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Making Europe

The Extra-European Origins of the Old World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2022

Sven Beckert
Sven Beckert*
Affiliation:
Harvard University beckert@fas.harvard.edu
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Abstract

This article reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century, and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first and especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the article explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: the question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in he relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.

Cet article s’intéresse à la manière dont les historiens et les économistes ont pensé l’his- toire économique de l’Europe. Il remarque que les explications internes qui accordent peu d’attention au monde non européen ont dominé pendant plus d’un siècle, et passe en revue certaines des raisons de cet eurocentrisme. Cependant, un tel nombrilisme a également été de plus en plus contesté depuis un certain temps, d’abord principalement par des universi- taires et des militants non européens. L’article explore enfin les débats actuels au sein de la discipline et sa reconnaissance croissante des interactions entre les économies européennes et non européennes. Deux sujets de discussion ayant joué un rôle crucial dans cette évolution sont particulièrement détaillés : la question du rôle de l’esclavage dans le développement économique européen et les riches débats qui ont lieu dans le domaine relativement nouveau de l’histoire globale du travail. Finalement, si les efforts visant à écrire l’histoire économique de l’Europe en la confinant à ses propres frontières mal définies peuvent répondre à des besoins politiques particuliers, ils sont, dans les faits, historiquement trompeurs.

Information

Type
European History after the Global Turn
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 419 - 432
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2022

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Footnotes

This article was originally published in French as “La fabrique économique de l’Europe. Les origines extra-européennes de l’Ancien Monde,” Annales HSS 76, no. 4 (2021): 701–15.

*

My thanks to Ulbe Bosma, Alison Frank Johnson, David Motadel, Marcel van der Linden, and Eric Vanhaute for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. The literature on European economic history is so vast that it is impossible to provide more than a first taste of some of it here. Many important books and articles will not be mentioned in the following pages.

References

1. Kenneth Pomeranz, “Scale, Scope and Scholarship: Regional Practices and Global Economic Histories,” in Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World, ed. Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 163–94, here p. 163.

2. Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), is an important example.

3. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (London: Bildungs-Gesellschaft für Arbeiter, 1848).

4. Stephen Broadberry and Steve Hindle, introduction to “Asia in the Great Divergence,” special issue, Economic History Review 64, no. S1 (2011): 1–7, here p. 7.

5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage, 1963); Adeline Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815 (Paris: Aubier, 1987); Hans-Werner Hahn, Die Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland (Munich: De Gruyter, 1998).

6. Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 104 (1977): 25–92; Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Penguin, 2011).

7. Pomeranz, “Scale, Scope and Scholarship”; Eli Cook, The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

8. Simon Kuznets, Lillian Epstein, and Elizabeth Jenks, National Income and Its Composition, 1919–1938, vol. 1 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1941); Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD, 2003).

9. Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122, no. 4 (2017): 1137–70.

10. A review of these approaches can be found in Peer Vries, Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna: V&R Unipress, 2013). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1904–1905], trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Merchant Books 1930), is the classic reference.

11. David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998); Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962); Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1943; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976).

12. Patrick O’Brien, “The Deconstruction of Myths and Reconstruction of Metanarratives in Global Histories of Material Progress,” in Writing World History, 1800–2000, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 67–90.

13. Peer Vries, “Global Economic History: A Survey,” in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5, Historical Writing since 1945, ed. Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113–34, is an important example. On the vibrancy of global economic history, see Pomeranz, “Scale, Scope and Scholarship.”

14. The Brill Global Economic History series so far consists of twenty volumes.

15. Peter A. Coclanis, “Ten Years After: Reflections on Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence,” Historically Speaking 12, no. 4 (2011): 10–25, here p. 11. See also Ulbe Bosma, The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia: Industrial Production, 1770–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Sven Beckert et al., “Commodity Frontiers and the Transformation of the Global Countryside: A Research Agenda,” Journal of Global History 16, no. 3 (2021): 435–50.

16. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

17. James, The Black Jacobins, 47–50.

18. Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation, and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Matthias von Rossum, “Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact,” Slavery and Abolition 36, no. 1 (2015): 63–83; Pepijn Brandon, War, Capitalism, and the Dutch State (1588–1795) (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Sven Beckert and Seth Rothman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). See also the important arguments in Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95, no. 3 (2005): 546–79.

19. Abdoulaye Ly, La Compagnie du Sénégal (Bordeaux: Karthala, 1955), 59 and 62.

20. Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901).

21. Romesh Chunder Dutt, The Economic History of India under Early British Rule, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1902), 299 and 302.

22. Aditya Mukherjee, Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class, 1920–1947 (London: Sage, 2002); Mridula Mukherjee, Colonizing Agriculture: The Myth of Punjab Exceptionalism (London: Sage, 2005).

23. Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, 1950). See also Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture 1972).

24. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi [1969] (Berkley: University of California Press, 1979). See also the works of philosopher Enrique Dussel.

25. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, xv e–xviii e siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1967–1979).

26. Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Os descobrimentos e a economia mundial (Lisbon: Arcádia, 1963).

27. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); vol. 2, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); vol. 3, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); and vol. 4, Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), are important examples.

28. Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology (New York: Sage, 1982); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World-Economy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).

29. Eric Vanhaute, “Global and Regional Comparisons: The Great Divergence Debate and Europe,” in The Practice of Global History: European Perspectives, ed. Matthias Middell (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 183–205, here p. 192.

30. Guillaume Daudin, Commerce et prospérité. La France au xviii e siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005); Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979).

31. See, for example, Barbara L. Solow, The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Lanham: Rowman, 2014).

32. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

33. Jeffrey G. Williamson, Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jeffrey G. Williamson and Philippe Aghion, Growth, Inequality, and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jeffrey G. Williamson and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Globalization and History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jeffrey G. Williamson, Michael D. Bordo, and Alan M. Taylor, eds., Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

34. Patrick O’Brien and Stanley L. Engerman, “Export and the Growth of the British Economy from the Glorious Revolution to the Peace of Amiens,” in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara L. Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 177–209; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” American Economic Review 95, no. 3 (2005): 546–79.

35. Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

36. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments (1884; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 56; Elizabeth Waterman Giboy, “Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution,” in Facts and Factors in Economic History: Articles by Former Students of Edwin Frances Gay, ed. Arthur H. Cole, Arthur L. Dunhman, and N. S. B. Gras (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), 620–39; John A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1894; London/New York: Allen & Unwin/Macmillan, 1926), 13.

37. Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: The New Press, 1968).

38. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

39. See, for example, Jack A. Goldstone, Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500–1850 (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2008), as well as the references in the following note.

40. A small sampling of these works needs to include Peer Vries, “Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,” Journal of World History 12 (2001): 407–46; Philip C. C. Huang, “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China,” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (2002): 501–38, which sharply critiques Pomeranz’s views on British and Chinese agriculture in the eighteenth century; Robert C. Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c. 1620–c. 1820,” Economic History Review 62 (2009): 525–50, which offers a more nuanced assessment of Pomeranz’s contentions regarding comparative agricultural productivity; Jan Luiten van Zanden and Eltjo Buringh, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through the Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 409–45; Peer Vries, “The California School and Beyond: How to Study the Great Divergence,” History Compass 8 (2010): 730–51, appearing first in the Journal für Entwicklungspolitik 24, no. 4 (2008): 6–49, which argues that the Californians often exaggerate the resemblances between western Europe and East Asia and should be more specific when it comes to time, place, and the differing historical trajectories of various regions; Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Roy Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Williamson, Trade and Poverty; Bozhong Li and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 72, no. 4 (2012): 956–89; Peer Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s–1850s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev, Great Divergence and Great Convergence: A Global Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2015); Peer Vries, “What We Do and Do Not Know about the Great Divergence at the Beginning of 2016,” Historische Mitteilungen der Ranke-Gesellschaft 28 (2016): 249–97; Paul Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales, 1560–2000 (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2007); E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Kaoru Sugihara and Gareth M. Austin, eds., Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013).

41. Samir Amin, L’eurocentrisme. Critique d’une idéologie (Paris: Anthropos, 1988), 119–22; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890 to 1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 222–23.

42. Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

43. Christof Dejung, David Motadel, and Juergen Osterhammel, eds., The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

44. Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (2017): 1431–58.

45. Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Hanna Hodacs, Silk and Tea in the North: Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2016); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Maxine Berg, “Britain’s Asian Century: Porcelain and Global History in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in The Birth of Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Jan de Vries, ed. Laura Cruz and Joel Mokyr (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 133–56, are important examples.

46. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).

47. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nis˛ancıog˘ lu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015).

48. See for example: Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985); Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (New York: Grove Press, 2001); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2014).

49. Jürgen Kocka, Geschichte des Kapitalismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013).

50. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England; Mauricio Drelichman, “The Curse of Moctezuma: American Silver and the Dutch Disease,” Explorations in Economic History 42 (2005): 349–80; Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen Broadberry and Kevin H. O’Rourke, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, vol. 1, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten R. Prak, “Demographic Change and Migration Flows in Holland between 1500 and 1800,” in Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 237–45; Peter Foldvari, Bas van Leeuwen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “The Contribution of Migration to Economic Development in Holland 1570–1800,” De Economist 161, no. 1 (2013): 1–18; Beckert, Empire of Cotton.

51. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective.

52. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1990); Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence; William J. Ashworth, The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

53. Pomeranz, “Scale, Scope and Scholarship.”