gpe2

Saturday, 29 January 2005

Peter-

I am about halfway through the Frank and have a copy of the Abu-Lughod at the GMu Library I'm picking up tonight. I will give some more summative comments once I've had a chance to look over both but my sense is that the only thing Frank sees himself disagreeing with her on is the idea that there is a lapse between the "Fall of Asia" and the "Rise of Europe." He wants to prove that the world system has been in effect at least since the thirteenth century and that Asia was the most powerful force in the world system up until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This stuff may be old hat to you, but it's kind of blowing my mind. I still have problems with it (which I will write about soon) but I am really impressed with what his argument has done to my thinking about global relations and world history. Despite my years of thinking--knowing even--that "the orient" got short shrift, it is obviously something that has never really adjusted my conception of the world. it is an argument I am trying to digest as fully and quickly as possible so that I can integrate it into my teaching NOW--the course is supposed to take into account "Western Civilization" and "Global Perspective" and I feel confident that the syllabus does niether of these things according to Frank's understanding.

Below are a few initial comments I wrote after the first couple of chapters. I will post again soon with more comprehensive comments.

-s

Frank, A. G. (1998). ReOrient : global economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Intro/Chapter 1:

Frank has a few distinct points he is trying to drive home with the book

1. He wants to further advance the World System understanding of global political economic development/history. I am not familiar with this paradigm, but it is a structural theory which attributes most every local development to some connection to a global structure. Cultural and ideological issues seem to be irrelevant.

1a. Even world systems theorists have failed to make their analysis broad or deep (that is by space or time) enough to include the entire globe or the entire history of the world system. This means that even they have an incomplete understanding of the system as a whole.

2. Cultural and ideological issues are relevant only in so far as they show the way that previous analysts—including world historians, social theorists, economic historians, etc.—have been mostly blinded by Eurocentrism in their examination of the history of the world. They have failed to broaden their understanding of the economic and social development of the world to include more than Europe and America.

2a. Frank sees the lapses of these earlier analysts to be of a cultural an ideological nature in two ways. One is that they were ideologically influenced by the dominant Eurocentric view of the world that prevailed during the mid-nineteenth century when many of the foundational texts were written. The other is that they were mostly concerned with the ideological and cultural factors of this process. He cites Weber and those who came after him as being importantly wrong about what determined western development (i.e. it was really its structural position within the world system rather than its “rational” cultural products).

3. Because of the two above points, we need

-a new paradigm with a global perspective of world history

-all new social theory since all the past social theory.

Frank is not interested in soft-selling these theories. He advances them with much confidence, leaving you with little doubt that it is the most significant work of history in history. He doesn’t equivocate very often in his narrative about the superiority of his theory, trying to make clear what is at stake on the many different fronts he sees himself attacking.

I am unable to judge the validity of his claims about world history. But I did notice how much I bristled at the notion that, 1) Europe wasn’t the engine for the development of the last 500 years; 2) that this is an overblown development that only became significant in the 1800s. And because I don’t know much about this time period, and know the great history of the ideological narrative of the supremacy of the West, I am willing to believe that his evidence proves this to be the case—or at least challenges an internalist view of development that would place more of the engine within Europe rather than between every corner of the globe.

What I am less willing to concede is that this “discovery” disproves all of Western Social theory as well. This is as much because I don’t trust most totalizing theories as it is a response to his own defense of this totalizing theory. In summary, the last section of the first chapter tries to answer many of his critics before the fact. One of his defenses is that he is simply trying to shift the paradigm of thought and that he can’t possibly know all of the empirical evidence for the entire world for the entire history of the world (39). He asks people not to make “nitpicking objections” to the almost complete absence of primary sources. Yet he skewers western social theory as a whole for not understanding the “facts” of the global world system—the facts which he tells us have only recently been uncovered.

In other words, through some careful slippage, he wants to make his heterodox challenge to a variety of fields because they “have no foundation in historical reality” (15) based on his own weakly empirical theory. I am willing to consider his argument about the place of the non-European world and about the reality of a “world system” in general, but I think he will need more than 350 pages to prove to me that this challenge debunks all of western sociology and political economy. If he manages to prove the first, I have no doubt that it will require a significant re-thinking of many of these theories, but chunking them altogether seems a bit premature.