The Eurasian Miracle PDF
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The Eurasian Miracle The Eurasian Miracle Jack Goody polity Copyright © Jack Goody, 2010 The right of Jack Goody to be identifi ed as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2010 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge, CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4793-7 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4794-4 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 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For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com Contents 1 Alternation or supremacy? 1 2 Why European and not Eurasian? 4 3 Domestic aspects of the ‘miracle’ 20 4 Eurasia and the Bronze Age 41 5 Merchants and their role in alternation 57 6 Merchant wealth and puritanical asceticism 66 7 Towards a knowledge society 79 8 The temporary advantage in alternation of the post-Renaissance west 94 9 Alternation in Eurasia 106 Appendix 1 Arguments of the Europeanists 115 Appendix 2 Water in east and west 127 Notes 131 References 139 Index 151 v 1 Alternation or supremacy? A short introduction to a short book. This book is about the relative unity of the European and Asian continents rather than their differences, a relative unity that began with the Bronze Age Revolution. That great change – what the pre- historian Gordon Childe has described as the beginning of the Culture of Cities (hence Civilization in his sense) – did not result in a bifurcation between the dynamic west, passing through antiquity, and feudalism, to capitalism, and the east that produced a static, hydraulic, bureaucratic, despotism, which was not about to modernize. This was the nineteenth- century theory of the earlier sociologists, Marx, Weber and many European historians, who saw the world from the standpoint of Europe’s predominance and presumed it had always had an advantage. No one is doubting the achieve- ments of Europe in the Industrial Revolution, nor yet in the Renaissance. What is at stake is the extent to which this was European. In some respects its roots were Eurasian, but in any case the key movement is alternation between post- Bronze Age societies, rather than viewing one as having a permanent advantage over the other. This fi rst chapter attempts to deal with various European- ist arguments that propose a completely different trajectory in the west. It is based upon my contribution to a conference 1 The Eurasian Miracle held in Cambridge in September 1985 under the title of ‘The European Miracle’. On this occasion I began to query the whole discussion on the grounds that it placed too much emphasis on the invention of something called ‘capitalism’, it neglected the contributions of other societies to the achieve- ments of the Industrial Revolution and, in particular, it over- looked the contributions of the east to ‘modernization’, mechanization and industrialization. The thesis of the book was not wrong in recognizing the advantage gained by the west after the Renaissance and especially in the nineteenth century after the Industrial Revolution, but it seemed to be an example of ethnocentric teleology in so far as it attributed that European achievement to deep-rooted, quasi-permanent features of the west, rather than recognizing the phenomenon of alternation of advantage in an exchange economy (which included the exchange of information). This short book contains little that I have not hinted at before but much that I wanted to clarify – and, specifi cally, the aspect of alternation among the major civilizations of Eurasia, which raises the question of why I think the so-called ‘European miracle’ was part of a wider Eurasian phenome- non, developing as it did in the nineteenth century (and even before in the Renaissance), but also of why I cannot agree with the kind of essentialist account that Europeans have been only too ready to offer. Alternation automatically rejects essentialism and the notion of permanent advantage. The idea for this book came from John Thompson who pointed out that I needed to deal more specifi cally with the question of ‘why capitalism in Europe?’ That made me look again at the report of the conference, which only confi rmed my belief that capitalism had to be seen in a wider Eurasian context where there were a succession of miracles and rebirths. What happened in Europe in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was part of these. Today we are experi- encing another swing towards the east, which is not simply copying the west but picking up on earlier achievements. Only such a hypothesis can explain the different records of development in Asia and in Africa, which never experienced 2
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