Page 69 - Encyclopedia Of World History

comparative history 419

Human history becomes more and more a race between
education and catastrophe. • H. G. Wells (1866–1946)

world have continued to highlight differences, whether where Brenner and Isett affirm different agrarian social
formulated within a clear Weberian framework (Hall, relations as basic to differences in trajectories of eco-
1985) or presented in a more ad-hoc and storytelling nomic change, David Landes stresses what seem largely
manner (Landes, 1998). cultural factors.Together Brenner, Isett and Landes affirm
Marxist interpretations have also argued for distinctive the continued contemporary appeal that the ideas of
European political and economic practices, as shown in Marx and Weber have for historians who make broad
two influential works of the 1970s. Perry Anderson’s two- comparisons among large parts of the world.
volume study of European state formation, Passages A distinct addition to these comparisons is highlighted
from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist by Andre Gunder Frank, who aggressively argues (1998)
State (1974), went back to classical antiquity to give a for connections among the world’s economic regions and
long-term view of how absolutist states were formed cen- asserts that China was at the center of the world’s econ-
turies later; his appendices on China, Japan, and the omy between 1500 and 1800, taking in large amounts
Ottoman Empire reviewed much of the available research of silver to fuel its expanding commercial economy. In
to suggest how a Marxist analysis of these cases could be contrast, R. Bin Wong suggests that the economic links
fashioned to complement what he had done for Europe. made possible by the silver trade did not encourage the
Robert Brenner also wrote an influential study compar- kinds of division of labor and movements of capital and
ing English agrarian social relations with those on the labor that would come to characterize international trade
European continent (1976); he argued that it was English after the mid-nineteenth century; he argues that a com-
social relations that made possible increased agricultural parison of the early modern world economy with what
productivity and surpluses that financed the formation of follows offers important differences as well as parallels
commercial capitalism. After his conclusions were chal- (Wong 2002).
lenged by English, French, and Dutch data, Brenner
shifted his arguments from class relations to the late Beyond the East-
medieval state (1982) and later to an explanation specif- West Divide
ically of Dutch materials (2001). More recently, in work Many uses of the comparative method in historical stud-
with Christopher Isett (2002), Brenner has returned to ies occur across the East-West divide of Eurasia. But there
his initial formulation about agrarian class relations and have also been comparisons that set this vast land mass
gone well beyond Europe to look at an economically off from still other continents. The anthropologist Jack
active part of eighteenth-century China, attempting to Goody has argued that societies across Eurasia, from
argue that differences in social relations cause differ- Japan to England and most points in between, shared
ences in agricultural productivity. structurally similar kinds of kinship systems, demo-
The Brenner-Isett effort is part of a debate with Ken- graphic regimes, and social structures. For him the major
neth Pomeranz over explaining what the latter has called divide globally is between Eurasia and sub-Saharan
the “great divergence” between Europe and the rest of the Africa, where kinship and social structures differed from
world (Pomerantz, 2001). Pomeranz shows similarities in those of Eurasia largely due to small populations relative
the performance of the advanced agrarian economies in to land and the implications of this situation for tech-
Asia, especially China, and in Europe; in order to explain niques of economic production and social control (1971,
the subsequent divergence in economic fortunes, he 1976).Within this broad framing he has repeatedly crit-
stresses Europeans’ economic gains, especially in terms of icized ideas about European uniqueness (1990, 1998).
resources, from the particular ways in which they devel- Jared Diamond has drawn a related contrast between
oped production in the Americas. On the other hand, Eurasia and other continents in Guns, Germs, and Steel