From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu> Subject: M-I: Andre Gunder Frank, 3 of 3 Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 13:14:35 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) I am not sure to what extent Uncle Louie P. buys into Andre Gunder Frank's argument and to what extent he is merely presenting it to us for our edification. There is a lot in that post that I find questionable, but let me focus just on one major point. Frank argues that the widely accepted view that there was an important break around 1500 is incorrect and he argues that Braudel accepts that also. In the latter he is only partly right and very misleadingly so. Frank is right that Braudel (and others) have argued that the surge of growth in Europe began prior to 1500. Thus 1500 was not a technological or long-wave break point. But 1492 and 1498 certainly were important dates because they marked the expansion of European sea-going activity and thus (eventually in Afro-Asia, sooner in the Western Hemisphere) of European global domination, even if at this time parts of Asia were still more technically advanced in some areas than most of Europe. I have already suggested that the mid-1400s were a peak point in the Ming cycle for China, after which the Chinese began to withdraw inwards, without having made that discontinuity-creating trip around the Cape of Good Hope. The Portuguese did it coming the other way and during the 1500s Portuguese Jesuits were penetrating not only India (Goa was held until 1961) but China (Macau is only to revert to Chinese control next year) and even Japan, where there was nearly a takeover until Tokugawa Ieyasu threw them out around 1600 and largely sealed up the country for the next two and a half centuries except for the port of Nagasaki. Braudel fully accepts this argument. His greatest work, thought by many to be the single greatest work of history in this century, is his two volume _The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II_. Superficially that book is about the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, at the time by far the largest naval battle in world history. But it is actually about the end of the Mediterranean as the center of the European "world-economy" which had lasted since the Phoenicians. And the source of that end was indeed these ocean voyages that undid the cross-Eurasiatic land route known as the "Silk Route" as the central axis of the world economy, in Frank's sense. More broadly, and to repeat, I think that Frank insists on seeing holistic unity where there is none. He insists that there is a unified world economy when there are only the most minimal and marginal relationships across the Eurasiatic land mass, much less the rest of the world. Furthermore, although there is always more continuity in the world than many like to admit, his denial of discontinuity is way over done. But then I'm prejudiced, as the author of a book called, _From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities_. Oh well. [aside to Carrol Cox: I meant to say 200 years, not 20] Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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