Contemporary Authors

• How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism Pluto Press (London, England), 2015

1. How the west came to rule : the geopolitical origins of capitalism LCCN 2016498081 Type of material Book Personal name Anievas, Alexander. Main title How the west came to rule : the geopolitical origins of capitalism / Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. Published/Created London : Pluto Press, 2015. Description 386 S : Ill ISBN 9780745335216 (hardback) 0745335217 (hardback) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available.

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  Personal name heading:
  Nişancıoğlu, Kerem

  Found in: How the West came to rule, 2015: title page (Kerem
  Nişancıoğlu)
  Data viewed Oct. 1, 2015 (Kerem Nişancıoğlu is a
  Visiting Lecturer in Politics and International
  Relations at the University of Westminster, London, UK.)
  https://plutopress.wordpress.com/2015/06/17/capitalism-a-h
  istory-of-violence/

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• From Publisher -

  Kerem Nisancioglu is a visiting lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Westminster, London

• Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London Web site - https://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff104876.php

  Kerem Nisancioglu
  PhD International Relations (University of Sussex)

  Overview
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  Kerem Nisancioglu
  Department of Politics and International Studies

  Programme Convenor - MSc International Politics
  London Middle East Institute (LMEI)

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  Name:
  Dr Kerem Nisancioglu
  Email address:
  kn18@soas.ac.uk
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  +44(0) 20 7898 4728
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  Biography

  Kerem Nisancioglu is a Lecturer in International Relations. Before this he was Visiting Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Westminster and Adjunct Lecturer at Richmond University. He received his PhD in International Relations from the University of Sussex in 2014.

  Kerem’s research focuses on Eurocentrism in international relations, and how this Eurocentrism can be subverted in both theory and history. In particular, his research has explored the ways in which non-European societies have been constitutive of European social relations in the early modern period. His current research seeks to uncover the international origins of whiteness as a form of social control. Kerem also blogs at The Disorder of Things.

• University of Sussex Web site - http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/37818

  Broadcast: News items
  Dr. Kerem Nisancioglu's book awarded two prestigious prizes

  How the West Came to RuleA book by a former Sussex IR student, Dr. Kerem Nisancioglu, has won two prestigious prize awarded by International Studies Association (ISA) and International Political Economy Group (IPEG) an affiliate of British International Studies Group (IPEG).

  How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015), co-authored by Dr. Nisancioglu and Dr. Alexander Anievas, has been awarded ISA’s International Political Sociology Section Book Prize for 2017. The prize is awarded every year to the "best book" in the field of international political sociology.

  How the West Came to Rule has also won IPEG book prize 2016. In its statement of award IPEG noted that “the book makes a very important theoretical and empirical contribution, tracing the brutal and bloody history of the origins of capitalism – a story that is only seldom told. The main contribution lays in linking the emergence of capitalism to the organisation of plantation slavery and colonialism. The book thereby challenges a vast range of existing works that have focused on the purely conjunctural or ‘accidental’ or so-called lucky factors to explain Europe’s rise and the birth of capitalism”.

• Viewpoint - https://viewpointmag.com/2015/12/01/towards-a-radical-critique-of-eurocentrism-an-interview-with-alexander-anievas-and-kerem-nisancioglu/

  Towards a Radical Critique of Eurocentrism: An Interview with Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
  Alexander Anievas, Benjamin Birnbaum and Kerem Nisancioclu December 1, 2015

  1500s

  According to the dominant narrative, the origin of capitalism was a European process at its core: this was a system born in the mills and factories of England, or under the blades of the guillotines during the French Revolution. Political Marxism or even World-Systems analysis have not escaped from this Eurocentric vise. In How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2015), Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu return to and reconceptualize Trotsky’s theory of unequal and combined development in order to assess the decisive role of non-Western societies in capitalism’s emergence. In this sense, they offer an internationalist theory of social change that is also not solely focused on the role of industrial labor.

  Benjamin Birnbaum: Your recently published book How the West Came to Rule, starts with a critical assessment of the Marxist-inspired theorizations regarding the transition to capitalism such as World-Systems Theory or Political Marxism. Why are they insufficient to account for how the West came to rule?

  Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu: Well, there are actually two distinct, albeit tightly interconnected, issues here. The first regards World-System Analysis and Political Marxist conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and the second involves explaining the ascendancy of Western domination. In the opening chapter of How the West Came to Rule, we really only focus on the first question concerning the transition to capitalism vis-a-vis Political Marxism and Immanuel Wallerstein’s particular rendition of World-System Analysis, while in later chapters we connect this issue to the “rise of the West” debate. We proceeded in such a way because for both Political Marxists and the particular form of World-System Analysis put forward by Wallerstein, these two historical questions are largely conflated: the origins of capitalism in certain Western European states (notably, Holland and England) explains how “the West” rose to a position of global dominance.

  This kind of approach is not so much wrong, as it is incomplete. Clearly once the initial breakthroughs to capitalism were made in the Netherlands and England, this led to increasing material disparities between these societies and others. At the same time, however, the advent of capitalism in Northwestern Europe did not immediately translate into the kind of hierarchical power relation that characterized the nineteenth century international order. While capitalist social structures offered the productive potential for increased technological innovations (particularly within the military sphere) and superior financial and organizational capacities, the developmental effects were not instant or undifferentiated, but staggered and uneven. Indeed, had it not been for the European “discovery” of the New World and the significant material benefits accrued to Europe – the benefits of which were disproportionately distributed to the Netherlands and England – this potential may have gone largely unrealized (cf. Chapter 5). Much the same can be said for the effects that the colonies in the East Indies had on Dutch capitalist development: were it not for the Dutch ruling class’ abilities to draw on this vast – albeit dispersed – mass of labor-power in Asia, its capitalist development would have been unsustainable in the way other “antediluvian” forms of capital1 were like the Northern Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice (cf Chapter 7).

  For these reasons, an account of the origins of capitalism in Northwestern Europe is in itself not enough to explain the subsequent ascendancy of Western power. Rather, capitalism should be conceived as having provided the conditions of possibility for Northwestern European states to eventually overcome and dominate their Asian rivals. Nonetheless, it was only once capitalist Britain transformed itself into an industrial-capitalist power that it was capable of dominating other highly developed Asian societies such as China. Moreover, Britain’s industrialization was greatly facilitated by both the New World “discoveries” and, perhaps even more importantly, the colonization of the Indian landmass which was only made possible through a confluence of internal and external pressures that severely destabilized the Mughal Empire by the early eighteenth century (see Chapter 8).

  So the reduction of the question of “how the West came to rule” to an explanation of the transition to capitalism is, as we see it, a general problem common to both Political Marxists and World-System Analysts such as Wallerstein and those who closely follow him. At the same time, there are number of more specific problems with their respective theorizations of the origins of capitalism (cf. Chapter 1). Briefly stated, we highlight three particularly problematic and interconnected issues with Political Marxist explanations of capitalism’s emergence: firstly, their commitment to a methodologically internalist and Eurocentric – or, more precisely, for Brenner’s followers, Anglocentric – analysis of the origins of capitalism; secondly, the resulting deficiencies in their examination of the relationship between the making of capitalism and geopolitics; and, thirdly, their highly abstract and minimalist conception of capitalism. For these reasons, we argue that Political Marxist approaches to the study of capitalism are both theoretically and historically untenable, despite the many invaluable insights and concepts they have to offer. Similarly, while highlighting some of the important contributions that Wallerstein and other World-System scholars have made to the study of capitalism’s origins, we nonetheless argue that this approach – especially Wallerstein’s rendition of it – remains limited by two debilitating problems: the unwitting reproduction of a certain kind of Eurocentrism that erases non-European agency; and the inability to provide a sufficiently historicized conception of capitalism.

  These problems with Political Marxism and World-System Analysis turn out to be quite big when examining the history of capitalism. Without a strong understanding of the broader intersocietal or geopolitical contexts in which European societies (notably within the Northwest) first made the transition to capitalism, you simply cannot explain how capitalism first emerged. The making of capitalism in Europe was not simply an intra-European phenomenon, but a decidedly international or intersocietal one, which saw non-European agency relentlessly impinging upon and (re)directing the trajectory and nature of European development. Tracing this international, often extra-European dimension in the origins of capitalism and the so-called “rise of the West” is one of the key themes of the book.

  While our emphasis on these international sources of capitalism’s emergence may seem rather obvious to some, it’s striking how few theoretical approaches (Marxist or otherwise) actually provide a substantive historical sociological theorization of “the international.” Whether the approach in question conceptualizes the primary “unit of analysis” as operating at the domestic or world level – as exemplified by Political Marxism and World-System Analysis, respectively – the problem remains the same. By working outwards from a conception of a specific social structure (be it slavery, feudalism, capitalism, etc.), the theorization of “the international” takes the form of a reimagining of domestic society writ large: an extrapolation from analytical categories derived from a society conceived as a unitary abstraction. This then vanishes what is unique to any intersocietal system: a superordinating “anarchical” structure irreducible to the historically variegated forms of societies constituting any given system.

  This is a particularly debilitating problem for Marxism because one of the hallmarks of Marxist theory is a strong claim to be able to provide a genuinely holistic conception of social structures, which requires a theoretical internalization of the interdependency of each element within it “so that the conditions of its existence are taken to be part of what it is.”2 If such a claim is to be taken seriously, then the theoretical standing of “the international” for a historical materialist approach to the origins of capitalism requires a direct engagement with the question of what is “the international” understood and theorized in its own substantive historical and sociological terms. In other words, how can one offer a properly “sociological definition” of “the international” – meaning “that dimension of social reality which arises specifically from the coexistence within it of more than one society” – which “formulates this dimension as an object of social theory…organically contained, that is, within a conception of social development itself?”3

  Our theoretical answer to this problematic – and the Eurocentric modes of analyses it often gives rise to – is a critical reconstruction of Leon Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) which has seen a recent revival in the discipline of International Relations thanks in large part to Justin Rosenberg’s work.4 By positing the multilinear character of development as its “most general law,” uneven development provides a necessary corrective to the ontological singular conception of societies and the attendant unilinear conception of history that underpins Eurocentric analyses. By positing the inherently interactive character of social-political multiplicity, combined development in turn challenges the methodological internalism of Eurocentric approaches whilst further subverting its strong stagist model of development.

  BB: Political Marxists offer a sharp distinction between feudal extra economic forms of surplus extraction and capitalist non-coercive forms of surplus extractions. Thus, they get close to an ideal-type abstraction. Yet, Marx doesn’t seem to use such a sharp distinction as he considered – for example – slavery in the Americas as at least partially capitalist because it is part of a wider set of international capitalist economic relations. How do you determine capitalism?

  AA and KN: We’re in absolute agreement with your assessment of Political Marxism’s conception of capitalism; it is far too abstract and Platonic to be very useful in understanding capitalism (past or present) as it excludes or externalizes so many sociohistorical processes that were – and continue to be – integral to the development and reproduction of capitalism. This has some important political implications. The externalization of “extra-economic” forms of exploitation and oppression from capitalism ultimately leads Political Marxists to exclude the histories of colonialism and slavery, an example you correctly point out, from the inner workings of capitalism, arguing instead that such practices were rooted in the feudal or absolutist logic of geopolitical accumulation. While we would not go as far as to claim that Political Marxists ignore colonialism and slavery per se – for example, Charlie Post has a number of excellent works5 on these issues, even if we disagree with his theoretical conclusions – they do nonetheless view these histories as sitting outside the pure “logic” of capitalist development.

  By contrast, in How the West Came to Rule, we examine these histories as integral or constitutive aspects of the formation of capitalism as the globally dominant mode of production (see esp. Chapters 5, 7 and 8). We also look at the intertwined and variegated formation of racial, gender and sexual hierarchies intricately bound up and constitutive of the making of capitalism. With these issues in mind, we argue in the book that capitalism is best understood as a set of configurations, assemblages, or bundles of social relations and processes oriented around the systematic (re)production of the capital–wage-labor relation, but not reducible – either historically or logically – to that relation alone. By placing an emphasis on such configurations and assemblages, we aim to highlight how the accumulation and reproduction of capital through the exploitation of wage-labor presupposes a wider array of different social relations that make these processes possible. These social relations may take numerous forms, such as coercive state apparatuses, ideologies and cultures of consent, or forms of power and exploitation that aren’t immediately given in or derivative of the simple capital-wage-labor relation, such as racism, patriarchy and unwaged labor. To be a bit more concrete, the example you give of slavery in the Americas – and, similarly, the forms of slavery in the Dutch colonies in East Asia – is exactly the kind of configuration which was geared toward the systematic reproduction of the capital–wage-labor relation within England, but is nonetheless not reducible to that relation itself (see Chapters 5 and 7).

  BB: On the one hand, Chakrabarty states that History 1s are “constitutively but unevenly modified” by History 2s, on the other hand according to Chibber “Chakrabarty overestimates the power of History 2 to destabilize History 1, he vastly underestimates the sources of instability within History 1.” How does the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD) contribute to understand the processes of differentiation within the universalizing dynamics of capitalism?6

  AA and KN: There is a lot of confusion over Chakrabarty’s distinction between History 1 and History 2. Some quick definitions then:

  History 1 denotes a past presupposed by capital, “a past posited by capital itself as its precondition” and “its invariable result.”7 Although Chakrabarty leaves this largely unspecified, it is clear that what he has in mind is abstract labor.
  History 2 denotes those histories that are encountered by capital “not as antecedents” established by itself, nor “as forms of its own life-process.”8 History 2s are not “outside” of capital or History 1. Instead, they exist “in proximate relationship to it,”9 whilst “interrupt[ing] and punctuat[ing] the run of capital’s own logic.”10 History 2s may well include non-capitalist, pre-capitalist or local social relations and processes, but the concept is not exhausted by these, and can refer to universal and global categories, social relations and process, including commodities and money – two universal categories central to the reproduction of capitalism.11

  Now, on the one hand, we would argue that Chakrabarty doesn’t underestimate the sources of instability within History 1. In Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty devotes an entire subsection titled “Abstract Labor as Critique” where he analyses precisely those sources of instability within History 1 (what is commonly known among Marxists as the “moving contradiction”). On the other hand, Chakrabarty in no way overstates the significance of History 2. That is, the mistake lies with Chibber’s interpretation; by reducing History 2 to “local culture,”12 it is clear that Chibber doesn’t understand what History 2 actually means. This becomes especially evident when Chibber invokes the “universal struggle by subaltern classes to defend their basic humanity” and “the interest in well-being” as a “fundamental source of instability to capital.”13 From the above definitions, we can see that when Chibber invokes “well-being” and “basic humanity,” he is paradoxically invoking History 2s as the “source of instability to capital.” If anything Chibber is guiltier of the problem he attaches to Chakrabarty than Chakrabarty himself.

  The quagmire of muddle fashioned by Chibber shouldn’t hinder us from reading Chakrabarty sympathetically, or indeed reading him as a Marxist. Like Marx, Chakrabarty emphasizes the tendency for capital to universalize and differentiate in equal measure. But where Chakrabarty goes beyond Marx is identifying universalising and differentiating tendencies outside of but related to the pristine logic of capital (though he’s not alone in doing this). This brings into our understanding of global capitalism forms of oppression but also agency and resistance that can reside outside of the wage-relation. This opens the theoretical, historical and political space to acknowledge the ways in which reproductive and/or affective labor, or anti-racist, anti-caste struggles are integral to anti-capitalist politics. It brings into view indigenous struggles over land or the earth as vital components of global resistance.

  However, there is an additional source or field of universalization-differentiation that Chakrabarty doesn’t discuss – the intersocietal or international. One of the key insights of UCD is to demonstrate how the existence of multiple societies – multiple states – under capitalism is at once an indication of its universalising tendency and its tendency towards differentiation and fragmentation. That is, the nation-state functions as a universal standard of what form a political community can and should take. At the same time, concrete processes of uneven and combined development constitute one of the biggest sources of continuing differentiation between nation-states.

  A central factor perpetuating this uneven development, manifested in territorialized and geographical forms, is the construction of spatially-embedded physical infrastructures (e.g. transport facilities and communication technologies) necessary for the expanded reproduction of capital. Investments in such built environments come to define regional spaces for the circulation of capital. Capital thus demonstrates a clear tendency towards concentrating in specific regions at the expense of others, producing a somewhat porous but nevertheless identifiable “territorial logic of power” – regionality – inherently arising out of the processes of capital accumulation in time and space.14

  This form of uneven development is unique to the capitalist system. The effect of these tendencies is that they will perpetually act to undermine any unification of “many capitals” into a single fraction of “global capital.” As Marx said, “Capital exists and can only exist as many capitals and its self-determination therefore appears as the mutual interaction of these upon one another.” It must then by necessity “repel itself from itself.” Consequently, a “universal capital, one without alien capitals confronting it, with which it exchanges – is therefore a non-thing.”15

  Moreover, as David Harvey has shown, the reproduction and spatial expansion of capital accumulation produces and necessitates the creation of relatively immobile and concentrated organized territorial configurations. Dense spatial constellations of capitalist social relations can thereby provide the territorial foundations of states by both commanding and supplying the necessary resources to sustain a functioning state apparatus. In this sense, the uneven and combined character of capitalist development reinforces and perpetuates territorial fragmentation which, in its contemporary modality, takes the form of a plurality of sovereign nation-states. In our view, this territorializing and deterritorializing geopolitics of capitalism is unaccounted for in Chakrabarty; a geopolitics that we think is crucial to understanding the origins of capitalism and its continued contemporaneous reproduction.

  BB: You underline a weakness shared by both Eurocentric and postcolonial accounts:the presupposition of a “hermetically sealed European history in which modernity was created before being subsequently expanded globally.”16 What are the main ideas of the “internationalist historiography” of capitalism which is supposed to abolish that weakness?

  AA and KN: What we mean by an “internationalist historiography”17 is this: that the origins and history of capitalism can only be properly understood in “international” or intersocietal terms, and that this very “internationality” is constitutive of capitalism as a historical mode of production. Although this may seem intuitively obvious to many readers, in the book we demonstrate how existing conceptions of capitalism have hitherto failed to take this “internationality” seriously, leading to problematic theorizations of its origins and development that limit not only our histories of capitalism, but also our critiques of the present.

  While there have been many studies that empirically point to this “international” dimension of capitalism’s historical emergence and development, they by and large fail to theoretically incorporate the specificities of “the international” as an organic component of social development (see above). In other words, the international or geopolitical sources of development are relegated to the sphere of contingencies, exogenous “shocks” and/or other untheorized externalities attached in an ad-hoc way to a pre-formed theory of society conceived as a singular abstraction. In overcoming the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of such approaches, the book offers a theoretical reconstruction of Trotsky’s idea of UCD which uniquely incorporates a distinctly intersocietal dimension of causality into its basic conception of development. For implicit in Trotsky’s original formulation was a fundamental redefinition of the concept and logic of development itself: one inscribed with a “more-than-one” ontological premise that is missing in other social theoretical approaches.18

  Such a perspective not only widens the spatial scope of analysis to capture the distinct determinations arising from the coexistence and interaction of multiple societies (i.e. “the international”), but also allows for a resolute focus on the variegated relations of interconnection and co-constitution between “the West” and “the Rest” in their joint, if uneven, making of the modern capitalist world. From the economically regenerative effects of the expansion of the Pax Mongolica over the Long Thirteenth Century to the Ottoman-Habsburg “super-power” rivalry during the Long Sixteenth century to the “discovery” of the New World and its’ division along linearly-demarcated spaces of sovereignty to the broader economic and strategic benefits accrued from the colonies spanning the Atlantic to Indian Ocean, all these historical processes and developments were absolutely central to collapse of feudalism and the emergence of capitalist modernity (cf. Chapters 3-8).

  BB: Marx wrote that “the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.“19 How did the new world “discoveries” contribute to the development of capitalism and the modern territorialized state system?

  AA and KN: Indeed, the 1492 “discoveries” were crucial to the formation of modern capitalist European societies, constituting a fundamental vector of uneven and combined development through which the modern world order was born. In How the West Came to Rule, we examine a vast array of different processes and developments in which the “New World” impacted the differential developmental trajectories of the “Old World” in their variegated transitions (and non-transitions) to capitalist modernity.

  For example, we look at how the intersocietal interactions, conflicts and struggles between Europeans and Amerindians that took place in the Americas were critical to the emergence of modern conceptions of territorial sovereignty and the development of Eurocentrism, scientific racism and the modern institution of patriarchy. We examine in particular how the Spanish jurists of the sixteenth century sought to reconcile the increasing gap between Christendom as an all-encompassing universal ideology and the encounter with non-Christian peoples in the Americas. The jurists’ response to these problems invited a reconceptualization of universality, based on an ontological distinction between Europeans and “Indians.”

  Thus, whilst colonialists were conducting the “greatest genocide in human history”20 in the Americas, these ideologues in Europe were busying themselves with tearing down an authority – Christendom – that was proving incapable of articulating New World experiences. It was out of the resultant debris that the twin conceptions of the European Self and the non-European Other would emerge, paving the way for an ideological apparatus – Eurocentrism, racism, patriarchy – that would serve to both legitimize the horrors of colonialism and spur the development of capitalism. The colonial encounter in the Americas also witnessed (for the first time in history) the development of linear forms of sovereignty territoriality (cf. Chapter 5).

  We further show how the plunder of American precious metals and resources by Europeans further exacerbated an already nascent divergence between the feudalism of the Iberian empires and the incipient capitalisms of Northwest Europeans. Indeed, the development of capitalism in England was itself dependent on the widened sphere of activity offered by the Atlantic. As we demonstrate, it was only through the sociological combination of American land, African slave labor, and English capital that the limits of English agrarian capitalism were eventually overcome. Not only did the widened sphere of circulation implied by the highly lucrative transatlantic triangular trade offer numerous opportunities to English capitalists to expand their sphere of activity, but the combination of different labor processes across the Atlantic enabled the recomposition of labor in Britain through the Industrial Revolution. The brutal exploitation of slaves on the plantation offered an array of “inputs” that contributed to the Industrial Revolution. It was in this respect, among others, that the real subsumption of labor under capital in the British factory, and the establishment of “free” wage labor in Europe, “needed” as its fundamental precondition “the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”

  BB: Neo-Weberian scholars consider geopolitical competition as the driving force behind state formation in Europe. Thereby, in a realist manner, they suppose that international politics take place within a context of anarchy. If anarchy is not the driving force behind politics what explains the war-prone nature of the European feudal state system?

  AA and KN: In short, the answer lies in the specificities of feudal relations of production which, over the course of the late Medieval and early modern periods, descended into a generalized systemic crisis. At first sight, this might seem like an illicit return to the kind of internalist Eurocentric theorizing we criticize throughout the book. However, when widening the analysis beyond Europe, it is important to recognize that Europe’s feudal social relations – and the geopolitical system emerging therewith – along with their technological, military, and ideological components all bore a distinctly intersocietal origin as we show in the book (cf. Chapters 3, 4, 6, 8)

  While keeping these intersocietal, extra-European sources of the making of European feudalism in mind, how then did feudalism generate such a competitive and war-prone geopolitical system? Here we partially follow Robert Brenner’s work on the subject. In the absence of the kind of unprecedented economic dynamism afforded by capitalist social relations, war was an expedient mode of expanding the surpluses available to the ruling classes under feudalism. Feudal productive relations offered few incentives for either peasant or lord to continuously and systematically introduce more productive technological methods, particularly as peasants had direct access to their means of production and subsistence. Consequently, lordly interests lay in extracting more surpluses by directly coercive means. This could be done by pushing the peasants to the limit of their subsistence or by seizing the demesnes of other lords. The latter course resulted in a process of “political accumulation” amongst the lords themselves – a war-driven process of state formation.21

  This condition meant that the aristocratic ruling class required the political, ideological, and military means in order to exploit the peasantry and extract a surplus for the purpose of lordly consumption. However, unlike the tributary empires in Asia, these means were not controlled by – or concentrated in – a centralized and unified state, but instead dispersed across the nobility. This dispersion of coercive capabilities meant that political authority in Europe was fragmented, parcellized and therefore also highly competitive, with heightened intra-lordly struggle taking place over territories both within and outside of feudal “states” (see Chapters 4, 6,and 8).

  The lords left standing at the end of the process of geopolitical accumulation formed the basis for the absolutist state. Representing a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination,”22 the absolutist states system of early modern European remained driven by the systemic imperatives of geopolitical accumulation that came to interact – and in some cases fuse – with the emerging logic of competitive capital accumulation accompanying those states already making the transition to capitalism in part explaining the endemic state of war-marking the epoch. What made this era of permanent war so intense was the generalized crisis of feudal production relations besetting Europe.

  The persistence of armed conflict throughout the period was not just a result of the usual structural dynamics of the feudal mode – the tendency toward (geo)political accumulation – but, rather, because the process of ruling class reproduction was itself in crisis and under threat as feudalism had virtually exhausted all possibilities for further internal expansion (i.e. within Europe). This in turn precipitated a sharp fall in seigniorial revenues, itself further exacerbated by the plague-induced demographic crisis, leading to a dramatic rise in peasant revolts and class struggles more generally (see Chapter 3). This perilous situation was further exacerbated and “overdetermined” by the persistent geopolitical threat emanating from the Ottoman Empire (see Chapter 4). Under such conditions, a near continuous state of war – including both intra-ruling class struggles and the incessant efforts to crush peasant rebellions – became a sociological “necessity” (cf. Chapter 6).

  BB: Against Political Marxist accounts insisting on the internal reasons for the development of capitalism in England you underline the decisive role of external factors via “the privilege of backwardness” or “the whip of external necessity.” What external factors contributed to the development of capitalism in England and how are the linked to internal factors such as the class struggle between lords and peasants leading to agrarian capitalism?

  AA and KN: Political Marxists have correctly identified the existence of a relatively homogenous English ruling class as an explanation for England’s peculiar trajectory to agrarian capitalism. In contrast to the French, where the state and the nobility competed over peasant surpluses, the English ruling class acted in unison to expropriate the peasantry and enclose land. By “freeing” the peasantry from land in this way, and by concentrating the means of production in the hands of the ruling class, we see the emergence of a distinct class of capitalists, on the one hand, and wage-laborers, on the other. But why did England specifically exhibit this peculiar ruling class unity? For Perry Anderson, among others, the answer lies in the relative demilitarization of the English ruling class during the sixteenth century. Whereas early modern absolutist states in the rest of Europe were centralizing and expanding their military capacities in the form of standing armies and investment in arms, England was regressing militarily.

  The obvious explanation for this demilitarization is England’s relative isolation from geopolitical pressures – they didn’t need an army because they were comparatively insulated from the multiple wars engulfing Europe at the time. We argue one of the key reasons – arguably the single most important reason – for England’s isolation was that it was unimportant to the ambitions and concerns of the major geopolitical powers of the time – it was considered “relatively backward,” a north eastern backwater that was irrelevant to the reproduction of Christendom and imperial feudalism. In the sixteenth century, the single most important threat to the great powers of Christendom was found to the southeast, in the Ottoman Empire.

  The Ottomans were making rapid incursions into south east Europe and taking possession of the eastern Mediterranean – at this time the pivot of European geopolitical interests. The Ottomans thus acted as a kind of buffer, or geopolitical center of gravity, that sucked the most powerful state in Europe into its orbit, leaving England relatively isolated from the machinations of the Habsburgs, the Papal states, Italian city states and (to a lesser degree) the French. And it was the isolation wrought by the Ottoman buffer that homogenized the English ruling class, enabling it to undertake such unified action against the peasantry. The history of the enclosures therefore can only be fully understood when viewed from an Ottoman vantage point.

  BB: According to André Tosel, 1991 was not the end of Marxism but the end of Marxism-Leninism which also contained a deterministic, stagist perspective of historical development. How do you explain the re-emergence of UCD in Marxist theory?

  AA and KN: Trots might cry: “Re-emergence? Pah! We always spoke about UCD!” However, it is interesting that despite Trotskyists’ invoking UCD, it is only in the last decade or so that there has been such a resolute and innovative use of the idea, either theoretically or historically. Perhaps, more interestingly, many of these innovations are coming from people who long abandoned Trotskyism as a political project (or who were never part of it in the first place). This, incidentally, is why we would resist John Hobson’s characterization of UCD as “neo-Trotskyist.”23

  But the question of UCD’s very own historicity is extremely important and one we only partially broach in the book. Though we do recognize the context of its emergence in debates among revolutionaries in the early 20th century, we don’t really examine its recent re-emergence. And although we historically situate the study of capitalism in the post-2008 context, the history of UCD as an intellectual project has a different pulse. From a rather insular, academic perspective, the currency of the idea of UCD is rooted in a set of intellectual problems that Marxists (and subsequently non-Marxists) were grappling within the discipline of International Relations – specifically, “why is there no international historical sociology?” or, more generally, why has been so difficult to bridge between sociological and geopolitical modes of theorizing.24 UCD struck many of us as a remarkably useful way of answering these questions. But there is a wider historical and political context that is worth explicating.

  For starters, yes, 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union put paid to any remnants of stadial theorizing (within Marxism at least). But it also opened up a set of political questions that tore at many of the old (and problematic) certainties of the Marxist(-Leninist) left. We see in this period the triumph of neoliberalism, the changing nature of the state-form, the growing vagaries of so-called globalization and the increasing subsumption of social life under the auspices of capital accumulation. All of these developments opened very new political possibilities and necessities that the “old left” – with its attachment to the identity of “the worker” – could not adequately engage with. Reflecting on this political and intellectual history then, it is not surprising that UCD emerges in a context in which theoretical constructs derived from singular experiences of oppression – derived from singular vantage points – were becoming increasingly irrelevant if not downright useless to the lived experiences of the global proletariat.

  Concurrently, the increasing currency of poststructuralist, postcolonial, critical race, feminist and queer conceptions of the way in which capitalism – and power more generally – operates placed a greater conceptual need to engage with questions of liminality, hybridity, intersectionality and so on. Many of the more dogmatic trends of Marxism tended to ignore, sideline or be openly hostile to these different approaches, and many continue to do so (think of the various lazy dismissals of “identity politics” that continue to pervade various political organizations that lay claim to liberation and revolution). UCD is an idea that is – theoretically at least – more sympathetic to and more in common with these “post-positivist” trends (or rather that’s the way we see it). At the same time, it is an idea that remains wedded in many (not necessarily all) respects to a historical materialist approach, class analysis and Marx(ist) writings. To our minds, UCD therefore might constitute a framework through which theoretical and political gaps between Marxist and non-Marxist critical approaches might be productively bridged. For example, in How the West Came to Rule, we seek to open a dialogue with postcolonial approaches, rather than dismiss them.

  BB: Michael Löwy states that “the politics of combined and uneven development” consists of three dialectically linked problems: the possibility of proletarian revolution in “backward” countries; the uninterrupted transition from the democratic to socialist revolution; and the international extension of the revolutionary process.25 What role does the uninterrupted international revolutionary process play in your analysis, where UCD is considered to be transhistorical, or – to be precise – transmodal?

  AA and KN: Perhaps it’s worth clarifying what we mean by UCD operating transmodally. When used at a general, transmodal level, UCD is best understood as a basic premise or ontology of human history. Put differently it identifies an abstract set of determinants which describe a general condition confronted by all societies irrespective of historical context. Therefore, when used at this transmodal level, UCD doesn’t actually tell us much about concrete historical processes and certainly explains very little about these processes. At this level of abstraction it does not constitute theory. However, this is not the only way in which UCD can be used. In the book, we also use it methodologically. From the transmodal ontological premise we can derive a set of questions for research, in particular an attentiveness to: (1) the multiplicity of societal development; (2) interactions between societies arising out of that multiplicity; and, (3) the combined forms of development that emerge out of these interactions. But, these general ontological and methodological assumptions taken on their own, still do not constitute a theory as such – at least not in the specifically Marxist sense. That is, theory is only possible at the more historically specific-level at which the ontological and methodological coordinates of study are connected to more determinate, concrete, historical-sociological categories. We think this is useful in that we can consider UCD in its historical specificity, as something that is different in different historical contexts, without necessarily abandoning the transmodal premise. (This is in fact precisely how the Marxist idea of “mode of production” works).

  Returning to Löwy, his excavation of the politics of UCD takes place at a concrete level of analysis, one which is inflected by the transmodal conception of UCD, but not derived from it. The problems Löwy therefore identifies are specific to a set of historical problems (in particular those pertaining to the 20th century) that do not necessarily hold in different contexts, be it today or the early modern period (which is the focus of our analysis). Whether these problems are constituted in different epochs is the work of historical sociology and political activity, and cannot be derived from any transmodal claims alone.

  Were Löwy’s problems present or observable in the focus of our analysis (i.e. the origins to capitalism)? Well, some of his claims – specifically the existence of a proletariat and the question of transition from democratic to socialist revolution – presuppose capitalism, and therefore cannot be considered as part of the history of its origins. The way the third problem – the international extension of the revolutionary process – is framed is itself problematic. It presupposes some internal – domestic – revolution that subsequently extends outwards – internationally. Such a perspectives suffers from the sort of internalism (or methodological nationalism) that UCD is used to overcome.

  Nonetheless, in some formal sense, you could argue that there are numerous ways in which “international revolutionary processes” played some significant role in the period we look at the in the book. Take for example, the crisis of Christendom. We have in Europe the breakdown of feudalism and peasant uprisings, articulated along the lines of religious revolt. At the same time, peasant revolts against Christendom facilitated the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into Christian territories, further weakening the Papacy and the Habsburg Empire. We have simultaneously in the Americas a series of revolts by indigenous communities against Iberian imperialism. Meanwhile, in Asia, local communities were resisting attempts at colonial settlement by the Iberians and, later, Dutch powers.

  We argue that these international, often non-European, uneven yet intersecting histories were crucial to breakdown of social order in Europe. It was subsequently out of the wreckage of this crumbling social order that alternative methods of exploitation and social order emerged – namely capitalism, racism and modern forms of patriarchy. Moreover, such new methods were used specifically to crush and/or control these international insurgent movements. I guess the point here is a more basic one – the ontological premise of a transmodal UCD and the methodological pointers it gives rise to helps us understand class struggle and subaltern agency in intersocietal rather than domestic or methodologically nationalist terms. UCD helps us recognize how uneven, multiple, insurrectionary processes might intersect and combine globally. And this is of relevance today, just as much as it was when Löwy was writing.

  This interview was originally published in Période.

How the West came to rule
Richard Braude
40.1 (Feb. 2016): p181.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816816630709
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Conference of Socialist Economists
http://www.cseweb.org.uk

Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu

How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Global Capitalism, Pluto, London, 2015; 400 pp: 0745336159, 24.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk)

Introduction

Eight hundred years of global history explained! Anievas and Nijancioglu's book is an ambitious attempt to amalgamate discussions in the fields of international relations, global history, Marxism, world-systems theory and historical sociology into a great machine of explanation, the side of which is stamped with the newly repainted letters 'Uneven and Combined Development'. The Trotskyist theory, re-outlined by IR theorists and displayed for discussion and reassemblage, now provides the screen across which the past of the global proletariat can unscroll, and on which to better project the future that awaits it.

Through post-colonial and political theory, the Introduction argues persuasively for an ever more complex understanding of capitalism (p. 9), but also firmly attempts to swat away two erroneous and yet arguably dominant Marxist stories of capitalism's development. In order to battle these theories, the authors draw on the work of a wide breadth of global scholars, slowing down the centripetal force of Europe on world history to understand the dynamics of other agents instead--whether of control or rebellion--in the expansive universe of capitalism's ascendency. Leon Trotsky's theory of 'combined and uneven development' is given a robust defence in Chapter 2. Terms such as 'the whip of external necessity', 'substitutionalism' and 'privilege of backwardness' are put back into a history of party politics and the Bolshevik general's marshaling of his terminology, along with his troops and coterie. The authors do not shrink from providing some obvious criticisms. This includes explaining the theory's reliance on the teleological terms of 'advanced' and 'backward' societies (p. 56), reinterpreting these instead as 'asymmetries and 'imbalances' between societies, rather a directional flow. These opening chapters thus make clear that this is an autocritical work in which the authors wish to correct the racist and patriarchal mistakes of Marxist theory, incorporating not only the histories of production beyond the European frontier, but also the analyses by feminist and non-European scholars. This is an extraordinary ambition: surely few contemporary projects of historical writing have quite so audacious a mission or scope.

Chapter 3 begins the historical journey with the nomadic mode of production on the Mongol grasslands, moving across the trade routes, with the Black Death upon them, into feudal Europe and the demographic crisis which, the authors claim, catapulted Europe into capitalism. Chapter 4 argues for the distinction between tributary and feudal modes of production. The authors then claim that that it was the superior army of the Ottoman tributary mode that halted European expansionism, forcing European powers to look elsewhere--the East and West Indies--for necessary feudal agricultural expansion and merchant trade. In both chapters, Europe reaps the 'privileges of backwardness' in relation to other modes of production.

Chapter 5 moves overseas with the merchant adventurers, first through the Spanish legal theories of Amerindians and the influence of New World map-making on European's conceptions of their home territory, and then the twin rise of New World slavery and industrial capitalism, these last as combined and mutually intertwined systems of production and circulation. Chapter 6 works as a moment of repose in the global whirlwind, turning back to the conflicts within Europe which had begun to be outlined in Chapter 4, and arguing that it was the preoccupation of the majority of European powers either with New World expansionism or battling the Ottoman Empire that allowed Holland and England the geopolitical space' (p. 184) for the political primacy of merchant capital and the early appearance of bourgeois revolutions.

Chapter 7 propels the reader across oceans once again, explaining how Dutch capitalism, far from developing solely on a mercantile basis, relied on the partial colonisation and industrial development of the Indonesian islands in which it did business, exploiting not only labour but also the intersocietal connections built up through previous modes of production. Chapter 8 argues that it was, again, the 'backwardness' of the feudal mode of production of the European states which forced them to develop abnormally dominant military technologies for the sake of overseas expansion--an unevenness which, in the context of industrial capitalism, allowed them to realise imperial ambitions over merchant capitalist states and empires across the surface of the Earth. In a brief and humble conclusion, the authors admit the challenges of any kind of internationalism for both political militants and historians, and point towards the potential for the theory of combined and uneven development to explain the ways in which patriarchy and racism are 'constitutive of, but not reducible to, the emergence of capitalism' (p. 282).

The introductory remarks in the opening chapters need to be read along with those made throughout the book, especially at the start of Chapter 7 (pp. 215-8), which restates much of the theory in different terms, and sometimes with different conclusions. Similarly, pp. 255-6 and 131-4 provide ideas which could have been helpfully assimilated into earlier chapters, especially given that there are two devoted to theoretical prelude alone. No matter, perhaps: at best, this shows that the theory develops along with the material, as it should. However, the path of these clarifications seems to indicate an increasing specificity of the way uneven modes of production combine and develop across international--even intercontinental--lines through history, the persuasiveness of the theory correlating with the increasingly global character of the subject matter. By the time the authors reach a history of India under British rule in the 19th century, the interrelation of military capital, forced Indian de-industrialisation and the Mughal tax system as an explanation for the specificities of British capitalism in India is entirely convincing; but then by Chapter 8, the world has become quite a different place, in which the accumulation of global technologies of transport and communication provide a wealth of opportunities for anyone searching to show the global formation of both capital and class. It is to the application of the theory to the other end of history, however, that I now turn.

Modern history

How the West Came to Rule places itself in opposition to the supposed school of 'political Marxism' represented in the main by the late Ellen Meiksins Wood, Charles Post, Bruno Teschke and, at the fore, Robert Brenner. I am not an uncritical supporter of Brenner's theories. However, I believe that in their eagerness to criticise an orthodoxy taking hold within historical materialist theory, Anievas and Nijancioglu have misunderstood their main opponent. (1)

Brenner's argument did not, and does not, only respond to the commercialising, 'Smithian' model by which capitalism is said to come to rule throughout the world by virtue of increasing global trade and the consequent dominance of merchant capital. This thesis, represented for Anievas and Nijancioglu by Wallerstein's world-system theory, was also that taken for granted in the early 20th century by a range of historians. This 1930s generation of economic historians (foremost among them Richard Tawney and Eileen Power) generally agreed with the commercialising model, and indeed Michael Postan's own doctoral thesis had been on the development of credit in medieval England. However, by 1937, Postan had begun to outline a different model based more firmly on demographic change as an explanation for the economic rise and fall of European nations. After the Second World War (and his stint as the official historian of wartime industry), Postan turned his attention more thoroughly to those kind of national statistics on which the post-War welfare state was built: the metrics of births, deaths, marriages and disease. The mercantilist and monetary model of Keynes's circle had been overcome by a return to Riccardo and Malthus.

That the placing of neither demographic change nor mercantile capital at the centre of a history of global capitalism fitted a Marxist theory of history was not lost on any of the British Marxists of Tawney and Postan's generation. Historians within and without the universities challenged these models, even if perhaps only implicitly, often by focusing attention instead on the rising or falling consciousness of the working classes at different points in history, measured along a metric of incidents of named rebellions. By the time Brenner came to make his intervention against Postan's new 'Malthusian' orthodoxy (one with parallels in works by French and German scholars of the time as well), it should be borne in mind that there was a serious and large body of work by Marxists who had already challenged these theories. Important mention should be given to Joan Thirsk and Eleanor Searle, women on whose work Brenner constructed much of his argument.

I will return to this historiographic thread in a moment. For now, what is important to note is that in 1976, when Brenner came to make his intervention on the agrarian capitalist origins of the English industrial revolution, his primary goal was to oppose not the commercialising model, which had been done away with, but the demographic model of historical development. This is key, because this is exactly the model Anievas and Nijancioglu do not explicitly oppose in How the West Came to Rule, and thus at times, they fall into the same pitfalls Brenner had so articulately undermined.

This is evidenced most in the chapter on the 'long thirteenth century'. The argument of the chapter moves in four moments:

(1) the necessary expansion of trade networks due to the Mongol nomadic mode of production;

(2) contact with Europe and the passing over of the Plague;

(3) the demographic collapse of Europe; and

(4) the consequent increased availability of land in relation to labour and the development, 'out of necessity', of agriculture and manufacture 'along more capitalist lines' (p. 85).

While the attempt made to relate the methods of nomadic life in Asia to the development of capitalism in Europe is laudable, each step seems to me fairly weak. First, nomadic production could equally lead to internalism as externalism; and second, the Plague could have developed in any part of the world and moved through other trade routes--describing the Black Death as a result of combined and uneven development seems to hold as true as describing the meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs as a result of the peculiarities of the interstellar mode of production (and indeed, the move happens in one single sentence on p. 78, with a little more elaboration, incongruously, on p. 254). Third, the extent of the demographic collapse, its variations across Europe and the importance of the pre-Plague agricultural crises, though mentioned by Anievas and Nisancioglu, are still very much under debate. Most importantly, however, the final fourth stage of this argument is exactly that to which Brenner has responded for nearly 40 years, and to which the authors unfortunately provide no riposte.

Brenner's argument was that there was nothing inherently capitalist about the response to the Black Death, but that the different responses did lay the path for varying alignments of class forces, allowing the cycle of agricultural collapse through population expansion and subsequent agricultural development following population collapse to be broken. Brenner formulates his argument, in an entirely Marxist manner, as a materialist critique of economics. 'Ironically', Brenner argued in 1976, 'Malthus's model was correct not for the emergent industrial economy he was analysing, but for the stagnant backward society from which this had risen.' (2) What needed to be explained therefore was how English and Dutch states had superseded this Malthusian cycle. Indeed, as a scholar of the 17th century, Brenner's real initial question was why England in the period of the Civil War did not suffer the same kind of agricultural collapse that was experienced concurrently on the rest of the continent. For following the Black Death, there was not the kind of capitalistic development which the authors claim for Europe, and not even for England. Instead, there was a clear (if slow) return to the Malthusian cycle. Brenner's argument was that despite the return to this Malthusian 'phase A', the different class structures--the solidarity within both the exploited and exploitative classes--between France and England explained England's development of agrarian capitalism and its break from the Malthusian 'phase B' in the 17th century at the same time as France suffered it.

This argument makes several points to which the authors unfortunately do not respond. Most of all, that there was a significant difference in the 'long thirteenth century' between different European states and polities, which were the root cause for their developmental differentiation. Anievas and Nijancioglu do not acknowledge this aspect of Brenner's argument except to note that the concept of 'combined and uneven development' as employed in his 1982 essay is incomplete; that is, the argument that the English state structure was ultimately indebted to the Norman invasion. Despite noting simply a problem of incompleteness, the authors replace this theorisation of 'the international' with their theory of the combination with the 'nomadic mode of production', rather than delving further into the quite clear 'internationalism' of the Norman Empire itself, which extended as far as Sicily. (3) Furthermore, the argument puts class struggle and composition at the centre of the developmental differences between states, while the authors replace this factor in their chapter on relations with the Ottoman Empire with England's 'privilege of isolation' from the Hapsburg-Ottoman wars (p. 118). This no doubt adds an important geopolitical context to the development of English agrarian capitalism, but it does not follow that if another European state had been similarly isolated that there too agrarian capitalism would have developed. As Brenner might put it, without the prerequisite 'social-property relations', it would not be possible for capitalist tenants to amass the quantity of land necessary for the qualitatively different fixed capital investment that was managed in 16th century England.

Without this analysis, the model falls back into the 'Smithian' model whereby, given the opportunity for specialised market production, peasants would naturally and inevitably choose to specialise. This was the focus of Brenner's most recent contribution to the debate, in which he claimed, continuing his critique of economic models, that Adam Smith was essentially correct in his description of the results of specialisation, the division of labour and the 'obsessive pursuit of the gains from trade', but failed to acknowledge that such processes are only chosen by producers given very particular social-property relations, i.e. those of capitalist history. (4) This distinction between 'capital' and 'capitalism'; that is, between the methods of the 'obsessive pursuit' and its prerequisite historical conditions is briefly approached by the authors in their introduction to Chapter 7, but unfortunately not applied to the earlier chapters (pp. 216-7).

Theory and historiography

The distinction between the processes of capital and the conditions for capitalism is also a path to return to a theoretical and historiographic division which I began to outline before, that between the Marxist tradition which Brenner helped to start, along with Perry Anderson, and that which he sidestepped, associated with the name of E. P. Thompson. Anievas and Nisancioglu do not make best use of the continued tradition of British Marxist history which Brenner has largely set aside throughout his work, though they do of course draw on it in their description of the formation of a trans-Atlantic proletariat in the 17th and 18th centuries (Chapter 5), assimilating Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many Headed Hydra into their structure of 'combined and uneven development'. The slaves of the Americas, the indentured servants spirited away from England and Ireland, the marooned pirates and their utopias: they all combined to create a truly international proletariat which formed the dreams and labours of the New World.

There was, however, a kind of wider division of academic labour that has dominated this split, between the productive processes of capitalism and the development of the state structures in which these processes have developed and expanded across the globe. For while Anderson and Brenner concentrated on the development of the absolutist state and the legacies of previous modes of production, and Hobsbawm republished Marx's Pre-Capitalist Economic Formulations, the 'Midnight Notes' scholars--Peter Linebaugh, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis primarily among them (with an important debt to CLR James)--delved into the historical development of capital accumulation, the study of workers' resistance (in a very expanded notion of 'the worker'), and the technologies within the productive process developed to combat this resistance.

There are two practical ways in which I think this conception of capital accumulation, and the Midnight Notes scholars' work, points toward further developments Anievas and Nisancioglu could make on their theory of combined and uneven development. The first is in terms of the place of race, or the 'accumulation of differences', within the capitalist process of production itself. (5) How this reflects on situations globally --not so much in terms of the global division of labour, but within the varying productive processes across the world--is perhaps a theory of race and division that would make better use of Trotsky's theory than the remarks provided thus far by the authors, and not just in Chapters 5 and 7.

The second, and this is where I will end, would be a feminist critique of demographic theory. The theoretical insight that has been drawn on most from Federici's Caliban and the Witch is that the work of creating and raising children is itself a form of unpaid labour (and the hidden root of the creation of labour-power itself)--a form of work that has conceptually and physically formed 'women' in the modern era (pp. 325-6). There is, however, another connected claim that has been often (though certainly not always) passed over, which is the history of resistance to this kind of labour, which needs to be studied both in our contemporary world and in that of the past. The rise and fall of births and deaths; the supervisional metrics of infants, wives and husbands; the supposedly natural habits of family life, which, in aggregation, form the great curves of the statistician's empire, all have their own histories in the production and accumulation of labour-power--histories that undoubtedly contain their own imbalances and asymmetries across different cultures, rebellions and methods of domination (contra Federici, this is a history which profoundly predates the 14th century). Byway of illustration, note Brenner's statement that the subdivision of peasant holdings in feudal Europe 'also enabled peasants to respond to the demands of male children for the wherewithal to start families of their own' (Brenner 2007: 69). It is this naturalisation of the productive basis to demographic change that needs to be interrogated in order to uncover the planetary dimensions to sexual divisions of labour. In other words, Brenner's critique of the Malthusian orthodoxy never reaches far enough into the ideological assumptions that underpin it. This is one way towards the feminist critique the authors promise, but unfortunately do not provide. On the basis of Anievas and Nisancioglu's committed epic, however, scholars across the globe are in a more solid position to unravel these histories.

DOI: 10.1177/0309816816630709

Reviewed by Richard Braude, University of Cambridge, UK

Endnotes

(1.) This is perhaps partly caused by the attempt to treat the school of 'political Marxism' as unitary. Most of the criticisms aimed at it, while following on from an explanation of Brenner's arguments, actually confront claims by Ellen Wood (e.g. p. 32); and the claim that Brenner rejects the theory of immanent change from within the feudal system relies on a misleading citation of Neil Davidson (p. 24).

(2.) In this, he agreed with Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Brenner R [1985] Agrarian class structure and economic development, in Aston TH, Philpin CHE (eds.) The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge, p. 14.

(3.) See David Bates's 2013 The Normans and Empire, and Eleanor Searle's Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988.

(4.) Brenner R (2007) Property and progress: Where Adam Smith went wrong, in Wickham C (ed.) Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century, Oxford, p. 100. Anievas and Nijancioglu attempt to counter the argument regarding the peasant's 'choice' to marketise by citing the Postan School's inheritors, Mark Bailey and Jane Whittle. They do so, however, without drawing either on Spencer Dimmock's important critiques (although his book does appear in a footnote) or on what seems to me the far more pressing matter, which is that even if some peasants chose to produce for the market, this does not show the kind of systemic, overall change to which Brenner pointed. Indeed, it might simply be adduced as evidence of the class division within the peasantry, often expressed as 'the rise of the yeoman', who became the capitalist tenant farmer in Brenner's model.

(5.) A phrase the authors borrowed from Silvia Federici's (2004) Caliban and the Witch, Brooklyn, p. 63. The authors themselves note the need to more thoroughly apply Federici's ideas in future (p. 326).

Richard Braude is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Braude, Richard
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Braude, Richard. "How the West came to rule." Capital & Class, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, p. 181+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448569400&it=r&asid=64d42102350fd2898201a68d3a68b069. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A448569400
Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism
K.M. Zaarour
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1235.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about

Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism, by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu. Pluto, 2015. 386p index afp ISBN 9780745336152 pbk, $40.00

(cc) 53-3709

HB501

MARC

Anievas (Univ. of Cambridge, UK) and Ni^ancioglu (Univ. of Westminster, UK) have succeeded in providing new theoretical and historical perspectives to explain how capitalism prevailed to become a dominant force in global affairs. They offer a fundamental rethinking of the origins of capitalism and the emergence of Western domination by the interactive relations with the non-European world. They reject the liberal view that capitalism is considered pacifying and civilizing through the spread of free trade and markets where societies are transformed into positive-sum games. The authors believe this liberal view is at odds with the historical record of capitalism underlying the histories of subjugation and exploitation that lay behind the rise Western exceptionalism. Instead, the authors offer a counterargument by suggesting that capitalism came to dominate, subordinate, and exploit non-European societies, creating the alienation of workers and uneven development and wealth. Therefore, they contend that capitalism could only emerge, take root, and reproduce itself through a violent, coercive, and often war-assisted process of subjugating, dominating, and often annihilating many of those social forces that stood in its way. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readership levels.--K. M. Zaarour, Virginia Tech
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zaarour, K.M. "Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1235. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661840&it=r&asid=b22a45faea3de430e5a63dfcaa62339d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661840

Braude, Richard. "How the West came to rule." Capital & Class, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, p. 181+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA448569400&asid=64d42102350fd2898201a68d3a68b069. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017. Zaarour, K.M. "Anievas, Alexander. How the West came to rule: the geopolitical origins of capitalism." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1235. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA449661840&asid=b22a45faea3de430e5a63dfcaa62339d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017.

• International Socialist Reviews
  http://isreview.org/issue/100/uneven-and-combined-development-world-capitalism
  Word count: 2981

  The uneven and combined development of world capitalism
  Review by Ashley Smith
  Issue #100: Reviews

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  How the West Came to Rule::
  The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
  By Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu
  Pluto Press, 2015 · 386 pages · $40.00

  The debate between Marxists about the origins of capitalism has divided into two broad camps—World Systems Theory and Political Marxism. While each has its insights, they are both one-sided: the first calling attention to the external processes of commercial trade as the principle cause of the rise of capitalism, and the second to the internal transformations of class relations in the English countryside.

  Both, however, only capture a part of Marx’s original sketch in Capital of how the system came into being. For Marx, the triumph of the capitalist mode of production over its feudal and tributary predecessors was an international process that combined geopolitics, commerce, class struggle within societies, bourgeois revolution, the conquest of the Americas and the system of plantation slavery, and colonialism.

  In their new book, How the West Came to Rule, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu defend and develop Marx’s original account. Their book is a provocative and brilliant theoretical and historical explanation of how capitalism emerged in England and Europe through a dialectical inter-societal process.

  One of their principle aims is to undermine a Eurocentric bias that has compromised both camps in the transition debate. Each wrongly grants priority to Europe, presumes capitalism emerged within it as a closed space, and depicts the system developing in a linear process throughout the rest of the world. They contend that these assumptions are neither theoretically nor empirically tenable and deny the agency and contribution of non-Western societies to the emergence of capitalism.

  They argue that while World Systems Theory describes the international process of commerce and plunder, it is plagued by several key problems. It remains within a Eurocentric framework that sees capitalism developing within Europe and then sweeping through the rest of the world. In the process they reduce non-Western societies to a passive role.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu also affirm Robert Brenner’s contention that World Systems Theory suffers from a Smithian definition of capitalism as simply commerce. Since trade is a feature of almost all human societies, World Systems Theory fails to grasp the specific nature of capitalism’s historical emergence, its class relations, and laws of motion.

  The authors show, however, that Brenner’s alternative case is compromised by problems of its own. Famously, Brenner contended that capitalism was the contingent result of class struggle between lords and peasants in the English countryside. That conflict transformed lords into agrarian capitalists and their former peasants eventually into wage laborers, both dependent for their social reproduction on the capitalist market.

  Brenner’s Political Marxism suffers from Eurocentrism, if not Anglocentrism. Anievas and Nisancioglu show how it excludes the international processes of trade, geopolitical competition between European feudal states and the Ottoman Empire, primitive accumulation in the Americas, and colonialism, all of which were decisive in establishing the conditions allowing for the capitalist breakthrough in Holland as well as England.

  To break out of the pervasive Eurocentrism in the debate, they turn to Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development. Using unnecessarily opaque language, the authors argue that Trotsky’s theory

  uniquely interpolates an international dimension of causality as an intrinsic aspect of sociohistorical development itself. This then allows for the organic—rather than contingent or external—integration of the “geopolitical” and “sociological” determinations into a single, unified theory of sociohistorical change, sublating “internalist” and “externalist” theories of modal transitions.

  Trotsky argued that the capitalist mode of production transformed the general law of uneven development, which holds that societies grow at different paces, some faster and others slower at various points in time. He maintained that capitalism’s unique expansionary qualities led it to penetrate precapitalist modes of production, subordinating their economies and states to its laws of development. It thus produced hybrid societies, combining the worlds most advanced and backward features.

  His paradigmatic example was of course Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. It had been a backward, feudal society ruled by the autocratic tsarist state. European capitalism penetrated it toward the end of the nineteenth century, producing a hybrid formation that combined advanced capitalist development with backward feudal relations.

  Trotsky later generalized this capitalist law of uneven and combined development to the colonial world. Based on this analysis, Trotsky argued that workers even though a minority in such societies could lead the peasants in what he called a permanent revolution for socialism on the condition that it spread to the advanced capitalist world. Successful revolutions there could help them overcome their economic backwardness.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu use uneven and combined development as a methodology to show how capitalism came into being through an international, inter-societal process. They demonstrate how more developed tributary modes of production in societies like China and the Ottoman empire suffered the “penalty of progressiveness;” their more advanced economic systems and stable states stifled the development of capitalism within their societies.

  By contrast the economic and geopolitical interaction between them and less-developed feudal Europe, in particular Holland and England, granted them the “privilege of historical backwardness,” as they incorporated more advanced productive forces from elsewhere. Moreover, under “the whip of external necessity,” Europe was forced to compete geopolitically with their more advanced rivals, a dynamic that provided the condition for the development of capitalism in Holland and England.

  With this framework, Anievas and Nisancioglu radically recast the process of capitalist development as the result of the inter-societal interaction between European feudalism and the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the conquest of the Americas, the establishment of the slave trade and plantations, and the colonization of Asia. This international history is perhaps their book’s most significant contribution.

  They begin by demonstrating how the Mongol Empire spurred the development of merchant capital throughout Europe. The Pax Mongolica opened up the Silk Road, dramatically increased trade, and transferred the Empire’s higher development of its productive forces to backward Europe. This encouraged the formations of cities, which had a gravitational pull on peasants to leave the countryside and become wage laborers especially in the Italian city-states.

  The Mongol Empire was also the source of bubonic plague that caused the Black Death in Europe, which decisively changed the balance of class forces in England, driving lords to become capitalist farmers and peasants to become rural laborers. Thus the Pax Mongolica forms an international precondition for the rise of English agrarian capitalism recounted by Brenner.

  But, Anievas and Nisancioglu contend, without the geopolitical competition from the Ottoman Empire Holland and England would never have undergone the transition to capitalism. The Ottoman’s more advanced tributary mode of production buttressed a more stable, unified state compared to Europe’s squabbling feudal states. As a result, they were able to deploy a far larger military force against their rivals in Europe.

  The most powerful state in Europe, the Hapsburg Empire, had no choice but to deploy a disproportionate amount of its forces against the Ottomans. The geopolitical rivalry between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans facilitated Holland and England’s capitalist development in two ways. First it offered their merchants significant trade opportunities. Second it provided them the geopolitical space to develop capitalism and complete their bourgeois revolutions.

  With the Hapsburgs preoccupied, Holland managed to successfully carry through the Dutch Revolt and establish the first capitalist nation state. In England, the Hapsburg’s preoccupation with the Ottomans ensured their isolation from any threat, and led to a relative demilitarization of the feudal lords, thereby weakening their power over the peasantry and compelling some of them, in the wake of the Black Death, to adopt a capitalist agriculture.

  However, without the conquest of the Americas and the development of plantation slavery, Anievas and Nisancioglu argue, the new capitalist powers could have been strangled in their cribs and certainly would not have undergone capitalist industrialization. The Ottoman’s were the principal reason that the European societies reoriented from the Mediterranean to the so-called New World. And once they did, the plunder of the region reinforced the differential patterns of development between the feudal absolutist powers like Spain and those of the newly capitalist Holland and England. Driven by its feudal military preoccupation of competing with the Ottoman’s, Spain used its horde of gold and silver to pay off loans it had taken out to pay for its military. Much of that treasure ended back in Holland and England to expand their new system.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu also show how the colonial slave trade and the hybrid labor regime of plantation slavery, which fused capitalist pressures of production for the market with precapitalist relations of production, provided the raw material for industrialization—cotton for example being the basis for England’s textile boom.

  The combination of these inter-societal dynamics thus made possible capitalist development in Holland, England, and eventually the rest of Europe. But this was not an evolutionary process. They argue bourgeois revolutions were necessary to establish capitalist states to defend and reproduce capitalist class rule internally against the exploited classes and internationally against both capitalist and pre-capitalist rivals.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu adopt a consequentialist theory of the bourgeois revolutions, pioneered by many, but most fully developed by Neil Davidson in his magisterial How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions. They show how a combination of capitalist lords, merchants, industrialists, and their bourgeois representatives, such as lawyers, led the revolutions in countries like Holland, England, and France. In later bourgeois revolutions, precapitalist classes often carried them out from above in Germany, Japan, and elsewhere. But all built new states that facilitated capitalist development.

  Once established in the European metropole, they argue, capitalism could still have been strangled by its own contradictions, in particular its internal tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The European capitalist powers, in particular Holland and England, overcame these and other obstacles to capitalist development through their penetration of markets in the Americas and Asia. With these obstacles overcome, the European powers achieved a decisive advantage over the previously dominant tributary powers like China and the Ottomans that they carved up through imperial warfare. Thus, the West came to rule.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu have written an innovative and brilliant work of historical sociology. Unfortunately its academic language is opaque at points making it unnecessarily difficult to read. Beside that there are some serious questions to be asked about their argument.

  Many have rightly challenged their expansion of Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development to analyze pre-capitalist societies like the Mongol Empire and its interaction with European feudalism. Trotsky mainly argued that this law applied to capitalism, since as a mode of production it is uniquely expansionary compared to other modes of production, and therefore has the capacity to subordinate and transform development. For the most part, Anievas and Nisancioglu might be better served by seeing the pre-capitalist interactions through the law of uneven development, since in the main they do not reveal genuine hybrid social formations in their discussion of these societies, but a dynamic of competition, commodity exchange, and transfer of productive forces.

  In their discussion of capitalism, they endorse Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument in Provincializing Europe as a superior way for understanding the differences between advanced and developing capitalist societies than that of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Chakrabarty divides capitalism’s history into two parts: History 1 encompasses the system’s universalizing tendency to subordinate all laborers to its laws regardless of national particularity; and History 2 includes all the social particularities in each and every society like, in Chakrabarty’s words, human being’s “bodily habits,” religious “gods and spirits,” and “unselfconscious collective practices” that are “constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.”

  Anievas and Nisancioglu correctly criticize Chibber for claiming that Chakrabarty assigns the West to History 1 and postcolonial societies to History 2. Chakrabarty makes clear that both histories inhere in all capitalist societies. They also may have a point that Chibber’s emphasis on capitalist universalization weakens our ability to adequately explain how capitalism universally imposes its laws of motion on all societies and at the same time produces social differences between societies.

  But there is much to be lost in becoming hostage to Chakrabarty’s Heiddegerian mysticism and poststructuralist politics of difference between societies that posits a difference of kind between the West and the Orient. As Vasant Kaiwar warns in The Postcolonial Orient, with Chakrabarty, “we end up with a sentimental, postmodernist Third-Worldism.”

  Anievas and Nisancioglu would be better served by sticking with Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development, a law that Chakrabarty, by the way, dismisses along with the law of uneven development as an obstacle to understanding the postcolonial world. In fact, it is a far better basis, as Anievas and Nisancioglu themselves demonstrate, for explaining capitalism’s tendency to impose its logic on all societies and at the same time produce peculiarities in each and every society it transforms.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu’s aversion to what they worry are ideal-typical or reductionist definitions of capitalism such as the Political Marxist’s market dependency or the more classical Marxist definition of the competitive exploitation of wage labor leaves them with a rather vague definition of capitalism. Thus they write,

  Capitalism is best understood as a set of configurations, assemblages, or bundles of social relations and processes oriented around the systematic reproduction of the capital relation, but not reducible—either historically or logically—to that relation alone. . . . These relations may take numerous forms, such as coercive state apparatuses, ideologies and cultures of consent, or forms of power and exploitation that are not immediately given in or derivative of the simple capital-wage-labor relation, such as racism and patriarchy.

  This viewpoint—tacked on and undeveloped—likely leads them in their conclusion, whose political generalizations seem in contrast to the rest of their arguments, to some questionable criticisms of Marxist arguments about the revolutionary party, and class struggle and its relation to movements against oppression.

  They present a straw man conception of the revolutionary party, contenting that it is

  the organizational form, in which political differences are ironed out, unity among disparate parts realized, and a homogeneous political perspective pursued. In turn, the perspectives constructed by the leadership of parties and organizations are presented as the historical prime mover—the royal road—which simply needs to replicated everywhere for capitalism to be overthrown.

  The authors also claim that the Left committed to building parties assumes that it has all the answers already, imparts them in a top down way to workers and the oppressed, and sees political differences as something that “must be directed onto the True Path” or “exiled as a ‘bourgeois deviation.’” What they are describing is a sect, not a party. Certainly there are such sects, but they very rarely, if ever, play a leading role in any kind of struggle, let alone revolution.

  Anievas and Nisancioglu’s vague definition of capitalism leads them to decenter the working class as the pivotal agent of socialist revolution. This is ironic since Trotsky used the law of uneven and combined development, which is the core of their book, as the scientific basis of his strategy of permanent revolution, a strategy that underscored the central role of the working class in leading the rest of exploited and oppressed in revolution. By contrast they go so far as to ask, “might it be time to rethink the privileged revolutionary subject (the proletariat) in broader terms than its traditional, singular association with waged labor?”

  Drawing on theories of intersectionality, they want to dynamically integrate struggles against exploitation and oppression as all part of the anti-capitalist struggle. In doing so they rightly challenge Political Marxists like Ellen Meiksins Wood who argue that class exploitation is essential to capitalism while oppressions of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality are not. Instead, they argue that capitalism is equally dependent on class, race, gender, and other oppressions. They advocate, therefore, that all struggles pose equivalent threats to the system.

  They have a point but they take it too far. Capitalism rests on the competitive exploitation of wage labor; it is the basis of the entire system. At the same time, various oppressions are an inextricable part of it. For example, women’s oppression through their disproportionate burden in the social reproduction of labor is an essential part of capitalism today.

  Recognizing the constituent nature of capital-wage labor relation to the system does not diminish struggles against oppression. They are absolutely necessary to unite workers to overthrow the capitalist class, and within oppressed groups, which themselves consist of groups with different class interests, workers’ have the most interest in carrying the liberation struggle the furthest. Anti-capitalist struggles can start on any number of fronts, including against aspects of oppression, but if it does not win at the point of production, the system with all its sundry oppressions, cannot be overthrown.

  Regardless of these questions and criticisms, Anievas and Nisancioglu have made an enormous contribution to redressing the one-sided debates about the origins of capitalism and the West’s conquest of the planet. Their book should be read by anyone hoping to understand as well as challenge Eurocentrism, imperialism, and the capitalist system as a whole.

• Marx and Philosophy
  http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/2064
  Word count: 2731

  'How the West Came to Rule' by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu
  How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
  Pluto Press, London, 2015. 386pp., £24.99 pb
  ISBN 9780745336152

  Reviewed by Tony Mckenna
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  About the reviewer

  Tony Mckenna

  Tony Mckenna’s work appears in The Huffington Post, ABC Australia, The United Nations, New Statesman, The Progressive, New Internationalist, New Humanist, Ceasefire Magazine, Monthly Review, Science and Society, Critique, Rethinking Marxism, and others. His first book was on Art, Literature and Culture; the second, on Joseph Stalin, is out now.

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  Review

  19 October 2015
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  One of the most intriguing areas of Marxist scholarship centres around the ‘transition debate’: that is, the controversy surrounding the way capitalist relations developed out of the old world, and the processes by which they achieved ascendency. The debate spans from Marx’s own fragmented observations – which suggest that capitalist relations were cultivated first in Northern Italy, only to be prematurely stifled – to the development of Political Marxism a century later, which tended to be more emphatic and Anglo-centric in tone (especially among its later followers), emphasising the role and significance of the English countryside in the 14th century. Coeval with the geographic question, was the way capitalist social relations developed ontologically, so to speak: Were they - in the old Marxist parlance - incubated in the womb and contradictions of the old (feudal) order – or was the set of relations of the feudal-agricultural world increasingly corrupted and ‘capitalised’ by the rise of trade, external markets, and the corroding imperatives of exchange value? The latter debate was, of course, famously hashed out in the pages of the journal Science and Society, by Sweezy, Dobb and others way back in the 1950s.

  But wherever you stand on these issues one thing seems clear, that is - the ‘transition debate’ has been conducted, in the main, on firmly European ground. Other issues have been referenced: the role of the Atlantic slave trade on the processes of European primitive accumulation, for example, is heavily underscored in Marx’s Capital and has recently received detailed treatment by Robin Blackburn among others, but the attempt to provide a totalising analysis, which seeks the complex web of interactions between older modes of production and capitalist trends on a world scale; an analysis which is designed to demonstrate just how heavily the emergence of modern capitalism was dependent on the interactions between older empires, newer powers - and the subsumption of a variety of forms of labour which came to provide, so to say – capital’s amniotic fluid: such an analysis has yet to reach fruition. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’s How the West Came to Rule is an exciting and engaging effort precisely because it goes a good way toward providing this type of account. Specifically, it utilizes the Trotskyist analytical method of uneven and combined development as a means to unpick some of the deadlocks the more localised accounts of the transition problem have yielded.

  In this book the authors first provide a summary of the history of the transition debate, paying particular attention to the eurocentrism (or later Anglo-centrism) of political Marxism and the tendency toward ahistoricity which is built into World-System Theory. Other chapters involve a consideration of the Mongolian Empire and the way in which it facilitated a trade network from the more developed East to the European backwaters, and how the effects of the plague it also helped transmit would significantly alter the value of peasant labour - undermining the balance of class forces in feudal Europe – and leavening the way for spots of capitalist development thereby. The authors go on to consider the Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry of the ‘long sixteenth century’, and the manner in which it provided a breathing space for the development of those countries on the European periphery whose economic trajectories were already developing in a capitalist direction - like England and the Northern Netherlands.

  The ‘discovery’ and colonisation of the Americas (itself partially a result of the Ottoman ascent and its seizure of Constantinople in 1453) – is given detailed consideration, in terms of both the subjugation of African slaves on an international level, and the decimations of the indigenous populations which took place in both North America and Latin America; alongside the hybrid social systems which pertained in the aftermath, and the way their economic activity fed back into shaping the political landscape of the European nations. Likewise the relationship between the European nations and their counterparts in the East is examined in depth; specifically the way the Dutch were able to subsume South Asian regions like Singapore and Indonesia in a world market which was directed by the Dutch Republic, and which provided a vital impetus for the further development of capitalism in the United Provinces – and also the way British capital was able to subordinate the Indian market to itself in and through the imperial conquest of the remnants of the Mughal Empire. In addition, the book provides an examination of the concept of bourgeois revolution, focusing in particular on the English, Dutch and French variants.

  There are many high spots in the analysis. The account of the class relations and the historical development of the Ottoman Empire is clear but also profound. The authors demonstrate persuasively how its tributary mode of production entailed all sorts of advancements on the feudal empires it was pulled into contact with on its western flank. The extraction of the surplus product of peasant labour was achieved through ‘the preponderance of taxation as a mechanism … regulated by regional and central agents of the Ottoman state’ (99). This had several consequences, not least of which was that the power of the upper classes based on the land was substantially weaker than that of its western feudal counterparts, for its access to the surplus product was directly mediated by the central state, ‘almost all land was formerly owned by the Sultan, while military fiefs – timars – were predominantly nonhereditary, changeable, and regularly rotated’ (99). The power of a landed ‘nobility’ could not congeal in the way it might in feudal terms, and thus the Ottoman tributary system was essentially more stable, less prone to fragmentation in the way the more parcellized, competing elements of ruling class feudal power were.

  But it was precisely its advanced character which, at a certain point, placed the Ottoman state at a distinct disadvantage with regard to its feudal opposition. From within the fragmented polities of feudal power, forms of private property could be more effectively cultivated. A class of merchants were allowed to develop whose commercial activities attained a relative independence from the centralised state – in contrast to the Ottomans where the ‘subordination of merchants to the tributary state was also evident geopolitically’ (105). The Ottoman state, according to the logic of its own mode of production, had to capture and tightly regulate the tributaries by which the surpluses flowed from the exploited subaltern territories. Such acts of conquest and taxation were facilitated by complex ‘mechanisms of social reproduction’ (103), which included a highly centralised army and bureaucracy that operated by ‘controlling coin circulation, production and prices’ (105). Market relations were not unheard of, but they were severely regulated and even stifled – ‘anti luxury laws were deployed to confiscate merchant fortunes’ (105).

  The suppression of the market had far-reaching consequences in the way in which the Ottomans waged war; the funds were often extracted from the peasantry directly and en masse, whereas feudal lords were more liable to bolster intensive, concentrated forms of direct exploitation with loan agreements with wealthy merchants or international banking houses, and thus the logic of a market economy, of exchange value, could more fundamentally penetrate the means of social reproduction. Finally, because the means of exploitation were ‘dispersed across the nobility’ (104) in the feudal case, the peasant tended to have little legal recourse against the lord who was directly exploiting him, a lord who could often set the legal limits of that exploitation. In a centralised bureaucratic state this was less so, the peasants had greater access to their own surplus product, and this often meant they were less rebellious then their western European counterparts; the contours of class struggle, therefore, were somewhat less pronounced. This would prove significant, of course, in light of the peasant rebellions which broke out throughout the 14th century in particular, and were part and parcel of the way peasant labour was able to detach itself from its feudal premise.

  The authors’ analysis of the ‘encomienda’ – the legally enshrined framework of exploitation which arose in the aftermath of the colonisation of Latin America – is likewise highly impressive. They articulate the way in which the Spanish preserved many of the productive relations which had characterised the pre-Colombian world. In Mexico, for instance, the tributary form of the Aztec Empire was largely maintained – a form “in which the direct producers retained access to the means of production and formal vestiges of kin-based, ‘communal’ social relations persisted, while indigenous elites extracted surpluses from these producers through ‘extra economic’ means”(130). Rather than impose its own style of Iberian feudalism, the Spanish crown granted parcels of land - or encomiendas - to those conquistadores whom it favoured, and the latter were then allowed to extract a tax in terms of goods, money or labour services from the Amerindian inhabitants who fell under the remit of the given territory. The granting of an encomienda did not confer on the trustee any property rights (which still accrued to the crown) and its period of use was merely temporary. Just like under the Ottomans, the central state (the Spanish Crown) could rotate its imperial functionaries, and thereby curtail their power. The encomienda, then, was the product of an uneven and combined development - which arose from the combination of the old tributary forms with the nature of Spanish colonialism – specifically the tension between the colonists and the crown, as the latter sought to limit the power of the former. Amerindian Slavery too was abolished in Latin America, precisely because the danger of private property accrued through the ownership of persons could well bolster the power of the colonists at the expense of the crown.

  Following Marx, the authors note how the plundering of the Americas was key to capitalist development in England in the run up to the industrial revolution. As Marx noted, capital invested in the colonies allows for a profit rate which ‘is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour through the use of slaves and coolies, etc… there is no reason why the higher rates of profit … should not enter into the equalization of the general rate of profit’ (Cited 163). Consequently the higher rate of exploitation which more backward forms of labour offered in the colonies could be refracted back into the colonial heartland and thereby counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, while also providing an outlet by which a surplus population who had fallen through the gaps during the centuries of long, interminable and painful processes of primitive accumulation could be absorbed. In other words, the colonies were the key by which the limits of England’s domestic agrarian capitalism were to be transcended, and the breakthrough to industrial capitalism was to be secured.

  The analysis of the Dutch Republic and its developing empire unfolds along similar lines. Again, the use of the theory of uneven and combined development is integral to the account. The Dutch mode of exploitation already revealed a significantly capitalist character in and through the creation of the ‘joint stock company’ (VOC), which, through its internalisation of protection costs, could become the pivot around which ‘the logics of territorialism and capitalism were united’ (223). The VOC created a link between the investors and managers at home and the political decision-making process which sustained the empire and the logic of its imperialism abroad. The form of exploitation which Dutch imperialism adopted more and more tended toward ‘going beyond activity in the circulation process and intervening directly in production, assuming both ownership and control of the direct production process’ (242).

  The authors cite the example of a silk-reeling centre in Bengal which ‘initially employed over 3000 reelers before being reconstructed in 1715 to accommodate over 4,00 workers … while also providing them with equipment, working space and raw materials’ (242). These techniques and methods deployed at the level of production – across the constellation of Dutch interests, which dotted the East Indies during the period - were combined and fused with the indigenous forms of labour which they encountered there – ‘a multiplicity of uneven forms – advances, debt peonage, corvées, plantations and wage labour’ (243). Such a fusion guaranteed the Dutch something of an integrated monopoly based on the control of the production of goods, and thereby allowed for the broader regulation of a world market where cheap production and labour costs could be exploited to the hilt. At the same time, this also provided the means by which the domestic economy of the Netherlands - which was now based primarily on wage-labour, but suffered from a deficit of labourers – could be augmented by the surfeit of cheap labour abroad, and thus overall wages could fall. All of this helped Dutch capitalism to pass the threshold of its own local limits.

  How the West Came to Rule is an excellent, inventive and fascinating piece of scholarship; it is all the more remarkable because it is able to condense a complex of vast and contrary trends, in and through the lens of uneven and combined development, and to demonstrate how they intersect at the point of capital development. It achieves this, for the most part, with clarity and conviction. There are, however, occasional weak spots in the analysis. The chapter on ‘pure theory’ – on uneven and combined development – at times lurches into the abstruse, clunky, Althusserian-type language which is so often considered a mark of distinction and profundity in academia today, and it indulges a certain relativism with regards to the objective economic categories of ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’. So, for example, we are informed that ‘a social formation such as the Habsburg or Ottoman Empire during the 16th century might be considered more “advanced” than, say, the emerging capitalist societies of the United Provinces or England’ (56). Perhaps more significantly – although the authors have a very strong case in terms of rehabilitating the role of non-western European nations, territories and older labour practises in the development of capitalism – it is a case they are sometimes liable to overstate. In my view, they overestimate the productive capacity of plantation slavery, and this leads them to misconstrue its relation to the ontological nature of capitalism.

  For instance, they argue that ‘capitalism utilises exploitation and oppression – beyond the formally free exchange of labour power for wages … The violence that inheres in forms of exploitation such as slavery … is not external to capitalism, but constitutive of its very ontology’(278). This is highly problematic. Developed capitalism and generalised wage-labour is antithetical to slavery – for in the long term, wage labour is always going to be more productive. In the processes of primitive accumulation, when the capitalist economy as a whole is still fragmented and disparate, and its level of productive technique still relatively immature, the immediacies of naked exploitation that the slave system offers can be key to pulling it (developed capitalism) into being. But once the capitalist economy is established, it is compelled to abolish slavery; the methods of violence which underpin capitalist exploitation consequently lose the immediate ‘extra-economic’ essence which is characteristic of the slave mode of production. (I suppose one might make an exception for those cases of capitalism in acute crisis – Nazi militarism for instance - which actually revived and integrated slavery into its mode of production.)

  Nevertheless, How the West Came to Rule is an exemplary scholarly achievement, providing a powerful riposte to Political Marxism, and an important step forward in a vital debate.

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