Before European Hegemony

Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 provides a welcome, highly scholarly, adjustment to views that overstate Europe’s precocity and importance before 1500. However specific its institutional evolution, Europe was a peripheral backwater prior to its export of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas. She 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. In other words, 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 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 highly readable and extremely informative, the personality of the author engaging. An excellent way of coming to grips with how global history works.

Alas, Abu-Lughod does include some fashionably ambiguous nonsense in her introduction about science being “socially constructed” (if she means that science occurs within a social context, obviously true: if she means that whether E=mc2 is true depends on the social context, that is nonsense). This fortunately does not seem to be other than fashionable hand-waving. (Anyone who claims to believe the second claim is other than nonsense is invited to allow me to belt them in the jaw to see whether it is “socially constructed” how many times I have to hit them to break their jaw. Nobody really believes this nonsense, because no-one walks out in front of trucks to see if it is “socially constructed” whether the truck will (a) hit them and (b) kill them.) But this fashionable hand-waving does not detract significantly from the value of the book.