West Came Research Articles

The Uneven and Combined Development of Global Capitalism: Debating How the West Came to Rule

AbstractThis article is an introduction to the Symposium on Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’sHow the West Came to Rule(2015). It summarises the main arguments of the book, as well as the critiques levied by the contributors to the Symposium.

The Use and Misuse of Uneven and Combined Development: A Critique of Anievas and Nişancıoğlu

AbstractAneivas and Nişancıoğlu’s provocative book,How the West Came to Rule, attempts to provide an alternative account of the origins of capitalism to both ‘Political Marxism’ and ‘World-Systems Theory’. By making uneven and combined development a universal dynamic of human history and by utilising a flawed concept of ‘Eurocentrism’, however, they introduce a high degree of causal pluralism into their analysis. Despite important insights into the specific dynamics of different pre-capitalist forms of social labour, their account of the origins of capitalism inHow the West Came to Rulesuffers from causal indeterminacy and historical inaccuracies.

‘My Capitalism Is Bigger than Yours!’

AbstractThis article reviews Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’sHow the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism(2015). It argues that the book offers a stimulating and ambitious approach to solving the problems of Eurocentrism and the origins of capitalism in growing critical scholarship in historical sociology and International Relations. However, by focusing on the ‘problem of the international’ and proposing a ‘single unified theory’ based on uneven and combined development, the authors present a history of international relations that trades off methodological openness and legal complexity for a structural and exclusive consequentialism driven by anti-Eurocentrism. By misrepresenting the concept of social-property relations in terms of the internal/external fallacy, and by confusing different types of ‘internalism’ required by early-modern jurisdictional struggles, the book problematically conflates histories of international law and capitalism. These methodological problems are contextualised by examples from the Spanish, French and British empires’ conceptions of sovereignty and jurisdiction and their significant legal actors and processes.

The Frontiers of Uneven and Combined Development

AbstractAlexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’sHow the West Came to Ruleis an important intervention within Marxist historical debates which seeks to use the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) to explain the origin and rise to dominance of capitalism. The argument is shaped by a critique of Political Marxist ‘internalist’ explanations of the process, to which the authors counterpose an account which emphasises its inescapably ‘inter-societal’ nature. While recognising the many contributions that the book makes to our historical understanding, this article argues that these insights do not depend onUCD, and could have been arrived at without reference to it. In particular, it will try to show thatUCDis inapplicable in periods before the consolidation of capitalism, but might be more usefully extended spatially rather than chronologically.

A Combined Argument: Beyond Wallerstein?

AbstractInHow the West Came to Rule, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu offer an alternative to both Political Marxism and world-systems analysis (WSA) by going beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis in the former and the marginalisation of articulation and combination between modes of production in the latter. Their account also gives more room to non-European actors neglected in other interpretations of the rise of the West. However, I argue that their argument is much closer toWSAand that their critique of Wallerstein regarding Eurocentrism, the origins of capitalism and the role of wage labour in the capitalist world-system is problematic. Furthermore, Anievas and Nişancıoğlu do not offer a sufficiently rigorous definition of combination, leading to an overextension of the concept.

Book Review: How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

Book Review: How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

Down with Eurocentrism, Up with Marx - Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, London, 2015)

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Review of How the West Came to Rule

This is a book which invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew and understood about a Europe’s rise. It examines the historical origin of Europe’s capitalism in the growing call for internationality that can explain the uneven and combined histories of European and non-European regions. This view asks us to use the lens of relational and hierarchical perspectives, which contain various types of interconnected narratives between European and non-European regions in Europe’s exceptional rise, instead of accepting the self-generating development of the West.

How the West came to rule

Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Global Capitalism, Pluto, London, 2015; 400 pp: 0745336159, 24.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Introduction Eight hundred years of global history explained! Anievas and Nijancioglu's book is an ambitious attempt to amalgamate discussions in the fields of international relations, global history, Marxism, world-systems theory and historical sociology into a great machine of explanation, the side of which is stamped with the newly repainted letters 'Uneven and Combined Development'. The Trotskyist theory, re-outlined by IR theorists and displayed for discussion and reassemblage, now provides the screen across which the past of the global proletariat can unscroll, and on which to better project the future that awaits it. Through post-colonial and political theory, the Introduction argues persuasively for an ever more complex understanding of capitalism (p. 9), but also firmly attempts to swat away two erroneous and yet arguably dominant Marxist stories of capitalism's development. In order to battle these theories, the authors draw on the work of a wide breadth of global scholars, slowing down the centripetal force of Europe on world history to understand the dynamics of other agents instead--whether of control or rebellion--in the expansive universe of capitalism's ascendency. Leon Trotsky's theory of 'combined and uneven development' is given a robust defence in Chapter 2. Terms such as 'the whip of external necessity', 'substitutionalism' and 'privilege of backwardness' are put back into a history of party politics and the Bolshevik general's marshaling of his terminology, along with his troops and coterie. The authors do not shrink from providing some obvious criticisms. This includes explaining the theory's reliance on the teleological terms of 'advanced' and 'backward' societies (p. 56), reinterpreting these instead as 'asymmetries and 'imbalances' between societies, rather a directional flow. These opening chapters thus make clear that this is an autocritical work in which the authors wish to correct the racist and patriarchal mistakes of Marxist theory, incorporating not only the histories of production beyond the European frontier, but also the analyses by feminist and non-European scholars. This is an extraordinary ambition: surely few contemporary projects of historical writing have quite so audacious a mission or scope. Chapter 3 begins the historical journey with the nomadic mode of production on the Mongol grasslands, moving across the trade routes, with the Black Death upon them, into feudal Europe and the demographic crisis which, the authors claim, catapulted Europe into capitalism. Chapter 4 argues for the distinction between tributary and feudal modes of production. The authors then claim that that it was the superior army of the Ottoman tributary mode that halted European expansionism, forcing European powers to look elsewhere--the East and West Indies--for necessary feudal agricultural expansion and merchant trade. In both chapters, Europe reaps the 'privileges of backwardness' in relation to other modes of production. Chapter 5 moves overseas with the merchant adventurers, first through the Spanish legal theories of Amerindians and the influence of New World map-making on European's conceptions of their home territory, and then the twin rise of New World slavery and industrial capitalism, these last as combined and mutually intertwined systems of production and circulation. Chapter 6 works as a moment of repose in the global whirlwind, turning back to the conflicts within Europe which had begun to be outlined in Chapter 4, and arguing that it was the preoccupation of the majority of European powers either with New World expansionism or battling the Ottoman Empire that allowed Holland and England the geopolitical space' (p. 184) for the political primacy of merchant capital and the early appearance of bourgeois revolutions. …

Capitalism: A Short History by Jürgen Kocka

Reviewed by: Capitalism: A Short History by Jürgen Kocka Henry Heller Jürgen Kocka, Capitalism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016) Capitalism can only be understood as a system which had a beginning and must have an end. Marxist discussion of the history of capitalism in recent times has been founded on Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1946). That work became the foundation of all further Marxist study of capitalist history. Famously it was the jumping-off place for the transition debate which proved to be so critical to both Marxist historiography and theory. Lately we have seen the publication of two important works in the Marxist vein that deal with the transition question and also later capitalist history. In a novel twist the Indian scholar Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Perilous Passage: Mankind and [End Page 388] the Global Ascendancy of Capital (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) analyzes capitalist history from the perspective not of accumulation but of global human development. In this light Bagchi’s careful scholarship demonstrates that in both Europe and the rest of the world that capitalism has stunted human development. Bagchi’s account represents a pioneer attempt to study the history of capitalism from the perspective of global humanity rather than from the viewpoint of Europe and capital. Another theoretically interesting effort to transcend a Eurocentric view is How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, (London: Pluto Press, 2015) by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu. Redeploying Trotsky’s concept of combined and uneven development the authors show that that from capitalism’s inception non-Western societies were intrinsically rather than extrinsically linked to capitalist accumulation. Among non-Marxists the cultural turn from the 1980s onward led to a loss of interest in economic history. But since the onset of the crisis in 2008 non-Marxists have begun to interest themselves once again in the subject and indeed in the history of capitalism itself. This can be seen in the recent neoliberal Cambridge History of Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, a two volume work which takes the reader back to the purported beginnings of capitalism in Babylonia attempting to prove that the repeated failures of a capitalist breakthrough up to 1500 were due to market imperfections. This massive study in anachronism only confirms the sad failure of the still influential neoliberal approach. In contrast there has been the illuminating study of the world history of capitalism through an analysis of one key commodity, namely cotton, in Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 2015). Jürgen Kocka’s Short History of Capitalism represents an equally important non-Marxist attempt at a synopsis of capitalism’s history. Previously published in German, this work offers a brief and lively overview which is likely to attract a wide readership. Aside from the fact that is based on considerable learning and is occasionally insightful, it represents an important effort at constructing a plausible narrative meant to defend a beleaguered capitalism while fending off the Marxist view of history. Entertaining and informative, it will prove useful and reassuring to many who are troubled by the onset of the capitalist crisis in 2008 but who are still wedded to the system. In five chapters Kocka offers a synopsis of the long history of capitalism. He begins by defining the concept while offering the views of some of the most important theorists of capitalist development including Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, Polyani, Braudel, Wallerstein, and Arrighi. He then uses this theoretical schema to argue that capitalism long predated modern times rejecting the Marxist view that capitalism exists only when capitalist principles dominate production and organize work. The Marxist transition debate initiated by Dobb is ignored. He then devotes Chapter 2 to trying to substantiate this view by recalling the history of merchant capitalism finding variant forms of this kind of capitalism in Antiquity, China, and the Islamic and Western Middle Ages. Kocka argues that merchant exchange in these epochs was capitalist because of the existence of intense relations to the market, the use of...

Jefferson vs. Mahathir: How the West Came To This Muslim's Rescue

New Perspectives QuarterlyVolume 16, Issue 4 p. 29-30 Jefferson vs. Mahathir: How the West Came To This Muslim's Rescue MUNAWAR A. ANEES, MUNAWAR A. ANEES MUNAWAR A. ANEES, a scholar who founded and edited the prestigious Kuala Lumpur-based journal, Periodica Islamica, was released last spring from a Malaysian jail. He had been serving a six-month sentence after being tried for having sexual relations with former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, a charge Anees denied, saying it was a part of a set-up to imprison Anwar and remove him from political life. Anwar has been sentenced to six years in prison.Search for more papers by this author MUNAWAR A. ANEES, MUNAWAR A. ANEES MUNAWAR A. ANEES, a scholar who founded and edited the prestigious Kuala Lumpur-based journal, Periodica Islamica, was released last spring from a Malaysian jail. He had been serving a six-month sentence after being tried for having sexual relations with former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, a charge Anees denied, saying it was a part of a set-up to imprison Anwar and remove him from political life. Anwar has been sentenced to six years in prison.Search for more papers by this author First published: 01 February 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5842.1999.tb00068.x AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume16, Issue4Fall 1999Pages 29-30 RelatedInformation