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R e O R I E N T: GLOBAL ECONOMY IN THE ASIAN AGE
University of California Press 1998,xxix+416 pp.[pb$19.95]
by
Andre Gunder Frank
A less expensive Indian edition was published by
Vistaar Publications (an imprint of Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd.),
P.O. Box 4215, New Delhi 110048, India published on December 22, 1998
Exclusively for India, Burma (Myanmar), Sri Lanka, Maldavies, Nepal,
Bhutan,
Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
A Chinese translation is in press in Bejing, and an unreformed
character version is in preparation in and for Hong Kong and also for
Taiwan.
BOOK ABSTRACT
This book outlines and analyzes the global economy and its sectoral
and regional division of labor and cyclical dynamic from 1400 to
1800. The evidence and argument are that within this global economy
Asians and particularly Chinese were preponderant, no more
"traditional" than Europeans, and in fact largely far less so. The
historical documentation poses an 'emperor has no clothes' challenge
to all received Eurocentric historiography and social theory from
Montesquieu, Marx and Weber, or Toynbee and Polanyi, to Rostow,
Braudel and Wallerstein. The books's global economic analysis offers
a more holistic theoretical alternative. 'The Rise of the West' was
not due to any 'European Miracle exceptionalism' that allegedly
permitted it to pull itself up by its own bootstraps as Weberians
have contended. Nor did Europe build a 'European world-economy around
itself" a la Braudel and thereby as per Marx and Wallerstein [as well
as Frank's own WORLD ACCUMULATION 1492-1789] initiating a European
centered 'Modern Capitalist World-System' primarily by exploiting the
wealth of its American and African colonies. Instead, Europe used its
American silver to buy itself marginal entry into the long since
existing world market in Asia, which was much larger, more productive
and competitive, continued to expand much faster until 1800, and was
able to support a rate of population growth in Asia that was than
double that of Europe until 1750. Then changing world economic/
demographic/ ecological relations and relative factor prices in the
competitive global economy resulted in the temporary 'Decline of the
East' and the opportunity for the also temporary 'The Rise of the
West'. Europe took advantage of this world economic opportunity
through import substitution, export promotion and technological
change to become Newly Industrializing Economies after 1800, as is
again happening today in East Asia. That region is now REgaining its
'traditional' dominance in the global economy, with the Chinese
'Middle Kingdom' again at its 'center.'
The complete table of contents is available on the author's home page
http://www.whc.neu.edu/gunder.html
COMMENTS ON ReOrient BY REFEREES AND REVIEWERS
Frank shows how Marx and Weber got it all wrong. This book is
conceptually that important. A fundamental rethinking absolutely
essential to understanding world history.
-ALBERT BERGESEN University of Arizona
This will be an extremely important book of sufficient originality
and importance to have a major impact. It could not be more ambitious.
- KENNETH POMERANZ University of California at Irvine
The author redefines our baseline for assessing the 'rise' of Europe.
I believe this book could become a benchmark study.
- BIN WONG University of California at Irvine
A book for the millennium ... can be a landmark book that shapes
substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next
generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact.
- MARK SELDEN State University of New York
Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT is a heroic effort to reconstruct our
conceptions of the world economy in the early modern age.
A brilliant theory - Frank's single-mided, relentless, and
compelling organic model achieves coherence and has much to offer.
- PETER PERDUE Massachussetts Institute of Technology
If challenging received wisdom is a trademark, this book is written
as the mother of all challenges. The immense power of the book rests on
the ability to provoke and force one to rethink many facets of history
that have been taken for granted for a long long time.
- HARBANS MUKHIA Indian Express
ReOrient's biggest virtue: it forces the reader to at least look
differently at world history. This impressive and illuminating analysis
sets out to challenge the mother of all orthodoxies that Europe
discovered capitalism and industrialisation and that what followed and
is happening and will happen is essentially a fallout of this
European preeminence.
- SAUBHIK CHAKABARTI The Statesman
This is a brave book, brave in the academic as well as the personal
sense. It insists on a completely necessary reorientation of
academic and political views. It will prove to be compulsory reading.
- JACK GOODY St. Johns College, Cambridge
ReORIENT deserves to become an instant classic
- MARTIN LEWIS Duke University
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