A globally pervasive, dispersed and multiform process of commoditization before industrial capitalism: this is the « city » examined and conceptualized in this book. This « city » is approached, on the one hand, as a philosophical problem: how was an all-encompassing world of ever more diverse marketable objects even possible? More precisely: how could it be made possible? How could human mind and hand at all produce this boundless yet ceaselessly fragmenting object world? The « city » is examined, on the other hand, as a problem of medieval and early modern economic history and anthropology: how was it possible for commodities, for goods and moneys produced for exchange, to become and remain transferable across all geographic, political and linguistic boundaries despite a highly dispersed and fragmented institutional structure that seems barely discernible—intelligible—from a present-day perspective? How could commoditization sustain universal pervasiveness when numerous « niches » were simultaneously opened for ever more diverse commodities and while differences between local commodity cultures were further deepened?

Perlin‘s metaphorical « city » has a name: Babel. The Babel epitomizing, according to biblical tradition, presumptuous human attempts to master the world that are rendered futile by inextricable linguistic confusion and the ensuing impossibility of communication between the tower builders. This vision of Babel may be seen as a foundational myth for identitarian ideologies of a humankind that must remain separated eternally by essential, ultimately unbridgeable cultural difference. At the same time, « Babel » may also serve as a metaphor for the « modernizing » gaze on « premodern » or preindustrial economies: « fuzzy » economies that appear to lack structure, standards, coherence—a congeries of essentially autochthonous, communitarian and local economies, only precariously connected by a chaotic and largely disfunctional mess of uncoordinated currencies and taxonomies, by primitive means of transport and communication, by haphazard and intermittent financial transactions and commodity flows. On accepting this latter historicist vision, the scholar’s conventional task would be to « reduce » to a « simple » narrative this « babble », this Babylonian confusion of voices and idioms, in other words: this complexity. Economic historians have been groomed, for instance, to dissect a messy, fuzzy « premodernity » with the chopper knife of simplifying models. Their task has been to identify « lack » and to assess « an economy » of an earlier period according to the standards of tower building of our own, supposedly enlightened, age of « globalisation ».

Perlin‘s view of Babel is different, however. To him, Babel is a « city intelligible », though not without effort and not by way of simplification: complexity, and for his case the very complexity of the preindustrial commodity continuum, needs to be taken seriously as a research problem in itself. Hence, what may appear to us, at first sight, as lack of order or as « confusion of tongues », should be understood, says Perlin, as a dispersed but universal form of social organization, as a culture of boundless mental and material « translation ». Since much of the dispersed infrastructure of this culture of commodification has atrophied in a process of centralization of resources that was prompted by industrialization, its complexity may well appear to present-day social scientists as alien, disorderly, irrational, as the hallmark even of an age awaiting « disenchantment ». In this preindustrial commodity culture, argues Perlin, difference did not precede or preclude universality. Rather, the constructive principle of commoditization gained its universality, he holds, since the emergence of settled agriculture, from its very ability to feed off difference: exchange was pointless, after all, without difference, both between commodities and between commodity producers. Crucially, however, difference cannot be reduced to a constant factor: commoditization, as a historical process, could be sustained only through the perpetual exacerbation of difference—through the production of greater diversity, through the addition of further « niches », as he puts it, that participants in this process could claim and occupy for themselves. Perlin’s Babel resembles, therefore, more Pieter Bruegel’s unfinishable spiralling tower with its mass of upward creeping edifices or, the tower used, as he shows, by Kant as a metaphor for the complex creation of a conceivable object world by and in the human mind.

Perlin, in his long-term project of rendering intelligible this Babel of preindustrial commoditization, can be seen to have built another tower, another sprawling, assurgent, open-ended city: his book resembles a complex structure of multi-storied buildings and annexes—at times leaning on each other, else linked by a labyrinth of curving lanes, parts of the edifice still under construction, some of its outbuildings even spiralling precariously into the clouds as in Bruegel‘s imagination. In other words, as it attacks conventional methods of simplification and while it insists that the complexity of preindustrial modes of commoditization must be considered a research problem in its own right, the book is neither a quick, nor an easy, nor a timely read. It is untimely in that it fails to conform to the market demand for slick, elegant academic writing that puts the reader at ease both with a familiar narrative structure of skillful simplicity and with references to equally familiar conceptual coordinates, usually derived, either consciously or by way of « common sense », from post-Nietzschean philosophy. Perlin’s Babel does nothing of the sort and the author has paid the price for being unconcerned about the marketability of his own product, even as he examined the making of the commodity. The original manuscript, completed about two decades ago, apparently puzzled its few readers, seemed unpublishable and remained buried on increasingly obsolete data carriers. Readers of this now thoroughly revised and printed text may gain in unexpected ways, however, if they dare enter the labyrinth and explore the lanes of Perlin’s Babel. This foreword invites them to do so.

For the book outlines a highly original approach to a problem global historians have been aware of for a long time without being able to solve it in a satisfactory way: how can we reveal and conceptualise structures of historical development in an early modern world that abounds with complex patterns of connectivity and fragmentation without ultimately retreating to the territorial containers and cultural binaries that we set out to overcome in the first place? The « Great Divergence » debate may be taken as a recent example for this conundrum: historians appear to be unable, despite all intentions, to overcome « methodological nationalism » without erecting new spatial « containers », essential closures and binaries in its place. Histories of « entanglements » and « connectedness » have been promoted as alternatives, but seem insufficiently theorised to be able to break the frame. For this purpose, a critical engagement with philosophies that set out to uncover universal patterns of human cognition appears to be fully justifiable and Perlin demonstrates both the difficulties and the intellectual potential of this approach. In other words: the manuscript confronts a key methodological problem of global historical research that has been around for a long time and is unlikely to disappear any time soon. It is, therefore, remarkably fresh and fully consonant with current debates in historiography even though it does not directly engage with the historiography of the last two decades: surely an indication that this is an important piece of academic work. In its engagement with classical German (and most explicitly Kantian and Neo-Kantian) philosophy it opens up new methodological avenues that can be explored in further research.

To quote one example for an immensely influential and productive intervention of a similar kind we may refer to Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace: a very unusual combination of philosophical, sociological and historical reflections; an analytically trenchant if occasionally opaque and arguably even eclectic text, which has been enormously suggestive, however, inviting researchers in various academic fields to draw their own, widely diverging theoretical conclusions and develop innovative methodologies. Perlin’s City Intelligible, like Lefebvre’s work, opens up from sharply formulated analytical insights numerous avenues into uncharted land—a richness that blends into opacity occasionally (and seems at the same time selective of which later more), but an opacity (and selectivity) that provokes interpretative effort and opens up new possibilities of research. The parallels between the books go further: Lefebvre, the philosopher, ventured into history and even though his exposition of « premodern » spatial history—effectively the spatial history before industrial capitalism—is perhaps the least satisfactory and most schematic part of his seminal work, the intellectual risk of disciplinary transgression he took still opened up new possibilities for historical research. Perlin, the historical anthropologist, ventures into philosophy and while the explicit focus on Kant (and neo-Kantianism) may not always be compelling with Leibniz, Hegel and Marx left lurking in the background, the transdisciplinary risk bears fruit in this case, too: it allows to address the socio-economic complexity of the late medieval and early modern periods as a historical research problem requiring specific methodological tools and not as a cacophony of voices to be reduced or « simplified » to a single, authoritative voice. Perlin thus endorses Rancière’s critique of historiographical traditions like that of the Annales, but locates the methodological alternative in a different, perhaps more promising direction. Again, the conversation between philosophy and historical social science enables to think, quite literally, beyond the box or, outside the container.

Between the two books, Lefebvre’s and Perlin’s, resonances are even perceivable: both examine, in very different ways, the « space-time » of commoditized societies—Lefebvre by focusing on the increasingly dynamized and evolutionary, serialized and mass-produced, non-Euclidian nature of social space after industrialisation, Perlin by stressing that a conceptualisation of time-space in Euclidian/Newtonian terms (i.e. as an a priori static and empty given in which clearly separated and taxonomically distinguishable objects move according to the rules of cause and effect) was a necessary precondition for building the “intelligible city” of potentially unlimited commoditization in the centuries preceding industrialisation. Perlin provides a history of an artisanal and agricultural « rurban » commodity space that preceded Lefebvre’s predominantly urban, serially « produced » space of industrial capitalism. Lefebvre explores, one may venture, the unfolding of the tensions within Perlin’s City Intelligible, which the latter merely hints at.

Perlin’s manuscript needs to be located, too, in a specific historiographical context—the context of a 1980s historiography of the South Asian early modern. This was certainly one of the most productive and innovative historiographical developments regarding this world region in the latter half of the twentieth century. Along with the contributions of the late Christopher Bayly, of the late Burton Stein, of David Washbrook and several others, Frank Perlin’s writings opened up a fresh perspective on India’s seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had earlier been dismissed wholesale as an era of social chaos, political disorganisation and economic decline. Behind this appearance of messiness, which had been denounced in unison by generations of earlier historians despite otherwise strongly diverging assessments, this new historiography discovered in early modern South Asia patterns of social dynamism, processes of condensed state formation as well as of economic diversification and growth. One of Perlin’s major concerns in the present book can be traced back to this stream of research: earlier historians had severely misjudged an entire era of societal development in early modern South Asia by quickly dismissing its complexity and by seeking to reduce it to a « simple » explanation or narrative. However, only a painstaking examination of this very complexity allowed the discovery of a historical dynamism behind a diversity that had been misunderstood as a symptom of mere decline. These findings also permitted a very new assessment of the changes brought about by British colonial rule. After the 1990s, this historiographical current narrowed down thematically and lost much of its theoretical sophistication as some of its main protagonists went into new directions of research, passed away or—in the case of Perlin—left academia. Perlin’s later work in the 1990s moved, moreover, beyond the regional specialisation on South Asia already. Two volumes of collected essays (“The Invisible City”: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900, Variorum: 1993; Unbroken Landscape: Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity, Variorum: 1994) began to explore a Euro-Asian « interface » of infrastructures of commoditisation that included, for instance, pioneering and as yet unsurpassed studies on overlapping circuits of coin manufacture and monetary exchange.

The present book draws upon Perlin’s already « global » historical studies of the early 1990s, but deepens them through philosophical reflection, develops corresponding methodological procedures and widens the empirical range of his investigation. This foreword is not the place for a detailed summary or a systematic review and I will here only refer to what to my mind are some of the key propositions. The book consists of a long introduction (“More than a preface…”), of a first part (“Artifice and nature …”) and of a second part (“Taxonomy and commodity…”). The introduction and the final, third chapter of Part 1 develop the philosophical (“Kantian”) foundations of Perlin’s approach; the first and second chapters of Part 1 focus on textile production, monetary means of exchange and forms of accountancy to reconstruct, through these strategically chosen samples, the making of an artificial « second nature » the object world of commodities—and develop a methodology (through « sampling ») for a systematic examination of this object world. Part 2 then turns more specifically to the interdependency of this human-made « second nature » with the « first nature » on which it relies and which it can never entirely leave behind. It does so by focusing on plants and plant products—organic offspring of (the first) nature, which become marketable, are turned into elements of the commodity world (second nature) only through « artifice », through human work that transforms them into recognizable and exchangeable objects.

The key innovation of Perlin’s approach, to my mind, is that it does not presuppose the utility of the commodity, but examines this utility as the result of a complex and interminable social process. If we think of the Marxian analytical distinction between the use value and the exchange value as complementary aspects of every commodity, it is evident that in most economic histories, Marxian or not, the emphasis has been squarely on exchange value and on issues emerging from this aspect of the commodity—e.g. on modalities of marketing and pricing, payment and accountancy etc. The use value of a commodity, however, i.e. the properties that define its utility and, in the last instance, its marketability, is often treated as a quasi-natural attribute that does not require interrogation: the coat that serves as the standard example for a commodity in volume i of “Capital” does not appear to require further specification—it’s a coat, plain and simple. Marx himself, in what are perhaps the most complex pages of his writings, thus assumes the utility of the coat as a given for the purposes of his analysis of the social relations that remain concealed in the commodity form. But if exchange value was a complicated, socially constructed matter as Marx proposed, so is use value and this is what Perlin focuses on. « Utility », we learn, is not a property of the thing itself, but an attribute that is socially defined as the thing must be adapted to a taxonomic grid to be transformed into an object of exchange and ultimately for our (i.e. the subject’s) use. A coat cannot be produced as a commodity for sale in a distant market if no understanding has been achieved previously, between both ends of the transaction, on what the essential properties of a « coat » might be. In other words, each and every commodity “species” needs to be defined and that not in isolation, but in the context of an ever expanding and diversifying object world of commodity species, as an articulation of universal culture.

Frank Perlin’s book can thus be understood as an attempt to trace the « origins of the commodity species ». As he introduces us to this problem, we find ourselves at the gates of Babel and are led into a labyrinth of complexities. Most fundamentally and even though the commodity world is inseparable from the natural resources that make it possible, the logic of commodity « speciation », the modality of species formation is quite different. While speciation in the « first nature » is evolutionary, « Darwinistic » in the sense that it is driven by the very instability of « identities », i.e. the non-essentiality of species, speciation in the « second nature », in the socially generated object world of commodities, is « essentialist » i.e. premised on the relative stability of every « species ». Hence even though no grain of rice, no piece of woven cloth, no coin of minted silver (or, for that matter, no coat) can possibly be precisely like any other, they can only function as commodities if they are recognizable as bearers of certain essential qualities—if they can be located, in other words, in a validated taxonomic grid. The tension between these two principles of « speciation » the evolutionary and the essentialist, are explored more systematically in the second part of the book with its focus on plants and plant products.

But this is only one of several layers of complexity the book leads us to. For instance, it is evident that the process of commodity « speciation » involves procedures of standardization and taxonomy that required some form of institutional infrastructure. But it is equally clear that in the medieval and early modern periods such institutional infrastructures were dispersed, overlapping, seemingly incoherent, involved numerous acts of « translation » and « conversion » that have become unfamiliar in our own age of heavily centralized and accelerated late capitalism. The existence of geographical, political or linguistic frontiers is not denied, but they are conceived of as « places of passage » rather than as absolute divisions. Furthermore, the essentialism of the process of commodity speciation (or, the systematic attempt to reduce variation within certain commodity types) did not preclude, in Perlin’s view, an enormous dynamism of diversification between commodities, the emergence of ever new « niches » for commodity innovation. He emphasizes, moreover, with reference to Kant and the Neo-Kantians, the cognitive dimension of this process of « objectification » in which a world of commodities became conceivable. But he also underlines the universality of commodification as a social process, i.e. the involvement of all social groups and of all forms of work in this process: the day labourer receiving her wages in cowrie as much as the tax farmer dealing with gold currency; the botanist defining a market variety of cotton as much as the peasant seeking to stabilize, through knowledgeable manual labour, crop quality against environmental impact.

This is an invitation to a text that is rich and dense. But readers may also locate many openings for future enquiry some of which Perlin will hopefully be able to explore himself. The book is intensely experimental, both in language and content, certainly not the last word on the matters it raises, an invitation to argument and further enquiry. I, for instance, remain doubtful whether the process of commoditization—including the process of « speciation », which is the focus of this book—can be separated, even if only for purposes of examination, from social relations of power, from social antagonism, coercion, war and destruction, from the breakdown of no doubt possible channels of communication. I doubt, as it were, whether Babel could even exist without arson, riot and execution. Perlin’s decision to focus on « speciation » as the social production of the commodity’s use value throws new light on a key aspect of commoditisation that has remained in the shadows for long, but may in turn have privileged one « side » of the commodity problem over the other. Be that as it may, the author did not write this book to please everybody and the demand to hoe another hard row many not be reasonable. Most importantly, Perlin’s Babel is finally out in the open, a provocation for debate. Some will, I expect, see no point in entering that labyrinthine city and will have little patience with the academic nonconformism of its architecture. Others, I am equally certain, will accept the invitation and explore its alleys for themselves.

Ravi Ahuja

Bregalla, September 2019