californian colleagues are even more so) I think that even ethically this
is a much more hopeful sign to give to poor countries than the Landes-line.
Landes et alii basically signal to the third world that it has to discard
all of its institutions and its culture (from the family to religion, from
law to language etc. etc.) if they ever want to catch up with `modernity'.
If I can be essentialist here: the Landes-line is a kind of `structural
readjustment' of the third world's past.
And they signal moreover, that the history of all other people has been a
failure since dim antiquity compared to the relentless onward march of the
Anglo-Saxon race. (For the roots of the industrial revolution go back to
King Arthur if not Boedica in their view). Is this an essentialist
caricature as Pat Manning would now say too ? Maybe - but, then, to me - a
citizen of a small non English speaking country - it often seems as if the
British and Americans often do see the nationalist splinter in the eyes of
Dutch, Hindhi, Chinese or Russian historiography. (And are immediately
prepared poke fun at it. No, the Dutch did not originally `sail into our
country near Lobith in 66 B.C.' - as we got taught at school - and, of
course, the Rus' were not Russians) But they do not perceive the
nationalist beam in their own eye in which they were the originators of
anything useful - with the Romans and the Greeks US- and British citizens
honoris causae -.
Goodbye to you all from Oz
Next posting will be from the Low Countries
Dr. Rene Barendse
IIAS - Leiden
barendse@coombs.anu.edu.au
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