It is hard to communicate the sheer scope of Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. For one thing, describing it as an account of ‘the world system, 1250-1350’ is a very conservative estimation. Though 1250-1350 describes the height of the economic formations in Europe that Abu-Lughod covers in the book, in many chapters she discusses factors dating back much older - the long history of urban formation in the Straits of Malacca for example, or the formation of Islamic economic practices from the faith’s origins to Cairo under the Mamluks - and significantly her argument stretches as far as the Portuguese entry into the Indian Ocean in the late 15th century. In each case, she provides broad yet detailed accounts of local industrialisation and market practices in a style that is admirably accessible for such an ambitious work as this.
Despite the works’ ambition, its key contentions are relatively simple. Firstly, that there was already by the end of the 13th century a series of multifacted economic relationships that constitute what contemporary sociologists and economists call a ‘world system’. Starting with cloth fairs in Champagne and moving slowly eastward, Abu-Lughod carefully explains these relationships and what she calls their ‘vectors’, that is, the factors and conditions that determined these relationships’ scale and nature over time, from geographical convenience to military conquests to state protection. One key example is the role played by pax Mongolica, a relative period of peace and stability across Eurasia in the 13th and 14th century due to Mongol rule over most of the continent, in facilitating huge amounts of trade and economic development in a variety of key locations across the world system.
This leads into her second key argument, that unlike our contemporary one, this world system, did not have a single ‘core’ region around which the rest of the system was oriented as its periphery. For example, while Mongol rule was key to faciliating these networks, according to Abu-Lughod, the Mongols themselves were largely uninterested in economic development as such, instead largely content to profit from taxes and tributes imposed on various local polities. As such, economic practices continued to develop from the ground up and took different forms dependent on local histories.[1] This multivectoral development is especially obvious in areas outside of Mongol control, such as Venice, Mamluk Egypt, Malabar, Coromandel, and the Straits of Malacca, which all had autonomous cycles of growth and decline, shaped by factors in other areas but equally responding to local dynamics.
Thirdly, Abu-Lughod argues that in this world system, Europe did not have any particular advantage over any other region; if anything, it was marginal. Though many economic historians have attributed key economic or technological developments to European innovation, such as banking or gunpowder, Abu-Lughod emphasises that economic practices such as banking appear to emerge semi-autonomously in a variety of regions at once. There is evidence of key banking practices like money changing and bills of exchange being developed in multiple sites in roughly similar time periods, and while these developments do of course influence one another, she suggests that many of these practices are almost inevitable once you have trade happening at a certain scale. That is, when you have a certain amount of goods changing hands, sometimes with time delays between payments and receipt of purchase etc, people look for forms of accounting for risk, arbitrating prices and disputes, guaranteeing currency and currency exchange, etc.
Similarly, there were very few unique technological developments in Europe in the period; compasses and gunpowder were both developed in China far earlier and used at a mass scale, and it was broadly recognised that Europe lagged behind other regions in this regard. If economic historians want to find an explanation for the sudden explosion of European colonialism in the 15th century, they will be hard pressed to find one in exceptional European accomplishments.
It is here, however, that Abu-Lughod’s project begins to wobble. In a work of this scale, it is almost inevitable that problems of organisation begin to emerge. As I have mentioned, for what she calls ‘purely organisational reasons’, the book is organised by chapters devoted to distinct local trade circuits, beginning with cloth fairs in Champagne and moving eastward. Her account is cumulative, building up her description of each trade circuit on the basis of the vectors she has already described. The natural result is a distinct emphasis on how European trade linked up to other regions; her history emanates from Europe outwards. By the time you reach the Indian Ocean, this problem has weakened, but it is still a difficult impression to shake. One wonders if there might have been a better organisational form this vast material could have been described through.
One result of this geographical organisation is the disappearance of Africa from Abu-Lughod’s account. In her move from west to east, with the exception of a chapter on Mamluk Egypt, the continent is passed over entirely. In the introduction she justifies the omission on the grounds that “Africa’s geographic reach was relatively limited. African merchants were largely local and African goods seldom made their way to China and Europe.” (p. 36) Such a gloss neglects that these goods, such as rice, livestock, gold, wax, ivory, and slaves did circulate in the Indian Ocean, and therefore had just as wide a reach as, for example, the Flemish cloths that she devotes two chapters to (one on the Champagne fairs and one on the Flemish fairs and workshops), which rarely seem to have made it further than Syria at most.[2] Abu-Lughod’s ‘purely organisational’ decisions seem to have wider theoretical ramifications.
This is most obvious in her conclusion, where the seemingly accidental organisation ends in vague confusions. Summing up her material, she emphasises the variability of the structures that constituted world system, and points out that both these structures and the wider form taken by this world system is very different from our own world-capitalist system, emerging from European colonialism from (according to Wallerstein, following Marx) the 16th century onwards. The historic character of economic relationships thus in no way predetermines in any rigid way the nature of the new system emerging out of the shell of the old. Thus far, I would agree. However, there does seem here to be an attempt to resist any kind of broader analysis, to articulate any broad patterns and what they might suggest for our present.
As such, turning to the present, Abu-Lughod’s claims become very dubious. It is hard to briefly summarise the number of questionable assertions. Like many writers in the late 80s, Abu-Lughod seems to take the ‘economic miracle’ of east Asian countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, alongside Japan’s incorporation into the Trilateral Commission and the market reforms in China, as all indicative of the same trend, the weakening of US hegemony. There is no mention of the role of the US in these ‘economic miracles’ - and addressing the distinct factors in China’s case would take a whole other essay[3] - despite the fact that Abu-Lughod is fully able to articulate an analysis of ‘comprador’ capitalism in other contexts, such as the Straits of Malacca. Rather than continued histories of domination in new forms, Abu-Lughod discerns the gradual resolution of global conflict into a new form of economic harmony;
Since multiple powers share the spoils [of economic restructuring] and there has been a greater convergence of economic systems (the Soviet Union has perestroika, socialist countries “privatize,” whereas western powers increasingly plan their economies), no country has a spectacular advantage […] The era of European/western hegemony may be superseded by a new form of world conquest, but that is hard to imagine. Rather, it seems more likely that there will be a return to the relative balance of multiple centres exhibited in the thirteenth-century world system. But that would require a shift to different rules of the game, or at least an end to the rules Europe introduced in the sixteenth century. (p. 371)
Hindsight sees in 20/20, but it’s hard not to feel that this is an epecially rosey view even for 1989. Of course we all might hope for a transition to what many contemporary analysts call a ‘multipolar’ world, but it is necessary to ask what social forces might make this transition possible and put it into action. Whilst new conquests on the scale of the 16th century are unlikely, nor do most of the existing world powers have vested interests in new, more balanced rules of the game. Her citation of renowned ‘neoliberal institutionalist’ Robert Keohane does little to reassure me.
Both Abu-Lughod’s organisational problems and her, at best, vague predictions of what seems suspiciously like an End of History might be best responded to by returning to the origins of world systems analysis in Third World Marxisms. In the wake of the anti-colonial revolts and independence struggles that followed the Second World War, Marxist theorists across the world began developing arguments about the forms of economic control and coercion that hemmed the new movements in at every turn; in Latin America, economists began articulating new theories of dependency, with the Guyanan Walter Rodney forming a key link between these discussions and the Dar Es Salaam debates on class, the state, and imperialism that took place in Nyerere’s Tanzania. All of this took place against the backdrop of the increasingly frosty relationship between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, in which the phrase ‘world capitalist system’ began to be posed against ‘the socialist world’ in new ways.[4]
It would take a much longer review to discuss the ways that stressing the Marxist tendency in world systems theory would change the way in which we view the material Abu-Lughod has gathered in Before European Hegemony. We might, for example, highlight the ways that Portuguese conquest in the Indian Ocean was made possible by the transference of Mediterranean norms of naval warfare to the relatively peaceful norms of oceanic trade formed in the region by patterns of monsoon winds. The beginnings of European colonialism would therefore appear to begin almost by accident, the circumstantial collision of two divergent geographical norms, rather than via caused by ‘the Protestant work ethic’ or some other idealist conception of ‘the European mind’. Indeed, Samir Amin has emphasised elsewhere that the ability of European powers to form a new economy around the waves of primitive accumulation initiated from the 16th century onwards was possible precisely because of their peripheral position in the pre-existing world system. They were simply those with the least to lose from breaking with the old networks and forming new rules.[5]
All that said, you really would be hard pressed to find a better source for beginning to understand the economic history of Eurasia in the period. Not only is Abu-Lughod’s ability to articulate both detail and breadth simultaneously breathtaking, but the work is relatively short (just 370 pages!) and comes with a huge bibliography for further reading. One can argue with her conclusions, but it’s hard not to be impressed with her achievement. I know I will be returning to this work again and again.
-
[1] That said, this tendency was also the Mongols’ undoing, since in periods of economic contraction, they could only respond by increasing taxes, which obviously placed further strain on already weakening economies.
[2] Reference to slaves as ‘goods’ is of course contextual.
[3] I’ve personally found the following essays useful for understanding the Chinese economy. 1) ‘China 2013’, by Samir Amin: link, and 2) ‘China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery’, by Minqi Li: link.
[4] On Latin America, cf. this brief review essay from the University of Virginia’s Gloal South Studies Department: link.
On the Sino-Soviet Split, cf. ‘Long Live Leninism’, from the editorial department of Honqi, April 1960: link.
[5] Cf. ‘History Conceived as an Eternal Cycle’, Samir Amin: link.
—
Thank you for reading. If you found this interesting, I have written before on class struggle and multipolarity in the contemporary context for Ebb Magazine. You can read that article here: link.
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider supporting me monetarily, either as a one-off via ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/ignatz_maria
Or as a regular Patreon supporter: https://www.patreon.com/IgnatzMaria
My money situation remains precarious so anything you can spare is really appreciated.