File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 463


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




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