Product Description

In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13620 in Books
• Published on: 1991-02-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review

"A provocative, well-researched, imaginative book."--Contemporary Sociology
"A useful and stimulating economic history that juxtaposes data from many different regions....The book should prove useful and popular in world history courses."--merican Historical Review
"An important work in historical sociology."--Science & Society
"A beautifully written work, whose scope is comparable to those of Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel."--American Sociological Association
"World history at its best, combining breadth and depth, pattern with detail....A first-class contribution that will become a major reference point in future scholarship."--American Journal of Sociology

About the Author
Janet L. Abu-Lughod is at New School for Social Research.

Customer Reviews

Eurasian interactions
A work drawing on deep scholarship providing welcome adjustment to views that overstate Europe's precocity and importance before 1500. Europe was a peripheral backwater prior to its export of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas (and even for some time after). Abu-Lughod examines each major area of the Eurasian trading network in term, bringing out how much events in one area were affected by changes elsewhere (in particular, how much Europeans were responding to such changes).

I also found Abu-Lughod's scepticism about grand conceptual schemas and strong preference for considering the complex texture of reality engaging. She sets out a highly informative history of the creation of an interacting Eurasian economy under the period of Mongol domination and how changes among the various participating powers (particularly China) resulted in the interactions falling back to a lower level. She also argues a power vacuum was set up in the Indian Ocean that the Europeans (first the Portugese, then the Dutch and finally the British) were able to fill. That there was a "Fall of the East" prior to there being a "Rise of the West". She does a nice job of debunking "cultural" and "Confucian-isolationism" explanations for China's shift, placing the public policy considerations the Ming court was dealing with in a more plausible context.

My first quibble is with the title. This is about the Eurasian system, not a global one, a point the author herself concedes (p.37). It is a "world" system only in terms of the Old World/New World usage and, to be fair, she is responding to Immanuel Wallerstein's coinage of the term. The second is she suffers from the modern academic fetish for shudder quotes, though at least she is often prepared to explain in more detail why concepts are problematic, rather than simply engaging in the tedious knowing-virtue wink. The worst bit of the book, as so often is the way, is when she attempts to look forward. The talking down of the stability of the current world-system, and the situation of the US in particular, reads rather poorly for a book published in 1989 with clearly no sense whatsoever of the impending collapse of the Soviet empire.

But the book is very readable and extremely informative, the personality of the author engaging. An excellent way of coming to grips with how global history works.

Provocative
This book is approaching the status of a classic. While a work of history, the author is not a historian but rather a sociologist with an interest in the role of cities. Perhaps because she was a disciplinary outsider not specializing in a given historical period, as well as being used to comparative analysis, Abu-Lughod adopted a cross-cultural approach. The starting point for this book was the prevailing belief that a world economy was created by Europeans in the early modern period. More naive interpretations saw this as a logical development of European capitalism and that capitalism was unique to Europe. A major point of this book is that a world economic system, spanning all of Eurasia and including Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa existed prior to the early modern period. This world system was based on pre-existing regional trade networks in the Eastern Mediterrenean, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and China. Some of these linkages, like the famous Silk road across Central Asia and trade across the Indian Ocean, were ancient.
Abu-Lughod reconstructs a true world economy stretching from western Europe to China reaching its peak during the 13th and 14th centuries and then declining. She shows that Europe joined this system relatively late and was a smaller component of these large trade networks. The peak of this world system is associated with the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and China. Mongol successes are seen as simultaneously making trade across Central Asia, the northern axis of the world system, and trade through the Indian Ocean and south China, the southern axis, more efficient. This lead to a Eurasian boom. As a corollary, Abu-Lughod explores the richly capitalist nature of trade in the Muslim, Indian, and Chinese regions making up the world system. Some of the institutional innovations attributed to Medieval and Renaissance European merchants may have been borrowed from the Muslim world.
If the Mongols were the inadvertant architects of this system, they were also the inadvertant cause of its collapse. The key event is the Black Death, a Eurasian pandemic which probably originated in central Asia and was spread by Mongol armies and trade made possible by their states. The resulting depopulations and political instability, including the Ming expulsion of the Mongol from China, crippled the Medieval world system, though it left intact regional trade networks, particularly in Asia that the Europeans would join and come to dominate in the Early Modern period.
A final and more controversial point made by Abu-Lughod is that the success of Europeans in subsequently reconstructing and dominating, in an unprecedented way, the Eurasian trade system was the withdrawal of the Chinese state from interest in trade. Under the later Ming, the powerful Chinese navy was dissolved and trade through southern China ceased to be an important issue for the Chinese state. The subsequent power vacuum made European domination possible. This may not be entirely correct but is argued well.
This book has become the point of departure for much subsequent important work in world history. It is well written and has a nice bibliography.

A landmark of the "new" economic history
There are few books in the field of economic history that I'd say are both landmarks and enjoyable to read. Assuming the reader has a great interest in history, Before European Hegemony is certainly one of them.

Abu-Lughod's excellent world systems survey details the inter-connections between pre-modern economies and societies of the era. There is also the sense of continuity between these pre-modern economic relationships and the modern era.

Special mention should be made of the fact that Before European Hegemony was one of the first of a new wave of economic, historical and sociological studies that de-emphasized the eurocentric histories that came before them. Guilty of the same simplistic approaches the eurocentric histories were charged with, for example giving the only reason for the rise of the West as military might, much of what followed Before European Hegemony was, in a word, garbage. Not so, this groundbreaking study.

Well researched, well written and highly recommended.