Periodizing the
Thought of
Andre
Gunder Frank:
From
Underdevelopment to
the
19th Century Asian Age
Christopher Chase-Dunn
Institute for Research
on World-Systems
University of
California-Riverside
draft v. 3/19/2015. 9158 words
An earlier version was presented at the annual meeting of
the International Studies Association, New Orleans, Feb. 19, 2015 This is IROWS Working Paper #88 available at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows88/irows88.htm
Abstract:
This paper reviews Andre Gunder Frank’s contributions
to our understanding of the modern world-system, the long-term evolution of
world-systems and the issues raised in Frank’s posthumous book about the Global
Nineteenth Century. Early, middle and late Frank’s are praised and critiqued
and those scholars who are continuing the Gunder
Project are supported and encouraged.
Andre
Gunder Frank’s legacy is wide and deep. He was one of
the founders of dependency theory and the world-systems perspective. He took
the idea of whole historical systems very seriously and his rereading of Adam
Smith inspired Giovanni Arrighi’s (2007) reevaluation
of the comparison of, and relations between, China and the West. This paper
reviews Frank’s contributions to our understanding of the modern world-system,
the long-term evolution of world-systems and some of the issues raised in his
posthumous book about the Global Nineteenth Century (Frank 2014). I divide
Frank’s thought into three periods (early, middle and late) in order to
explicate his ideas and to compare them with one another and with those of
other scholars.
All intellectuals change their
thinking as time passes. Some elaborate on their earlier ideas or pursue
directions that had occurred to them in earlier projects. Some make radical
changes that require retraining. Andre Gunder Frank
was unusual in the extent to which he sought to correct mistakes in his own
earlier work and was will to rethink basic assumptions. There are continuities
in his work to be sure. He was passionate about grand ideas as new ways of
looking at the world. He had a strong commitment in favor of the underdogs. He
was never afraid of confronting his own earlier ideas and he enjoyed
challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and myths. His detractors called him a gadfly and said
he “painted with broad strokes.” Broad strokes are often a good start down
paths that are hard to think.
Gunder was an early adopter and important diffuser of the
dependency perspective that emerged from Latin American social scientists in
the 1950s. His 1966 article "The Development of Underdevelopment"
(published in Monthly Review) was an important element in the Third Worldism that became an important element of Western
independent socialism after the Cuban Revolution. Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy were significant
contributors to this trend. The basic idea, which Frank held to the end, is
that the nature of social institutions and class relations in poor and
powerless countries are not primarily due to traditional local power structures
but that these institutions and class structures have been shaped by hundreds
of years of exposure to the powers of “the metropole”
(Gunder’s original term for the powerful core
countries). Colonialism and neo-colonialism have left what we now call the
Global South in a state of dependent underdevelopment. So the modernity/traditionalism
contrast was seen as a global socially constructed and reproduced stratified
power hierarchy.
Gunder soon came
into contact with other Third Worldists and, with
Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi (all Africanists) he helped to formulate the emerging
world-system perspective. Frank’s research (Frank 1967, 1969, 1979b) showed
that Latin American societies were heavily shaped by colonialism and
neo-colonialism and argued that these dependent social formations should be
understood, not as feudalism, but as peripheral capitalism because they were a
necessary part of the larger capitalist world-system. The conceptualization of
capitalism as mode of accumulation that contained both wage labor (in the core)
and coerced labor (in the non-core) was elaborated by Frank and by the other
founders of the world-system perspective. Wallerstein
(1974) realized that serfdom had played a somewhat similar part in the peripheralization of Poland. Frank helped to formulate the idea that the
capitalist world-system was a single integrated whole and that it was a
systemically stratified system in which global inequality was reproduced and
the role of the non-core was an important and necessary part of the system.
This was a challenge to Marx’s definition of capitalism as necessarily
requiring wage labor and more orthodox Marxists accused Frank and the others of
“circulationism” because they seemed to focus on the
importance of trade between the core and the periphery rather than class
relations within each country. But the world-systems formulators explicitly
examined the global class structure as well as considering carefully the class
structures within countries (e.g. Amin 1980b).
Frank’s (1978)
examination of world history from 1492 to 1789 provided an insightful account
of the whole system and contributed to the reformulation of the study of
systemic modes of production by recasting them as modes of accumulation,
which included production, distribution and the different institutional ways in
which wealth and power were appropriated.
The Middle Frank: Ancient Hyperglobalism
Gunder
began to develop an interest in questions concerning the continuities and
discontinuities between the modern system of the last five centuries and
earlier periods. Other scholars were also doing this. Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1989) influential study examined a multicore
Eurasian system in the thirteenth century CE. Chase-Dunn and Hall published a
collection entitle Core/Periphery Relations in the Precapitalist
Worlds in 1991. Gunder began reading world
historians such as Philip Curtin and William H. McNeill. He developed an
important working partnership with Barry Gills in this period and together they
published the collection entitled The World System: Five Hundred Years or
Five Thousand? in 1993. Gills and
Frank argued, following Kasja Ekholm
and Jonathan Friedman (1982), that a “capital-imperialist” mode of accumulation
had emerged during the Bronze Age and that this system went through phases in
which state power was more important interspersed by phases in which markets
and private accumulation by wealthy families were more important. This mode of
accumulation had been continuous since the Bronze Age and so there was no
transition to capitalism in Europe. Already Gunder
had staked out this position in his 1989 Review article “Transitions and modes: in imaginary
Eurocentric Feudalism, Capitalism and Socialism, and the Real World System
History.” So capital imperialism had been continuous since the Bronze Age
emergence of cities and states. The emergence of capital imperialism was never
analyzed because it occurred before the emergence of cities and states in
Mesopotamia, which was the beginning of the Frank-Gills system of capital imperialism.
Frank and Gills also argued that there had been a single Afroeurasian
world system since the Bronze Age because neighboring societies share surpluses
and so are systemically linked with one another and if all indirect links are
counted there would be a single network of interaction. Frank also implied that
there will be no future transition to socialism.[1]
The capital-imperialist system is a great wheel that has gone around since the
Bronze Age and will continue into the future indefinitely.
Many
of Frank’s friends on the Left were very unhappy with this new analysis, but Gunder stuck to his guns, while continuing to critique
neo-colonialism and exploitation of the downtrodden. The new emphasis was on
the important continuities in the system, which were extended to the Americas
after 1492, creating a single global system. Frank also developed a fascination
with Central Asia in this period because of its long importance as a link
between the East and the West and the hybrid and innovative social formations
that emerged from there. In this he was a progenitor of a new (or renewed)
Central-Asia-Centrism that flourished after Frank’s affections moved on to East
Asia.
Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod’s important 1989 study of the multicentric
Eurasian world-systems of the l3th century CE was a very valuable and
inspiring contribution. Abu-Lughod helped to clear
the way forward in world-systems analysis by rejecting the idea of the ancient hyperglobalists that there has always been either a single
global (Earth-wide) system (Modelski 2003 and Lenski 2005) or a single Afroeurasian
system since the early Bronze Age (Frank and Gills 1993). Abu-Lughod agreed
with Wallerstein (1974) that as we go back in time
there were multiple regional whole
systems that should be studied separately and compared. Things would be
much simpler if it made sense to use the whole Earth as the unit of analysis
far back in time. The ancient hyperglobalists are
correct that there has been a either a single global network (or an Afroeurasian and American network) for millennia because
all human groups interact with their neighbors and so they are indirectly
connected with all others (though connections across the Bering Sea may have
been nearly non-existent for a period after the humans migrated from Central
Asia to the Americas). David Christian (2004: 213) contends that there have
been four “world zones” of information interaction (Afroeurasia,
America, Australia/Papua New Guinea and the Pacific) over the past 4000 years. But
all these claims about ancient macro-region interaction systems ignore the
issue of the fall-off of interaction
effects (Renfrew 1975 and below).
Frank and Gills (1993) contended that there had
been a single Afroeurasian system since the rise of
cities and states in Mesopotamia. But, if we read Frank and Gills as studying
the important continuities of the expanding West Asian/North African interstate
system and the Afroeurasian prestige goods network,
much of their analysis of core/periphery relations is quite valuable.
A Precontact North America-wide system?
Peter
Peregrine and Charles Lekson (2006, 2012) claim there
was a continent-wide American ‘oikumene’ that
extended to Honduras in Central America before the arrival of the Europeans.[2]
They contend that information spread quickly and cite several stories from
historian Herbert Eugene Bolton as evidence. The issue here is the spatial
scale of what Chase-Dunn and Hall (1996) have called the Information Network.
Information is exchanged, often in connection with trade, and this kind of
interaction is important for the diffusion of ideas and technologies. Though
information is lighter than other goods it is still subject to the frictions of
space, and so there is information fall-off and point in reached beyond which
no information travels.
Chase-Dunn and Hall have tended to assume that the Information Network is about
as big as the Prestige Good Network, but this is just a rough guess. Peregrine
and Lekson’s idea that information could rapidly
spread across the entire North American continent by means of foot
transportation and in a situation in which intelligible languages were rather
localized is somewhat far-fetched. We know that indigenous Americans developed
specialized trade languages for intergroup communication and there was regional
multilingualism that allowed information to move from group to group. But how
far and fast could information move?
Cora Alice Du Bois’s (1939) study of the
diffusion of the Ghost Dance cult from Western Nevada to Northern California
and Southern Oregon may help us get a handle on the issue of the spatial scale
of Information Networks. Du Bois interviewed people who had participated in and
observed the spread of the Ghost Dance cult. The 1870 Ghost Dance came from the
same area as the more famous 1890 Ghost Dance that inspired a Sioux uprising,
and the doctrine was very similar. The Indian dead were returning and all the
Europeans would disappear. As informants told Du Bois, this was a “hurry-up
word.” Doing a special dance would hasten the arrival of the formerly dead and
the emergence of the new world. This kind of millenarianism is familiar to
students of social movements and may have been an occasional feature of precontact indigenous social movements as well. It is hard
to sort out the autochthonous ideological elements from the borrowed aspects of
the Ghost Dance, and using it to estimate the geographical nature of precontact information systems has the same problem. By
1870 Indians in Nevada, California and Oregon had some access to roads, horses
and wagons, which they did not have before 1849 or so. These undoubtedly
extended their abilities to communicate with each other by making longer trips
easier. This said, the geography of the 1870 Ghost Dance was still rather
limited by several important factors. Language was one. Many Indian communities
had multilingual members, but the composition of these and their willingness to
aid the spread of the Ghost Dance doctrine were important determinants of where
the movement spread to and where it did not. Some communities, those that had
been less disrupted by the arrival of the Euroamericans,
were more resistant. The old “doctors” (spiritual specialists) in these did not
approve of the new ideas and were able to prevent the introduction or adoption
of the songs and dances in less disrupted regions. The Ghost Dance songs and
ideas were carried from their origin in Eastern Nevada by inspired individuals
who went abroad to tell the word. And the word was taken farther by new
recruits, who often modified the content and adapted it to local traditions.
From Walker Lake in Nevada, where the Ghost Dance emerged, to the farthest
point north in Southern Oregon is about 300 miles as the crow flies. The range
of a cult was probably less in precontact North
America, especially before the arrival of the horse. This is far from the
continent-wide oikumene posited by Peregrine and Lekson. But it does not exclude the possibility that ideas
and information can diffuse very long distances by passing from group to group,
nor that there may have been a occasional very long distance trip by an
individual or a small group. Such adventures would probably have been rare, but
they may account for the diffusion of “Southern Cult” artistic styles from
Mesoamerica that appeared during the decline of the Mississippian interaction
sphere. In any case, Gunder
Frank’s notion of connectedness is based on the transmission of “surplus,” not
the transmission of information or ideas. Physical goods containing human labor
are likely to be even more subject to the tyranny of distance than are ideas.
Modes of Accumulation and the East/West
Comparison
In
1989 Andre Gunder Frank wrote the first version of
his contention that “the modes of production” distinction made by Marxists is
just so much ideological nonsense (Frank 1989).[3]
He had discovered that something very like capitalism existed in the ancient
and classical worlds, and he had become quite skeptical about the idea of the
transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, which he increasingly saw as
a Eurocentric construction that ignored important larger Eurasian-wide
dynamics. Frank came to accept something close to Kasja
Ekholm and Jonathan Friedman’s (1982) notion of
“capital-imperialism” in which the world system had oscillated back and forth
between more state-organized and more market-organized conditions since the
emergence of cities and states in Mesopotamia. According to Frank’s view there
were no transitions from qualitatively different logics of social reproduction.
This view ignored what had happened before the emergence of states (the
so-called kin-based modes of production), and it minimized the idea of a long-term
trend in which large tributary states became increasingly commercialized as
they adopted and expanded the use of money and markets. Frank also largely
ignored what have been called “semiperipheral
capitalist city-states” in the ancient and classical worlds. And he completely
denied that Europe had experienced a transformation in which capitalism had
become the predominant mode of accumulation.
This conceptual move on Frank’s part
was arguably an over-reaction to some very important but not well-understood
insights – that markets, money, merchant capitalism, finance capitalism,
capitalist manufacturing and wage labor had played a much more important role
in the ancient and classical worlds than many others had recognized, and that
much of the Marxist version of the transformation of modes of production was
very Eurocentric. Furthermore, as did many others by 1989, Frank came to see
the Soviet Union more as a somewhat modernized and totalitarian version of
capital-imperialism than as an experiment in socialism. Frank’s response to
these insights was to completely throw out the idea that modes of accumulation
evolve. As with the contention that there had been a single Afroeurasian
world system since the Bronze Age, he may have over-reacted in order to make a
dramatic break with his own earlier thought and that of many others.
My
position is that there, indeed, have been major transformations in the modes of
accumulation. One reason both Frank, and to lesser extent Arrighi
(1994), missed this is that they started their histories well after states had
been invented. An anthropological framework of comparison recognizes that the
invention of the state was itself a major shift, marking the invention of the
tributary modes of accumulation. That this transition occurred independently
several times in human history indicates that it was part of a regular process
of socio-cultural evolution (Sanderson 1999; Chase-Dunn and Lerro
2014; Hall and Chase-Dunn 2006).
In
Rise and Demise, Chase-Dunn and Hall
characterized Rome and China as commercializing tributary empires in which
substantial amounts of marketization, commodity production and wage labor had
emerged, but the predominant logic of social reproduction remained based on the
appropriation of surplus product through the use of state power. Taxation,
tribute-gathering and rents from landed property were the mainstays of the
state and the ruling class. Paper money
was used in Sung China in the 10th century CE. But the state and the
ruling class of mandarins, or the marcher-state usurpers who sometimes came to
power, were mainly dependent on the use of state coercion to extract surplus
product from the direct producers. This is rather different from a capitalist
system in which profit-making and the appropriation of surplus value through
employment of wage labor has become the mainstay of the state and the ruling
class. China was commercialized, but the central state was still a tributary
state, not a capitalist state. A capitalist
state is controlled by capitalists and acts primarily in their interest, though
state power is sometimes used to also serve others who are allied with and
needed by the capitalists. Capitalist states existed in the ancient and
classical worlds, but they were out on the semiperipheral
edge, in the interstices between the tributary states and empires. Only in
Europe did a cluster of semiperipheral capitalist
city-states emerge, and then later a capitalist core state, the United
Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century.
In
Volume 1 of The Modern World-System
Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) noted a key difference
between China and the West that had huge consequences. He pointed out that
China had a central government -- single “world empire” that could make and
enforce a system-wide policy. Wallerstein pointed out
that at the same time that the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator was heading
out, with Genoese support, to circumnavigate Africa for the purposes of
outflanking the Venetian monopoly on East Indian spices, the Ming Dynasty was
abandoning the Treasure Fleet explorations to Africa and the West in order to
concentrate on defending the heartland of the middle kingdom from steppe
invaders. In Europe there was no central emperor to tell the Portuguese to
desist. Europe was developing a multicentric
interstate system in which finance capital was beginning to play and important
role in directing state policy (see Arrighi 1994),
while China was maintaining a relatively centralized tributary empire. Arguably
this was the most important difference between China and the West. It was the
weakness of tributary states in the West after the fall of Rome that allowed
capitalism to become a predominant form of accumulation, while the strong
tributary state in China, run by mandarins and semiperipheral
conquerors, repeatedly succeeded in confiscating the wealth of merchants who
posed a political threat to state control.
This
explanation was rejected as so much Eurocentric claptrap by Frank, because Max
Weber and Karl Marx had said as much, and they needed to be thrown into the
dustbin of Eurocentrism with all the other dead white guys. In Adam Smith in Beijing Giovanni Arrighi, reviews and recasts the recent work on Chinese
economic history that has been partly inspired by Gunder
Frank’s analysis (e.g. Bin Wong 1997; Kenneth Pomeranz
2000; Kaoru Sugihara 2003) These authors
show extensive markets, commodity production, buyer-driven commodity chains,
etc. in China and confirm that Chinese economic institutions in 1900 were not
inferior to those of the West. Arrighi (2007) ends up with the conclusion that the key
question is “who controls the state?” In Europe capitalists came to control,
first city-states, and then nation-states. In China that never happened, though
it may be happening now for the first time.
Giovanni
Arrighi’s Adam
Smith in Beijing is dedicated to Andre Gunder
Frank and Frank’s influence is obvious throughout. Arrighi
does not accept Frank’s blanket rejection of the distinction between the
tributary mode of accumulation and the capitalism mode of accumulation. In The Long Twentieth Century Arrighi describes China as having been a tributary state.
But in Adam Smith Arrighi
depicts China as having developed a more labor-intensive form of market society
that is less inhumane than the kind of capitalism that developed in the West.
Like Frank, Arrighi appears to have abandoned any
discussion of the possibility of a future transition to a qualitatively
different socialist mode of accumulation, though this is not explicitly
discussed. While Frank sees history as
great wheel that goes around and around between more state-organized and more
market-organized forms, Arrighi sees some possibility
of progress in the sense of a more egalitarian form of market society, with
China playing the role of exemplar and midwife.[4]
Both
Frank and Arrighi share the conviction that East Asia
is again rising to a central position, though Frank did not say as explicitly Arrighi has exactly what is meant by this. As reviewed
above, Frank argued that China had been the center of the Eurasian world-system
until the late eighteenth century and that then Europe had suddenly gotten the
upper hand, but that the European societies and their offshoots were now in
decline and China will be the center once again. In Adam Smith Arrighi is careful to avoid
saying that China will become the next global hegemon. Rather he sees China as
the exemplar of a better form of political economy – market society, and so the
world will become flatter (less unequal) to the extent that other countries
emulate the Chinese model of networked and state-led market society.
Arrighi contends that the kind of market society that is
said to be emerging in China is kinder and gentler to workers because it does
not replace labor with machines in such disruptive manor and it is less
destructive to the environment than Western capitalism because it does not
employ as large-scale methods of harvesting nature. It is also supposedly less
imperialistic. He contends that there
was an “industrious revolution” in China in the eighteenth century in which
intensive labor was used to produce commodities instead of replacing labor with
machines. This kind of market society was characterized by Mark Elvin (1973) as
a “high level equilibrium trap” in which capital had little incentive to invest
in labor-saving technology because labor was so cheap. Arrighi
emphasizes the upside of this for employment. He also contends that the Chinese
Revolution helped to create the conditions under which this kind of market
society could reemerge in the decades since Mao’s demise.[5]
Arrighi further contends that China was less imperialistic
than the West in earlier centuries, concentrating more on domestic development
than on global expansion. The East Asian PMN with China at its core was
somewhat less prone to interstate war than was the multicentric
European system of competing core states. Physical and human geography are also
relevant here. As John Fitzpatrick
(1992) first point out, despite a relatively great degree of centralization,
the East Asian system was still an interstate system that periodically broke
down into smaller warring states. These breakdowns were less frequent than the
nearly constant interstate wars of Europe, but this is probably due to the
preponderance of power held by the East Asian hegemon – China, than to any
difference in the modes of accumulation. An eight hundred pound gorilla can
keep the peace. The East Asian
trade-tribute system studied by Takeshi Hamashita
(2003) was a rather hierarchical form of international political economy,
though it was probably less rapacious than European colonialism. But again this
was at least partly due to the fact that the core was a single core-wide state
rather than a collection of competing core states.
The
notion that China concentrated only on domestic problems after the Ming
abandonment of the treasure fleets is contradicted by Peter Perdue’s (2005)
careful study of Qing expansion in Central Asia, and the notion that China is
an exemplar of contemporary egalitarianism in relations with the periphery is
contradicted by the situation in Tibet and by many observers of Chinese
projects in Africa (e.g. Bergesen 2014a). While we do
not condone China-bashing, and we agree with Arrighi
that China may be a somewhat more progressive force in world society than many
other powerful actors, the idea that adoption of the Chinese model of political
economy can be the main basis of a more egalitarian, just, and sustainable form
of global governance is a bit of a stretch. On the other hand there are
important elements of the idea of market society that probably are quite
relevant for a formulation of what should be the goals of contemporary
progressives, and that are possibly achievable during the twenty-first century.
The Late Frank: Sinocentrism
Gunder’s (1998) provocative study of the global
economy from 1400 to 1800 CE contended that China had been the center
of the global system since the Iron Age. Marx,
Weber and most other social scientist were hopelessly Eurocentric and this fatally
distorted their concepts and explanations of what had happened in world
history. The idea that capitalism arose in Europe is a myth. Capital imperialism had been the dominant
mode of accumulation since the early Bronze Age. Gunder contended
that the rise of European hegemony was a sudden and conjunctural development
caused by the late emergence in China of a “high level equilibrium trap” and
the success of Europeans in using bullion extracted from the Americas to buy
their way into Chinese technological, financial and production networks. Frank
contended that European hegemony was fragile from the start and will be
short-lived with a predicted new rise of Chinese predominance in the near
future. He also argued that the scholarly ignorance of the importance of China
invalidates all the social science theories that have mistakenly construed the
rise of the West and the differences between the East and the West. As I have
said above, in Frank’s view there never was a transition from feudalism to
capitalism that distinguished Europe from other regions of the world. He argued
that the basic dynamics of development were similar in the Afroeurasian
system for 5000 years (Frank and Gills 1993).
In ReOrient
Gunder forcefully argued that it is fundamental
and necessary to study the whole system
in order to look for continuities and transformations. He contended that the
most important way to do this is to look at multilateral trade, investment and
money flows. He argues correctly that very little quantitative research has
been done on the whole global system. When he reviews what has been done he finds that the
Rise of the West occurred much later than most thought and that it was due
mostly to the ability of the European states to extract resources from their
colonies. In the Global 19th Century the
gap that emerged between China and the West was smaller and shorter than most observers
knew. He contends that the rise of the West was short and insubstantial and the
global system is now returning to the China-centered structure that it has had
for most of the history of the world system.
Gunder’s
model of development emphasizes a combination of state expansion and
financial accumulation, although in Reorient he focused almost
exclusively on financial centrality as the major important element. His study
of global flows of specie, especially silver, importantly extends the work of
Flynn (1996) and others to expand our understanding of what happened between 1400
and 1800 CE. Frank also used demographic weight, and especially population
growth and the growth of cities, as indicators of relative importance and
developmental success (see also Morris 2010, 2013)
|
World Region |
City |
Population in thousands |
|
East Asia |
Nanjing |
1000 |
|
South Asia |
Vijayanagara |
400 |
|
West Asia-Africa |
Cairo |
360 |
|
Europe |
Paris |
280 |
|
East Asia |
Hangzhou |
235 |
|
America |
Tenochtitlán |
200 |
Table 1: World Largest cities in 1400 CE
Table 1 shows the sizes of six
largest cities on Earth in 1400 CE. Two of the six (Nanjing and Hangzhou) were
in China and Nanjing was the largest and much larger than the second largest,
which was Vijayanagara, the capital of a large empire
that emerged in the southern part of South Asia to resist Moslem incursions. So,
based on city sizes, Gunder is right that China was
the center at the beginning of the period studied in ReOrient.
Figure 1: East Asian and European Urban Population as a % of the total population in the World’s 6 Largest Cities, 1500 BCE to CE 2010
Figure 1 shows the percentage of the total population in the world’s six largest cities held by cities in Europe and East Asia since 1500 BCE. Both regions rise and fall but the waves are not synchronous. Rather there is the sea-saw pattern noted by Morris and other observers. Europe had a rise that began during the late 3rd millennium and then crashed in the late 2nd millennium. East Asia had a rise that began in the late 2nd millennium BCE, crashed and then recovered and peaked in 500 BCE. East Asia has another rise in the middle of first millennium CE, a decline and then another rise during the first part of the 2nd millennium CE, a decline that ends in 1800 CE and then a recovery. Europe has a small recovery during the last centuries of the first millennium CE, a crash, and then a rise to a level higher than that of East Asia that peaks in 1850 and then a decline that is due to the rise of American cities as well as the recovery of cities in East Asia. Figure 1 indicates that in 1200CE Europe had no cities among the world’s six largest but then it began a long rise. It passed East Asia between 1800 and 1900, and then underwent a rapid decline in importance as indicated by the relative size of its largest cities.
For East Asia we see in Figure 1 a rise to the highest peak of all (80%) in 1300 CE. Not until 1900 was East Asia bested by the European cities after a rapid decline after 1800. The European cities were bested again by the East Asian cities between 1950 and 2000 during the rapid decline of the European cities in terms of their size-importance among the world’s largest cities. This most recent rise of the East Asian cities is a consequence of the upward mobility of Japan, China and the East Asian NICs in the global political economy.
The
trajectory of Europe displayed in Figure 1 supports part of Gunder Frank’s
(1998) analysis, but contradicts another part. The small cities of Europe in
the early period indicate its peripheral status vis a vis the core
regions of West Asia/North Africa, South Asia and East Asia. As Frank argues in
ReOrient, Europe did not best East Asia (as
indicated by city sizes) until the beginning of the 19th century.
But the long European rise, beginning in the thirteenth century, contradicts
Frank’s depiction of a sudden and conjunctural emergence of European hegemony.
Based on relative city sizes it appears that the rise of Europe occurred over a
period of 600 years. And
Frank’s contention that the European peak was relatively shallow is somewhat
contradicted by the height of the peak in 1900, which time European cities had
70% of the population of the world’s six largest cities.
Frank’s
ReOrient depiction of a sudden and
radical decline of China that began in 1800 CE is supported in Figure 1. His
analysis in ReOrient,
which focuses on the period from 1400 to 1800 CE, does not examine the relative
decline of East Asian predominance that began in 1300 CE.
This
examination of the problem of the relative importance of regions relies
exclusively on the population sizes of cities, a less than ideal indicator of
power and relative centrality.[6]
Nevertheless, these results suggest some possible problems with Andre Gunder
Frank’s (1998) characterization of the relationship between Europe and China
before and during the rise of European hegemony. Frank’s contention that Europe
was primarily a peripheral region relative to the core regions of the
Afroeurasian world-system is supported by the city data, with some
qualifications. Europe was, for millennia, a periphery of the large cities and
powerful empires of ancient Western Asian and North Africa. The Greek and Roman
cores were instances of semiperipheral marcher states that conquered important
parts of the older West Asian/North African core. After the decline of the
Western Roman Empire, the core shifted back toward the East and Europe was once
again a peripheral region relative to the Middle Eastern core.
Counter
to Frank’s contention, however, the rise of European hegemony was not a sudden
conjunctural event that was due solely to a late developmental crisis in China.
The city population size data indicate that an important renewed core formation
process had been emerging within Europe since at least the 13h
century. This was partly a consequence of European extraction of resources from
its own expanded periphery. But it was also likely due to the unusually
virulent forms of capitalist accumulation within Europe, and the effects of
this on the nature and actions of states. The development of European
capitalism began among the city-states of Italy and the Baltic. It spread to
the European interstate system, eventually resulting in the first capitalist
nation-state – the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century as well as the later
rise of the hegemony of the United Kingdom of Great Britain in the nineteenth
century.
This process of regional core formation and its associated emphasis on capitalist commodity production further spread and institutionalized the logic of capitalist accumulation by defeating the efforts of territorial empires (Hapsburgs, Napoleonic France) to return the expanding European core to a more tributary mode of accumulation.
Acknowledging
some of the unique qualities of the emerging European hegemony does not require
us to ignore the important continuities that also existed as well as the
consequential ways in which European developments were linked with processes
going on in the rest of the Afroeurasian (and then
global) world-system. The
recent reemergence of East Asian cities has occurred in a context that has been
structurally and developmentally distinct from the multi-core system that still
existed in 1800 CE. Now there is only one core because all core states are
directly interacting with one another. While the multi-core system prior to the
eighteenth century was undoubtedly systemically integrated to some extent by
long-distance trade, it was not as interdependent as the global world-system
has now become.
An
emerging new round of East Asian hegemony is by no means a certainty, as both
the United States and German-led Europe and India will be strong contenders in
the coming period of hegemonic rivalry (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn 1999;
Chase-Dunn et al 2005). In this
competition megacities may be more of a liability than an advantage because the
costs of these huge human agglomerations have continued to increase, while the
benefits have been somewhat diminished by the falling costs of transportation
and communication and the emergence of automated military technologies. Nevertheless
megacities will continue to be an indicator of predominance because societies
that can afford them will have demonstrated the ability to mobilize huge
resources.
The Last Frank: the Global 19th century Asian Age
The posthumous publication of Gunder’s
last book would have never happened without the Herculean work of Robert A. Denemark in converting a massive corpus of notes and drafts
into a coherent whole. The first chapter is a long list of debunked myths in
which everything you have ever heard about the 19th century is
declared to be bunk and alternative assertions are proclaimed. The bombastic
tone is classical Gunder. There are too many issues
to address here. Instead I will focus on what I see as the main contributions.
While Frank attacks some of what he
himself said in ReOrient regarding the
timing of the emergence of the gap between China and the West, the main thrust
is the same. The rise of the West was more recent and less in magnitude than
anyone thought. While there were some amazing technological developments,
mainly the invention of the steam engine, the continuities were more important
than the transformations. There were no Dutch or British hegemonies and the
so-called “industrial revolution” was a minor sideshow that did not much change
the structure of the global system.
England was never the workshop of the world. The cotton textile industry
was a brief blip that rapidly spread abroad. The point at which Britain eclipsed
China was either 1850 or 1870.
In
Frank and Gills (1993) it was asserted that the structure of the global system
stands on a “three legged stool”: ecological/economic, sociopolitical and
cultural-religious. But, as in ReOrient, Frank mainly concerns himself with the structure
of international trade. The newly ecological Gunder
is more evident in his discussion of the ways in which the reproduction of
the core/periphery hierarchy involved
the export of social and physical entropy from the core to the periphery. At
the same time he contends that the consequences of European imperialism in the
19th century were strongly resisted in many areas of the
non-core. He once again affirms that the
main cause of the rise of the West was based on its ability to exploit and
dominate and derive resources from colonized areas, especially India.
Gunder’s review of other scholars who claim to have analyzed the
global system in the 19th rightly points out that most of them do
not include China – more instances of
Eurocentrism. The main exception is the research on multilateral trade by Folke Hilgerdt published in 1942
and 1945. Gunder rightly observes that the structure
of the whole system cannot be well represented by focusing on bilateral
connections –determining the interactions between two countries -- because this
leaves out their relations with other countries. This is the same insight that
is correctly trumpeted by the advocates of formal network analyses of social
structures. Gunder also denigrates the use of
variable characteristics that indicate the relationships between a single
country and the rest of the world, such as indicators of trade openness that
show the ratio of the size of the national GDP to trade with the rest of world.
Frank lumps these in with the idea of bilateral connections, but they are
different. He is right to point out that a lot of information is lost in these
calculations. Instead he prefers what he calls multilateral structures, and in
practice he focuses on what he calls trade
triangles that examine the exchange relations among three countries. This
is an important methodological insight for studying the structure of the world
economy and Frank makes good use of it to support his claims about the lateness
and shallowness of the Rise of the West.
The Frank Project is part social science and part commitment to a more egalitarian world society. Several eminent scholars have stepped to the plate to carry the research that Gunder began in new directions. I have already mention Robert A. Denemark’s huge effort to produce the last of Gunder’s books. Barry Gills, Albert J. Bergesen, Sing Chew, Patrick Manning and now Peter Peregrine and Charles Lekson are taking Gunder’s ideas in different important directions. Related work was done by George Modelski and Gerhard Lenski who share(d) Gunder’s idea of a global human system extending back to the Bronze Age, and William R. Thompson did research and published with Frank on cycles in the Bronze Age. As for the emancipatory side, a
s Gunder would have said, la
luta continua (the struggle continues).
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