The return of anti-Eurocentrism?

Abstract

Samir Amin Global History: A View from the South, Pambazuka Press, Nairobi, Kenya, 2011; 200 pp: 9781906387969, 14.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) This book is a collection of several previously published pieces on global history by Samir Amin. The breadth and depth of this study is considerable, and is testimony to the author's status as an internationally leading progressive scholar of the left. In only 190 pages of text, Amin covers global history from about 500 BC to the present day, including the various parts of the world and how they have been related to each other in different ways over time. The book highlights the author's independent contribution to Marxist historical sociology, and presents a stinging attack on Eurocentric accounts of history. Samir Amin is regularly mentioned alongside three other progressive, left academic intellectuals: Immanuel Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi. Indeed, he collaborated closely with them, especially in the 1970s, when they were known in academia as the 'Gang of Four'. Nevertheless, this book makes clear that Samir Amin has adopted independent positions on a number of key issues, which differentiate him from the others. I will focus on three key differences here. First, he highlights the significance of the Industrial Revolution in England, identified as the advanced form of capitalism since 1800. While Immanuel Wallerstein dates capitalism back to the long 16th century, beginning in around 1450 (e.g. Wallerstein 1974: 399), and Giovanni Arrighi downplays the Industrial Revolution completely in Britain's rise to international dominance (Arrighi 1994: 209-10), Samir Amin captures its systemic importance. 'The capitalist system only reached its advanced form with the establishment of the mechanised factory in the 19th century (modern industry), a base which was essential to the deployment of the law of value specific to the capitalist mode of production' (p. 71). Second, Amin's definition of capitalism is equally different from Wallerstein's and Arrighi's market-based definitions. For Amin, 'the development of historical capitalism is based on the private appropriation of agrarian land, the submission of agricultural production to the requirements of the market and, on this basis, the continuing and accelerating expulsion of the peasant population for the benefit of a small number of capitalist farmers' (pp. 172-3). In other words, when assessing the transition to capitalism in Europe, there is an emphasis on enclosures in England and the constitution of private property, i.e. the way the production process is organised. Third, in his broad historical sweep, Amin identifies several parallel tributary systems from 500 BC to about 1500 AD, based on direct, politically enforced surplus extraction from peasant activity, and dominated by ideological authority and the existence of a universal ideology. He highlights India, China and the Islamic Orient as the three major core tributary systems plus several less significant tributary systems in the periphery including, for example, Europe (85). Nevertheless, in contrast to Andre Gunder Frank (e.g. Frank and Gills 1993), who thinks in terms of an integrated world system reaching back up to 5,000 years, Amin does not conclude that the trading links between these different tributary systems implied that they were part of one and the same overall system. In this sense, 'the capitalist mode of production represents a qualitative rupture with systems that preceded it' (p. 123). Moreover, this book is significant in its criticism of Eurocentrism (see also Hobson 2012). Amin employs the concept of the 'tributary system' as a tool for a non-European interpretation of universal history (p. 137). In his analysis of the period between 500 BC and 1500 AD, he suggests that Europe was little more than a barbarous and backward periphery lagging behind major tributary systems such as India, China and the Islamic Orient and their scientific, intellectual and general civilisational achievements. …