The Eurasian Miracle E-Book

Jack Goody

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 243

Beschreibung

The idea of long-term European dominance is characteristic of most evolutionary theories of human culture and society in the nineteenth century. It was commonly believed that there was a natural progression from Antiquity through Feudalism to Capitalism which could not have taken place elsewhere. Today there are many who still believe that this progression was part of a European miracle that underlay the rise to global supremacy of the West. In this short book Jack Goody systematically dismantles this Eurocentric view of the world. He argues that we need to look, not for a European miracle, but rather for a Eurasian miracle that went back to the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, that affected the Near East, India and China well before Europe and that was much advanced by the adoption of writing. Under these conditions we find a long-term exchange of information between East and West, and the dominance of one followed by the dominance of the other - in other words, alternation rather than dominance. There were measures during the Renaissance in Europe that made for continuous growth, especially the secularization of learning, but it appears that the period of Western supremacy is now coming to an end and that we are about to experience a further alternation in favour of the East.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

1 Alternation or supremacy?

2 Why European and not Eurasian?

3 Domestic aspects of the ‘miracle’

Kingroups

Kinship

Individualism

Malthus and the east

4 Eurasia and the Bronze Age

5 Merchants and their role in alternation

6 Merchant wealth and puritanical asceticism

7 Towards a knowledge society

Faith versus reason

Writing and the accumulation of information

The mechanization of writing

8 The temporary advantage in alternation of the post-Renaissance west

9 Alternation in Eurasia

Appendix 1 Arguments of the Europeanists

Appendix 2 Water in east and west

References

Index

Copyright © Jack Goody, 2010

The right of Jack Goody to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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Cambridge, CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4793-7 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4794-4 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5926-8 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5925-1 (Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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1

Alternation or supremacy?

A short introduction to a short book. This book is about the relative unity of the European and Asian continents rather than their differences, a relative unity that began with the Bronze Age Revolution. That great change – what the prehistorian Gordon Childe has described as the beginning of the Culture of Cities (hence Civilization in his sense) – did not result in a bifurcation between the dynamic west, passing through antiquity, and feudalism, to capitalism, and the east that produced a static, hydraulic, bureaucratic, despotism, which was not about to modernize. This was the nineteenth-century theory of the earlier sociologists, Marx, Weber and many European historians, who saw the world from the standpoint of Europe’s predominance and presumed it had always had an advantage. No one is doubting the achievements of Europe in the Industrial Revolution, nor yet in the Renaissance. What is at stake is the extent to which this was European. In some respects its roots were Eurasian, but in any case the key movement is alternation between post-Bronze Age societies, rather than viewing one as having a permanent advantage over the other.

This first chapter attempts to deal with various Europeanist arguments that propose a completely different trajectory in the west. It is based upon my contribution to a conference held in Cambridge in September 1985 under the title of ‘The European Miracle’. On this occasion I began to query the whole discussion on the grounds that it placed too much emphasis on the invention of something called ‘capitalism’, it neglected the contributions of other societies to the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and, in particular, it overlooked the contributions of the east to ‘modernization’, mechanization and industrialization. The thesis of the book was not wrong in recognizing the advantage gained by the west after the Renaissance and especially in the nineteenth century after the Industrial Revolution, but it seemed to be an example of ethnocentric teleology in so far as it attributed that European achievement to deep-rooted, quasi-permanent features of the west, rather than recognizing the phenomenon of alternation of advantage in an exchange economy (which included the exchange of information).

This short book contains little that I have not hinted at before but much that I wanted to clarify – and, specifically, the aspect of alternation among the major civilizations of Eurasia, which raises the question of why I think the so-called ‘European miracle’ was part of a wider Eurasian phenomenon, developing as it did in the nineteenth century (and even before in the Renaissance), but also of why I cannot agree with the kind of essentialist account that Europeans have been only too ready to offer. Alternation automatically rejects essentialism and the notion of permanent advantage.

The idea for this book came from John Thompson who pointed out that I needed to deal more specifically with the question of ‘why capitalism in Europe?’ That made me look again at the report of the conference, which only confirmed my belief that capitalism had to be seen in a wider Eurasian context where there were a succession of miracles and rebirths. What happened in Europe in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was part of these. Today we are experiencing another swing towards the east, which is not simply copying the west but picking up on earlier achievements. Only such a hypothesis can explain the different records of development in Asia and in Africa, which never experienced the Bronze Age Revolution. The foundation of the culture of cooking and the growth of a ‘grand cuisine’ as well as the culture of flowers are things I constantly refer to, partly because these are areas in which I have done extensive research.1

But also they are areas outside the normal range of economic purview, even though they were much influenced by the economy, and they are areas associated with more general cultural achievement. Nevertheless, as I have argued, they are areas in which the west remained in constant comparison with the east, which in many respects had the advantage over a long period, so that neither the economy nor the knowledge system was inferior to that of the west.

Note

1 J. R. Goody 1982, 1993.

2

Why European and not Eurasian?

It was is the 1980s that a number of European intellectuals – Jean Baechler, John Hall and Michael Mann – held a prestigious conference where proceedings were published as a book on the European Miracle. It dealt with the particular ideological or political structures of the east and west. That is to say, it dealt with the twin questions of the ‘uniqueness of the west’ and ‘the miracle of the west’ that not only have formed the central focus of enquiry explicitly in the works of Marx, Weber and countless other economists, sociologists and historians, but are implicitly subsumed by the folk-models of most Europeans and in the analytic categories of those anthropologists, and other scholars, who draw a broad black line between modern and traditional, industrial and pre-industrial, advanced and primitive, indeed between ‘we’ and ‘they’.

It was on this latter point that I disagreed with the bulk of Europeanists since I saw many of the arguments put forward by them – including Marx and Weber, and the historians, Braudel, Laslett and Joseph Needham – as being mistaken, indeed teleological. I do not want to rehearse these arguments now except briefly to mention the thesis, central to the work of the whole Cambridge Group in population studies which Laslett headed, that the ‘European marriage pattern’ (of the statistician John Haynal) was singular in promoting a late marriage age for men and women, which meant that they had fewer children and more Weberian restraint (part of the Protestant ethic), following the late eighteenth-century comments of the Revd Malthus. The Chinese on the other hand married earlier and were less constrained in their sexual life, producing more and more offspring. The thesis was obviously in tune with the work of Max Weber and the importance of the Protestant ethic in the establishment of capitalism in the west and the supposed ‘failure’ of the east to achieve it.