How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over theLongue Durée

Abstract

Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe's ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain's colonization of India.

Geography and the theory of uneven and combined development: Theorizing uniqueness and the return of China

“…The theory of U&CD permitted a stronger incorporation of international relations into historical sociology. It also enabled an integration of 'external' and 'internal' relations into theories of the structural and contingent drivers of inter-state conflict (Anievas, 2013), the rise of capitalism (Anievas and Nis¸ancio glu, 2017) and the evolution of the twentieth century world order (Desai, 2013). In this article U&CD is brought to bear on two issues.…”

Myths of military revolution: European expansion and Eurocentrism

“…Anievas and Nisancioglu’s (2015, 2017) work on the rise of the West is in a different category, both in their attention to the problem of Eurocentrism, and in their extensive consideration of the Mongols, Ottomans, and Mughals, as well as various actors in the Americas, Africa, and South-East Asia. These authors advance a theory of uneven and combined development.…”

“…In contrast, Asian empires are said to have faced much less competition, and hence were less innovative in warfare (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015: 257; 2017: 45). Second, Europeans are said to have used these same military innovations developed in Europe, which gave them “a decisive comparative advantage in the means of violence and in their fiscal and organizational capacities,” in their early modern campaigns of intercontinental conquest (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2017: 51). In specifying these decisive military advantages, the authors again follow the military revolution thesis in speaking of drilled infantry using muskets, and gun-armed sailing ships (Anievas and Nisancioglu, 2015: 257; 2017: 47, 49).…”