CAPITALIST ORIGINS , THE ADVENT OF MODERNITY, AND COHERENT EXPLANATION: A RESPONSE TO JOSEPH M. BRYANT

Abstract

For many decades, there has been a of rise of West. At some point after 1000 AD--whether it was with medieval commercial expansion; or early Renaissance rediscovery of ancient Greek thought; or continental trade expansion based on Hanseatic league, Champagne fairs, Bruges cloth trade, and Italian banking and Mediterranean trade; or seafaring ventures of Portuguese and Spanish; or Reformation--not much later than 1500, the developed a new dynamic institutional and cultural framework that began to lift it out of its post-Roman Empire torpor, and launched it on path to modernity. Industrialization came as a later outgrowth of this earlier shift to capitalism or modernity, but it was a natural outgrowth of earlier dynamism of Europe. This contrasted with institutional and cultural stagnation in major civilizations of Asia--the Ottomans, India, China, and Japan--such that an increasingly advanced Europe was able to dominate and colonize Asian societies in 18th and 19th centuries. Against this view, a number of historians and historical sociologists of which I am one, and which I have identified as School, have argued that whatever their institutional and cultural differences, there was in fact no significant divergence of material living standards in Europe from those in advanced Asian societies until much later, c. 1800. (2) Despite very different cultural and institutional frameworks of major European states, Ottoman Empire, and China, which admittedly took different approaches to governance, religion, and political organization, we argue that they nonetheless shared very similar overall political and economic dynamics until about 1850. The only exception is Great Britain, which, starting in 18th century, embarked on a peculiar path of unique industrial innovations that gave birth to a modern world, which was quickly imitated and built upon by other European states and United States in 19th century, before spreading to rest of world in later 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, this peculiar British move to industrial innovation was not simply an outgrowth of broad European patterns of culture and institutions, but a contingent outcome of conditions that happened to come together in Britain in a way that did not happen elsewhere, and very conceivably would not have happened in Britain either if it had followed a typical European trajectory. Joseph Bryant objects to this revisionist story as both empirically suspect and analytically incoherent. It is neither; rather Bryant misunderstands argument. What Bryant does exceptionally well is identify why debate is significant, what evidence is crucial, and which elements of California School causal story are suspect. It is thus with great respect for his essay that I respond. Bryant states that revisionists claim that the major societies across Eurasia were all progressing along a comparable course of modernizing development (p. 403). This is incorrect. Rather, revisionist claim is that none of major societies across Eurasia, including Europe, were progressing along a course of modernizing development. From 1500-1800 major states of Europe, China, India, and Ottoman Empire were all experiencing a similar course of advanced organic development, with absolutist bureaucratic states, highly productive agriculture, a sophisticated urban culture, and extensive long-distance trade in both luxuries and daily necessities. They all experienced periods of demographic expansion, price increases, and trade expansion from 1500-1850, interrupted by political and economic crises in periods 1590-1660 and again from 1770-1850. Yet in all of them, material standard of living c. 1800 was no greater than it had been c. 1500; no effect of cultural or institutional dynamics leading to a materially superior civilization in West is evident. …