The Use and Misuse of Uneven and Combined Development: A Critique of Anievas and Nişancıoğlu

In: Historical Materialism
View More View Less
  • 1 Department of Social Science, Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY

Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):

€25.00$30.00

Abstract

Aneivas and Nişancıoğlu’s provocative book, How the West Came to Rule, attempts to provide an alternative account of the origins of capitalism to both ‘Political Marxism’ and ‘World-Systems Theory’. By making uneven and combined development a universal dynamic of human history and by utilising a flawed concept of ‘Eurocentrism’, however, they introduce a high degree of causal pluralism into their analysis. Despite important insights into the specific dynamics of different pre-capitalist forms of social labour, their account of the origins of capitalism in How the West Came to Rule suffers from causal indeterminacy and historical inaccuracies.

  • Allen, Theodore W. 1994, The Invention of the White Race, Volume I, Racial Oppression and Social Control, London: Verso.

  • Allen, Theodore W. 1997, The Invention of the White Race, Volume II, The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, London: Verso.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Anievas, Alexander and Kerem Nişancıoğlu 2015, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, London: Pluto Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ashman, Sam 2009, ‘Capitalism, Uneven and Combined Development and the Transhistorical’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22, 1: 2946, <https://doi.org/10.1080/09557570802683896>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Aston, Trevor Henry and Charles Harding English Philpin (eds.) 1985, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, New York: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Beckert, Sven 2014, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

  • Blackburn, Robin 1997, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800, London: Verso.

  • Blaut, James M. 1993, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, Volume 1, Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York: The Guilford Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Blaut, James M. 2000, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, Volume 2, Eight Eurocentric Historians, New York: The Guilford Press.

  • Botwinick, Howard 1993, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Brenner, Robert P. 1977, ‘The Origins of Capitalism: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, I, 104: 2792.

  • Brenner, Robert P. 1985a, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’, in Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Brenner, Robert P. 1985b, ‘Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, in Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985.

  • Brenner, Robert P. 1993, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Brenner, Robert P. 2001, ‘The Low Countries in the Transition to Capitalism’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 1, 2: 169241, <https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0366.00007>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Callinicos, Alex and Justin Rosenberg 2008, ‘Uneven and Combined Development: The Socio-Relational Substratum of “the International”? An Exchange of Letters’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21, 1: 77112, <https://doi.org/10.1080/09557570701828600>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Dimmock, Spencer 2014, The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400–1600, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

  • Dimmock, Spencer 2017, ‘The Eastern Origins of Capitalism?’, Historical Materialism, available at: <http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/eastern-origins-capitalism>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Fields, Barbara Jeanne 1990, ‘Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA’, New Left Review, I, 181: 95118.

  • Frank, Andre Gunder 1998, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

  • Hilton, Rodney (ed.) 1976, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London: New Left Books.

  • Luxemburg, Rosa 1968, The Accumulation of Capital, translated by Agnes Schwarzschild, New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Marx, Karl 1981, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Three, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

  • Mintz, Sidney W. 1986, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

  • Post, Charles 2002, ‘Comments on the Brenner-Wood Exchange on the Low Countries’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2, 1: 8895, <https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0366.00025>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Post, Charles 2012, The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620–1877, Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Post, Charles 2017, ‘How Capitalist Were the “Bourgeois Revolutions”?’, Historical Materialism, <https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341528>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Postan, M.M. 1966, ‘Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime’, in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Volume I, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rioux, Sébastien 2015, ‘Mind the (Theoretical) Gap: On the Poverty of International Relations Theorising of Uneven and Combined Development’, Global Society, 29, 4: 481509, <https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2014.983047>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Shaikh, Anwar 1978, ‘An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories’, in US Capitalism in Crisis, New York: Union of Radical Political Economics Monthly Review Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Shaikh, Anwar 1989, The Current Economic Crisis: Causes and Implications, Detroit, MI: Against the Current.

  • Shaikh, Anwar 2011, ‘The First Great Depression of the 21st Century’, in Socialist Register 2011: The Crisis this Time, edited by Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber, New York: Monthly Review Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Shaikh, Anwar 2016, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Smith, Adam 1937 [1776], An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, New York: Modern Library.

  • Tomich, Dale W. 2004, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Trotsky, Leon 2007 [1932], The History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

  • Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Weber, Max 1958, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The Relationship between Religion and the Economic and Social Life in Modern Culture, translated by Talcott Parsons, New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Weber, Max 1981, General Economic History, translated by Frank H. Knight, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

  • Whittle, Jane 2000, The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  • Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2001, ‘Anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism’, Against the Current, 92, available at: <https://solidarity-us.org/atc/92/p993/>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2002a, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View, Revised Edition, London: Verso.

  • Wood, Ellen Meiksins 2002b, ‘The Question of Market Dependence’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2, 1: 5087, <https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0366.00024>.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation

Content Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 488 187 19
Full Text Views 396 95 4
PDF Downloads 163 51 2