Abstract
This essay evaluates the new road Giovanni Arrighi paves in Adam Smith in Beijing (2007) in relation to the scholarly debate on Europe's Great Divergence and the remarkable resurgence of East Asia in the global economy at the end of the twentieth century. At the center of Adam Smith in Beijing is the argument that the probability has increased that we are witnessing the formation of an "East Asian-centered world-market society, " rivaling the historical "capitalist world-economy ". We show how Arrighi 's discovery of East Asia has led him to supplement the analysis of historical capitalism he presented in The Long Twentieth Century (1994). This brings about uncertainties and problems. On the one hand, Arrighi is clear in his view on the different paths of economic development followed by the Europe-centered capitalist world-system, and the Chinese-centered market-oriented world-system. These paths remained largely separate until deep into the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Arrighi is less clear on how the Asian market-oriented legacy survived its incorporation into a globalizing capitalist world-economy, a crucial precondition for Arrighi's political message. Characterized as a process of subordination, hybridization, or fusion, it remains difficult to extract from Arrighi an unambiguous understanding of the place of China and East Asia within the capitalist world-system. It is just as hard to understand the nature of that "interstitial" system itself These conceptual and theoretical uncertainties suggest a central question and problem that hangs over Adam Smith in Beijing: What remains of the capitalist world-system as an analytical category that allows us to understand economic history and our possible futures?
Highlights
In this paper we focus on the "Asian tum" that Arrighi has taken on his long march to historical sociology, a turn that became visible with The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and which came full circle in Adam Smith in Beijing.' At the center of Arrighi's Asian tum is the debate over what
Arrighi sees an increasingly likelihood that because of the Chinese resurgence we are witnessing the formation of an "East Asian-centered world-market society," rivaling the historical "capitalist world-economy." The central political message is that this change in the nature of the now-global world-economy might bring about a Great Convergence, bringing the different regions of the world closer together into the sort of Commonwealth of Civilizations that Adam Smith dreamt of
Adam Smith in Beifing is an attempt to answer the question that Arrighi left hanging at the end of The Long Twentieth Century: "Can capitalism survive success?" We may rephrase the question: "What remains of the capitalist world-system?" The question runs in two directions, past and present
Summary
In this paper we focus on the "Asian tum" that Arrighi has taken on his long march to historical sociology, a turn that became visible with The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and which came full circle in Adam Smith in Beijing.' At the center of Arrighi's Asian tum is the debate over what. Arrighi sees an increasingly likelihood that because of the Chinese resurgence we are witnessing the formation of an "East Asian-centered world-market society," rivaling the historical "capitalist world-economy." The central political message is that this change in the nature of the now-global world-economy might bring about a Great Convergence, bringing the different regions of the world closer together into the sort of Commonwealth of Civilizations that Adam Smith dreamt of. What we want to underline is how much Arrighi has modified the original idea of China's "subordination to the Western commands" that was presented in The Long Twentieth Century Instead, he has come to favor "hybridization" between two distinct paths of developments, one capitalist and one not. These conceptual uncertainties concerning the juxtaposition and permutation of two world-economies, one capitalist and one not, hinder Arrighi's attempts to cut the Gordian knot of the Great Divergence and Convergence
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