Page 68 - Encyclopedia Of World History

418 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

A Parable

If all you know is maple trees, your concept of
“leaf” looks exactly like a maple leaf, a green
thing with pointy lobes. Then you meet an oak sights, makes brief comparisons between the interna-
leaf.And you adjust your previous conception.A tional system centered on the European world from the
“leaf” in your mind is now a green thing with sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries and systems in
lobes, but the lobes are not necessarily pointy. place elsewhere in the world, before asserting that by the
Then you encounter an elm leaf, and discover end of the nineteenth century, any fundamental East-West
that the lobes can be reduced to mere serrations distinctions were subordinated to what had become the
around the edge of the green thing. modern, Western-dominated world-system. Therefore,

Source: Comparative History. Retrieved from www.umass.edu/wsp/comparative most analyses inspired by Wallerstein’s work focus on the
Europe-centered system and its expansion, without much
attention to the dynamics of change within other systems.
from European empires in two ways—first, Europeans Part of the intellectual foundation of Wallerstein’s
competed with each other and divided territories among world-system is the work of French historian Fernand
themselves in different world regions; and second, the Braudel, one of whose major writings, the three-volume
distances from imperial center to periphery were far Civilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century (1992),
longer for Europeans than in East Asian cases. Neither identifies the distinctiveness of European capitalism
the Chinese world order nor the Japanese colonial empire through comparisons with merchants and markets in dif-
that succeeded it were simply subordinated to a Europe- ferent parts of Asia. Such comparisons follow a long tra-
centered system of international relations; rather, a dition of efforts by seminal thinkers to explain the
unique and evolving system of regional political relations distinctiveness of Europe and its patterns of political and
persisted among East Asian states even as they became economic transformation by identifying contrasts with
more connected to the powerful political and economic non-European parts of the world. In the nineteenth cen-
system centered on both sides of the Atlantic. Such hemi- tury most observers, including revolutionary figures like
spheric distinctions suggest that interpretations of mod- Karl Marx, believed that outside Europe lay stagnant soci-
ern political change as exclusively or even primarily the eties with unchanging economies. Most educated West-
expansion of a Western system of international relations erners exposed to cultures in Africa and Asia regarded
are incomplete and misleading. these places as inferior to the West; while some were rec-
ognized as descendants of great and powerful ancient civ-
Assessing the Europe- ilizations, on the whole they were seen as shallow and
centered Approach broken remnants of their past greatness.
These interpretive difficulties notwithstanding, much Max Weber, the early-twentieth-century master of his-
influential work in world history has been done by trac- torical comparisons, looked to religion and ethics as the
ing the expansion of European power across the globe— arena in which different attitudes toward money and mar-
in fact, historians have tended to view nineteenth- and kets took shape. He noted that in the Christian West,
twentieth-century international relations as the most these attitudes formed in a way that led to the rise of cap-
recent chapter in a story of Western political and eco- italism, while in other religious traditions they did not
nomic domination. Most all interpretations of large-scale (1958).Weber’s famous observations about a “Protestant
changes largely build upon directly or indirectly the work work ethic” have been qualified, however, by more recent
of Karl Marx and Max Weber. The systemic features of scholarship documenting what appear to be functionally
this European expansion form the basis of Immanuel similar beliefs in other religious traditions (e.g. Bellah,
Wallerstein’s modern “world-system” (1974, 1980, 1957; Rodinson, 1974). Comparisons of a broader and
1989).Wallerstein’s seminal work, inspired by Marxist in- more general kind between Europe and other parts of the