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Summary:
In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.
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The First World System
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This book deals with the formation of the world system which evolved from the mid 13th to the mid 14th century. Prof. Abu-Lughod's approach in analyzing this topic is interesting insofar as she does not take as given the inevitability of European hegemony that resulted many centuries later. She goes back and presents the formation of the world system, post the Christian/Roman era, when many regions of the world first began to interact with each other in a quasi-global manner. She goes about linking the Christian Europeans, the predominantly Islamic Middle East and the developed yet isolated Chinese regimes of that period and presents a cogent explanation as to how and why they developed and what caused these interdependencies to breakdown and ultimately fail. We assume that the West was destined somehow through advanced scientific and cultural development to dominate an otherwise backward and somewhat stunted part of the world. She debunks this explanation by reviewing these three regions and breaking them down into their distinct "subsystems" or "sub-spheres" and further delineating them still into what she calls an "archipelago of towns" to see why they flourished and why they did not last as vibrant economic centers. Her main focus was on a system of world trade and what connected the various regions. The Middle East, being the oldest and most developed part of the world to date, India and China whose populations shared land and sea routes, as well as Europe, which she describes as still being on the periphery, all shared many similarities. There was monetary interconnectedness in the form of credit extension, rudimentary banking and money changing, and a system of payments which resulted in merchant wealth. But their stark differences in population, culture and geography all lent itself making Europe, which lagged behind the Orient at the beginning of the 13th century, their economic superior by the end of the 16th century. Asia's fractious society and its warring hordes along various land and sea routes inhibited its development. She notes that the unifying force of Ghengis Khan and the successive Mongol leaders was ultimately broken apart during this turbulent period. The Black Death which spanned Europe and China in the mid 14th Century devastated the populations along the routes linking these regions and contributed greatly to bringing this world system to a screeching halt. Although there was tremendous unevenness in the respective regions where economic centers were surrounded by large rural areas; there were common elements that helped develop each region collectively. At the beginning of the 13th century, no one region dominated the others. They were all sparsely populated for the most part with underdeveloped transportation systems and punctuated by towns where goods were exchanged in market places. Only when barter was replaced by some kind of monetary exchange did we begin to see the development of modern markets. Money-changers, the original bankers, became essential in rudimentary financing where the ideas of contracts and financial agreements began to take form. Credit creation and extension and rates of exchange were also important when ordering and delivering goods at different times and locales. Goods were assembled at sites different from where they were sold. And hence long distance trade made it crucial for there to be roads, more importantly, protected roads, along which goods and merchants could travel in relative safety. The book explores the development of each one of the eight circuits or regions of the 13th century world system. How each regions geography, demographics, religion and politics helped shape that development, consumes most of the book. At the end of the book, Prof Abu Lughod focuses her attention on why this world system failed and why European hegemony was not inevitable. Although it's difficult to call this system "global"--many did not benefit directly from this system-- it was one that exhibited tremendous sophistication on many levels. Even though there were various economic systems at different stages of development and sophistication, she refuses to chalk up the demise of the system to mere economic cycles running their course. Singling out any one element of western culture as the explanation for its ultimate dominance over the other regions doesn't jive with how well the regions developed over a long period of time. Instead she describes a series of unevenly timed cycles within each region that contributed to the breakdown of economic integration. She points out that there was a certain similarity among the "upward cycles" of regions and that their synergies contributed not only to their own domestic development but also to influencing the development of the regions they interacted with. As one might expect, this process worked in reverse as well. She highlights two significant factors: population and geo-politics. The plague dealt a blow to the entire global population which negatively impacted both supplier and consumer alike. Obviously, everything from trade to food production to the curbing of urbanization touched every aspect of this world system. Geopolitical upheaval had its impact as well in the form of interrupting trade lanes, diminishing revenues as safe passage could no longer be assured and the resultant reduction of economic activity. In fact, she posits that the Fall of the East was in more ways responsible for the Rise of the West than anything the latter did to cause it. Finally she ascribes almost living features to these world systems and outlines how they restructure and reorganize themselves. She draws the distinction between how world systems evolve and devolve and how that process differs from nations and civilizations. World systems decay as they become less integrated or as some exogenous inputs act as contagion which causes the system to breakdown. This breakdown oftentimes is the very seed of the next world system one which reorganizes and builds on the successes of the past.
Eurasian interactions
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A work drawing on deep scholarship providing welcome adjustment to views that overstate Europe's precocity and importance before 1500. Europe was a peripheral backwater prior to its export of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas (and even for some time after). Abu-Lughod examines each major area of the Eurasian trading network in term, bringing out how much events in one area were affected by changes elsewhere (in particular, how much Europeans were responding to such changes).
I also found Abu-Lughod's scepticism about grand conceptual schemas and strong preference for considering the complex texture of reality engaging. She sets out a highly informative history of the creation of an interacting Eurasian economy under the period of Mongol domination and how changes among the various participating powers (particularly China) resulted in the interactions falling back to a lower level. She also argues a power vacuum was set up in the Indian Ocean that the Europeans (first the Portugese, then the Dutch and finally the British) were able to fill. That there was a "Fall of the East" prior to there being a "Rise of the West". She does a nice job of debunking "cultural" and "Confucian-isolationism" explanations for China's shift, placing the public policy considerations the Ming court was dealing with in a more plausible context.
My first quibble is with the title. This is about the Eurasian system, not a global one, a point the author herself concedes (p.37). It is a "world" system only in terms of the Old World/New World usage and, to be fair, she is responding to Immanuel Wallerstein's coinage of the term. The second is she suffers from the modern academic fetish for shudder quotes, though at least she is often prepared to explain in more detail why concepts are problematic, rather than simply engaging in the tedious knowing-virtue wink. The worst bit of the book, as so often is the way, is when she attempts to look forward. The talking down of the stability of the current world-system, and the situation of the US in particular, reads rather poorly for a book published in 1989 with clearly no sense whatsoever of the impending collapse of the Soviet empire.
But the book is very readable and extremely informative, the personality of the author engaging. An excellent way of coming to grips with how global history works.
Provocative
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This book is approaching the status of a classic. While a work of history, the author is not a historian but rather a sociologist with an interest in the role of cities. Perhaps because she was a disciplinary outsider not specializing in a given historical period, as well as being used to comparative analysis, Abu-Lughod adopted a cross-cultural approach. The starting point for this book was the prevailing belief that a world economy was created by Europeans in the early modern period. More naive interpretations saw this as a logical development of European capitalism and that capitalism was unique to Europe. A major point of this book is that a world economic system, spanning all of Eurasia and including Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa existed prior to the early modern period. This world system was based on pre-existing regional trade networks in the Eastern Mediterrenean, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and China. Some of these linkages, like the famous Silk road across Central Asia and trade across the Indian Ocean, were ancient. Abu-Lughod reconstructs a true world economy stretching from western Europe to China reaching its peak during the 13th and 14th centuries and then declining. She shows that Europe joined this system relatively late and was a smaller component of these large trade networks. The peak of this world system is associated with the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and China. Mongol successes are seen as simultaneously making trade across Central Asia, the northern axis of the world system, and trade through the Indian Ocean and south China, the southern axis, more efficient. This lead to a Eurasian boom. As a corollary, Abu-Lughod explores the richly capitalist nature of trade in the Muslim, Indian, and Chinese regions making up the world system. Some of the institutional innovations attributed to Medieval and Renaissance European merchants may have been borrowed from the Muslim world. If the Mongols were the inadvertant architects of this system, they were also the inadvertant cause of its collapse. The key event is the Black Death, a Eurasian pandemic which probably originated in central Asia and was spread by Mongol armies and trade made possible by their states. The resulting depopulations and political instability, including the Ming expulsion of the Mongol from China, crippled the Medieval world system, though it left intact regional trade networks, particularly in Asia that the Europeans would join and come to dominate in the Early Modern period. A final and more controversial point made by Abu-Lughod is that the success of Europeans in subsequently reconstructing and dominating, in an unprecedented way, the Eurasian trade system was the withdrawal of the Chinese state from interest in trade. Under the later Ming, the powerful Chinese navy was dissolved and trade through southern China ceased to be an important issue for the Chinese state. The subsequent power vacuum made European domination possible. This may not be entirely correct but is argued well. This book has become the point of departure for much subsequent important work in world history. It is well written and has a nice bibliography.
A landmark of the "new" economic history
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There are few books in the field of economic history that I'd say are both landmarks and enjoyable to read. Assuming the reader has a great interest in history, Before European Hegemony is certainly one of them.
Abu-Lughod's excellent world systems survey details the inter-connections between pre-modern economies and societies of the era. There is also the sense of continuity between these pre-modern economic relationships and the modern era.
Special mention should be made of the fact that Before European Hegemony was one of the first of a new wave of economic, historical and sociological studies that de-emphasized the eurocentric histories that came before them. Guilty of the same simplistic approaches the eurocentric histories were charged with, for example giving the only reason for the rise of the West as military might, much of what followed Before European Hegemony was, in a word, garbage. Not so, this groundbreaking study.
Well researched, well written and highly recommended.
Great book, but still one sided
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Dr. Abu Lughod's book is a great work of scholarship and a much needed addition to the "New Histories" being written that show the history as it really happened.
Still, as Gunder Frank mentions in his review of this book, Abu Lughod misses one point in her survey. She sees the world economy as a disconnected series of events, and much like Wallerstein, maintains the idea that world after 1500 hundred was not connected to the one before that date. She treats the Mongol trade network as an isolated world-system, instead of a period in the world system.
This is a small flaw in the face of so many larger problems we have in current historiography. A great read, and I suggest you read it in conjunction with ReOrient, The Colonizers' Model of the World, and World System History.
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