How the West Came to Rule

Anievas, Alexander; Nişancıoğlu, Kerem

doi:10.2307/j.ctt183pb6f

Cited by 266 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…They insist that 'in order to truly "provincialise" Europe we must dissect European history itself, and there is no more central myth to be dissected than that of narrating European history around the history of capitalism'. 18 This echoes Sandra Halperin's warning that without deconstructing 'fictitious views of Europe's development and history' a mere emphasis on multiplicity and hybridity falls short in overcoming unilinear conceptions of historical development. 19 Likewise, Kamran Matin writes that postcolonial theory successfully reveals the differentiated, hybrid, and ambivalent character of colonial modernity, yet it 'does not account for, or even address, the initial crystallization of … capital in Europe', thereby failing to explain the heterogeneous constitution of the origins of capitalism.…”

Section: 'Modernity' In International Historical Sociology: Explaininmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…No doubt, one of the most sophisticated attempts in IHS seeking to challenge the presumed 'pristine-ness' of European modernity is the work of Anievas and Nisancioglu. 21 Anievas and Nisancioglu use the theory of 'uneven and combined development' (UCD) to reconceptualise the origins and development of capitalist modernity in western Europe. The theory of UCD emphasises the plurality and heterogeneity of world historical development through a dynamic conceptualisation of the 'international'.…”

Section: 'Modernity' In International Historical Sociology: Explaininmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Re-interpreting the Ottoman path to modernity

Duzgun

2017

Rev. Int. Stud.

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Debates over ‘modernity’ have been central to the development of historical-sociological approaches to International Relations (IR). Within the bourgeoning subfield of International Historical Sociology (IHS), much work has been done to formulate a historically dynamic conception of international relations, which is then used to undermine unilinear conceptions of global modernity. Nevertheless, this article argues that IHS has not proceeded far enough in successfully remedying the problem of unilinearism. The problem remains that historical narratives, informed by IHS, tend to transhistoricise capitalism, which, in turn, obscures the generative nature of international relations, as well as the fundamental heterogeneity of diverging paths to modernity both within and beyond western Europe. Based on the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, Political Marxism, and Robbie Shilliam’s discussion of ‘Jacobinism’, this article first reinterprets the radical multilinearity of modernity within western Europe, and then utilises this reinterpretation to provide a new reading of the Ottoman path to modernity (1839–1918). Such a historical critique and reconstruction will highlight the significance of Jacobinism for a more accurate theorisation of the origin and development of the modern international order, hence contributing to a deeper understanding of the international relations of modernity.

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Section: 'Modernity' In International Historical Sociology: Explaininmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: 'Modernity' In International Historical Sociology: Explaininmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Re-interpreting the Ottoman path to modernity

Duzgun

2017

Rev. Int. Stud.

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“…Piggybacking off this framing, the conceptual context and purpose for employing 'agrarian capitalism'typically for dating and locating the sui generis technological dynamic characterizing capitalist developmentcontinues to set the terms on debates centred on the birth of capitalism (Anievas & Nisancioglu, 2015;Banaji, 2010;Heller, 2011). Serving as something of a necessary intermediary between pre-capitalism and fully fledged capitalist social relations, agrarian capitalism conveniently 'explains' the uniqueness and immanent features of the rise of British industrial dominance.…”

Section: Most Cogently Developed Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cacao capitalism in coastal Ecuador: Production processes and accumulation in non‐transitionary agrarian capitalism during the long 19th century

Fenton

2020

Journal of Agrarian Change

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Histories of agrarian capitalism have often been constrained by the implications of Robert Brenner's work on the subject. This essay, employing archival and secondary research on Ecuador's long 19th century experiences with cacao capitalism, argues that production processes and localized forms of accumulation, rather than class structure and legal relations, should be included in our definition of the concept. By focusing on how fixed capital in cacao trees and the production of the yearly cacao commodity responded to global demand and local material conditions, I propose amplifying the concept of agrarian capitalism, as well as a rethinking of coastal Ecuador's history of capitalist development. I highlight how both absolute and relative forms of surplus value generation coexisted in coastal Ecuador's cacao haciendas, while demonstrating how financial instruments used for extending the cacao frontier undermined the prospects for long‐term growth.

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“…In these ways, the overall conditions of uneven and combined development emanating from both within and without Europe created the propitious "geo-social" environment in which specific countries, notably the Dutch and English, could emerge and consolidate themselves as capitalist states. 73 Over the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughal Empire was, by contrast, considerably weakened by the incessant interstate wars in Asia, along with insurgency and piracy within the region. The Mughals had to contend with both the "conventional threat" posed by the invading armies of the Durrani Empire from Afghanistan and the "unconventional warfare launched by the Marathas."…”

Section: S T R U C T U R E a N D C O N J U N C T U R E I N T H E " R mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Anievas

Nişancıoğlu

2017

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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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.

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How the West Came to Rule

Cited by 266 publications

References 0 publications

Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Re-interpreting the Ottoman path to modernity

Capitalism, Jacobinism and International Relations: Re-interpreting the Ottoman path to modernity

Cacao capitalism in coastal Ecuador: Production processes and accumulation in non‐transitionary agrarian capitalism during the long 19th century

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

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