Product Description

Frank explains the Rise of the West from 1400 forward in world economic and demographic terms, with a sweeping historical perspective that places it in clear conjunction with the Decline of the East around 1800. Anyone interested in Asia, in world systems and world economic and social history, in international relations, and in comparative area studies will have to take into account Frank's exciting reassessment of our global economic past and future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38764 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
"A hugely important contribution to the critique of Eurocentric history. . . . This book is powerful and important. Read it."--"Journal of Historical Geography

From the Author
BOOK ABSTRACT

This book outlines and analyzes the global economy and its sectoral and regional division of labor and cyclical dynamic from 1400 to 1800. The evidence and argument are that within this global economy Asians and particularly Chinese were preponderant, no more "traditional" than Europeans, and in fact largely far less so. The historical documentation poses an 'emperor has no clothes' challenge to all received Eurocentric historiography and social theory from Montesquieu, Marx and Weber, or Toynbee and Polanyi, to Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. The books's global economic analysis offers a more holistic theoretical alternative. 'The Rise of the West' was not due to any 'European Miracle exceptionalism' that allegedly permitted it to pull itself up by its own bootstraps as Weberians have contended. Nor did Europe build a 'European world-economy around itself" a la Braudel and thereby as per Marx and Wallerstein [as well as Frank's own WORLD ACCUMULATION 1492-1789] initiating a European centered 'Modern Capitalist World-System' primarily by exploiting the wealth of its American and African colonies. Instead, Europe used its American silver to buy itself marginal entry into the long since existing world market in Asia, which was much larger, more productive and competitive, continued to expand much faster until 1800, and was able to support a rate of population growth in Asia that was than double that of Europe until 1750.

Then changing world economic/ demographic/ ecological relations and relative factor prices in the competitive global economy resulted in the temporary 'Decline of the East' and the opportunity for the also temporary 'The Rise of the West'. Europe took advantage of this world economic opportunity through import substitution, export promotion and technological change to become Newly Industrializing Economies after 1800, as is again happening today in East Asia. That region is now REgaining its 'traditional' dominance in the global economy, with the Chinese 'Middle Kingdom' again at its 'center.'

COMMENTS ON ReOrient BY REFEREES AND REVIEWERS

"Frank shows how Marx and Weber got it all wrong. This book is conceptually that important. A fundamental rethinking absolutely essential to understanding world history."
-ALBERT BERGESEN University of Arizona

"This will be an extremely important book of sufficient originality and importance to have a major impact. It could not be more ambitious."
- KENNETH POMERANZ University of California at Irvine

"The author redefines our baseline for assessing the 'rise' of Europe. I believe this book could become a benchmark study."
- BIN WONG University of California at Irvine

"A book for the millennium ... can be a landmark book that shapes substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact."
- MARK SELDEN State University of New York

"Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT is a heroic effort to reconstruct our conceptions of the world economy in the early modern age. A brilliant theory - Frank's single-mided, relentless, and compelling organic model achieves coherence and has much to offer."
- PETER PERDUE Massachussetts Institute of Technology

"If challenging received wisdom is a trademark, this book is written as the mother of all challenges. The immense power of the book rests on the ability to provoke and force one to rethink many facets of history that have been taken for granted for a long long time."
- HARBANS MUKHIA Indian Express

"ReOrient's biggest virtue: it forces the reader to at least look differently at world history. This impressive and illuminating analysis sets out to challenge the mother of all orthodoxies that Europe discovered capitalism and industrialisation and that what followed and is happening and will happen is essentially a fallout of this European preeminence."
- SAUBHIK CHAKABARTI The Statesman

"This is a brave book, brave in the academic as well as the personal sense. It insists on a completely necessary reorientation of academic and political views. It will prove to be compulsory reading."
- JACK GOODY St. Johns College, Cambridge

"ReORIENT deserves to become an instant classic."
- MARTIN LEWIS Duke University

From the Inside Flap
"Frank shows how Marx and Weber got it all wrong. A fundamental rethinking of the rise of the West and the origin of the world-system. Absolutely essential to understanding world history."--Albert Bergesen,University of Arizona

"The great virtue of this stimulating book is its relentless push to redefine our framework for thinking about the early modern economy. . . . A benchmark study."--R. Bin Wong,University of California, Irvine

Customer Reviews

A New Frame in Which to View World History
I confess. I was Eurocentric. Despite a degree in International Economics from an east coast school known for its School of Foreign Service, I firmly believed Max Weber that the Protestant work-ethic was the source of western prosperity. I also believed in American exceptionalism. Frank's book cured me of both those false notions.

A couple points I'd like to add to Frank's thesis explained in other reviews.

1) I work for one of the major trans-Pacific ocean shipping companies. The company was founded in California in 1848 and sold to the Singapore government in 1997. (Shipping going East)

2) US-bound shipments are full of manufactured goods. Asia-bound ships are filled with wastepaper or are largely empty. The West continues to produce nothing that Asia really wants. Where in times past, most of the Asian-bound shipments from England and the Netherlands were boats filled with silver and gold, today we "ship silver" to Asia in the form of electronic fund transfers. Given the trade deficit the US alone has with China and the rest of Asia, it seems only a matter of time before the Chinese start buying Manhattan and US assets the way the Japanese did in the 1980s.

3) Frank's book adds an interesting background to the history of the Roman Empire. After subjugating Europe, Rome moved eastward under Constantine the Great. First, Constantinople provided a more defensible position for the New Rome (indeed where the western capital - Rome -- fell in the 5th century, the eastern capital - Constantinople -- continued until the 15th century, despite being "on the way" as it were for invading Huns and other invading armies). But perhaps more importantly, all the commercial action was centered in the East. Moving the capital eastward took it out of the backwater of Italy and moved it closer to the overland trade routes with the Asia).

4)That the East was far wealthier than the West can again be seen in microcosmic perspective during the 4th Crusade. Western soldiers had never imagined a city as wealthy as Constantinople. When they saw it they had to have it. The West, especially Venice, did to Constantinople in 1205 as the British did to Bengal in 1857 and the Americans have been doing to the Native Americans since they got here. They took by force, not by superior ethic, religion, tradition, or racial superiority.

The book itself, despite its "must read status" and historical importance, is very poorly written and highly repetitious. If you read the concluding few pages, you will have the main points of the argument. Read the rest of the book if you want the details. And Frank provides plenty of detail, footnotes, references, etc.

All in all, this book is important for understanding the world's past as well as the contours of the future. I wonder how long it will take for the pendulum to swing back to Asia. Chinese-US relations are getting interesting, aren't they?

Interesting but Flawed
An interesting and very ambitious book by a distinguished scholar. Frank challenges the views of a number of important thinkers about world history including important contemporary historians such as Braudel and Wallerstein, and seminal 19th century theorists such as Marx and Weber. Briefly, Frank attacks a 'eurocentric' model of world development that sees capitalism emerging in Europe and then enmeshing the whole world in a Europe centered world economy. Instead, he emphasizes the vigor of a well established Afro-Asian capitalist economy that Western Europe was able to participate in only belatedly and only by extracting precious metals from the Western Hemisphere. He shows convincingly that up until the threshold of the Industrial Revolution, Afro-Asian trade remained the greater part of the world economy. These points are an important corrective to the existing model. He goes too far, however, in asserting that the world economy was not created by European activity. This is a simple point of logic. A world economy means literally that, an economic system that encompasses the whole globe. It is only with the European expansion of the early modern period that the Western Hemisphere and Oceania were incorporated into the world economy. While the Afro-Asian trade networks would remain quantitatively substantially larger than trade involving Europe, the European additions to the world economy introduce a qualitative difference in world trade networks. Nor is it likely that China, Mughal India, or any other Afro-Asian economic power would have discovered the Western Hemisphere. Another flaw in this book is the somewhat rambling style. At times this can be a real obstacle to following Frank's arguments. There are 2 chapters on economic cycles that are poorly organized and at times seem contradictory. Frank's use of what appears to be a rather nebulous literature on cycles is unclear and he resorts at times to the poorly defined idea of Kondratieff waves as an explanatory force. The book finishes with a sketchy attempt to account for the Industrial Revolution. For those interested in this important topic, I recommend Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence, which covers some of the same ground in a more logical and systematic manner.

The book won the 1999 World History Association Book Award.
This book has just won the 1999 World History Association Book Award, which was presented at the WHA conference in Victoria, BC, Canada, on June 26, 1999. The choice was unanimous, because we regard this book as being in a class by itself. Its breadth of vision, courageous analysis and apt warning not to let ethnocentrism deter historians from pursuing a global perspective on the past, all make Gunder Frank's book exceptional and a must read for historians, teachers and students of world history. The book argues that European hegemony in the modern era did not really emerge until the nineteenth century, and that before that Europe was a rather marginal player in the Eurasian world economy that was centered on China. Only the windfalls of American silver and the Atlantic slave trade enabled Europe to buy its way into the existing world economy and industrialize. Its holistic approach forces historians to look beyond Europe to understand the making of the modern world, and Frank's attention to historiographic issues is outstanding. Sincerely, David A. Chappell, Book Review Editor, Journal of World History.