Before European Hegemony


Book Description

In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.




Before European Hegemony


Book Description

"First published in 1989 ... First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1991"--T.p. verso.




Before European Hegemony


Book Description

The modern vision of the world as one dominated by one or more superpowers begs the question of how best to understand the world-system that existed before the rise of the first modern powers. Janet Abu-Lughod's solution to this problem, in this highly influential work, is that Before European Hegemony, a predominantly insular, agrarian world was dominated by groups of mercantile city-states that traded with one another on equal terms across a series of interlocking areas of influence. In this reading of history, China and Japan, the kingdoms of India, Muslim caliphates, the Byzantine Empire and European maritime republics alike enjoyed no absolute dominance over their neighbours and commercial partners – and the egalitarian international trading network that they built endured until European advances in weaponry and ship types introduced radical instability to the system. Abu-Lughod's portrait of a more balanced world is a masterpiece of synthesis driven by one highly creative idea: her world system of interlocking spheres of influence quite literally connected masses of evidence together in new ways. A triumph of fine critical thinking.




Asia Before Europe


Book Description

This book explores the dynamic interaction between economic life, society and civilisation in the regions around and beyond the Indian Ocean during the period from the rise of Islam to 1750. Within a distinctive theory of comparative history, Professor Chaudhuri analyses how the identity of different Asian civilisations was established. He examines the structural features of food habits, clothing, architectural styles and housing; the different modes of economic production; and the role of crop raising, pastoral nomadism, and industrial activities for the main regions of the Indian Ocean. In an original and perceptive conclusion, the author demonstrates how Indian Ocean societies were united or separated from one another by a conscious cultural and linguistic identity. However, there was a deeper structure of unities created by a common ecology, technology, technology of economic production, traditions of government, theory of political obligations and rights, and a shared historical experience. His theory enables the author to show that the real Indian Ocean was an area that extended historically from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the sea which lies beyond Japan.




Households and Hegemony


Book Description

"Drawing together information from ethnohistoric records and data from one of the largest excavations in Alabama's history (the Fusihatchee Project), Cameron B. Wesson reexamines changes in early Creek culture from before and after contact with Europeans, beginning in the sixteenth century. Casting the household as a multifaceted cultural institution, he contends that important social, economic, and political transformations occurred during this time - changes that redefined the relationship between Creek households and authority. As avenues for exchange with outsiders broadened and diversified, prestige trade goods usually associated with Creek elites became increasingly available to individual households, so that contact with Europeans contributed to empowerment for Creek households and a weakening of traditional chiefly authority.".




Governing the World


Book Description

A majestic narrative reckoning with the forces that have shaped the nature and destiny of the world’s governing institutions The story of global cooperation is a tale of dreamers goading us to find common cause in remedying humanity’s worst problems. But international institutions are also tools for the powers that be to advance their own interests. Mark Mazower’s Governing the World tells the epic, two-hundred-year story of that inevitable tension—the unstable and often surprising alchemy between ideas and power. From the rubble of the Napoleonic empire in the nineteenth century through the birth of the League of Nations and the United Nations in the twentieth century to the dominance of global finance at the turn of the millennium, Mazower masterfully explores the current era of international life as Western dominance wanes and a new global balance of powers emerges.




How to Write the History of the New World


Book Description

An Economist Book of the Year, 2001. In the 18th century, a debate ensued over the French naturalist Buffon’s contention that the New World was in fact geologically new. Historians, naturalists, and philosophers clashed over Buffon’s view. This book maintains that the “dispute” was also a debate over historical authority: upon whose sources and facts should naturalists and historians reconstruct the history of the New World and its people. In addressing this question, the author offers a strikingly novel interpretation of the Enlightenment.







The Chivalric Turn


Book Description

Historians have tended to understand medieval conduct through the eyes of Enlightenment historians, seeing superior conduct as 'knightly' behaviour, categorising it as chivalry. This book shows what superior lay conduct was in Europe before chivalry, and maps how and why chivalry emerged and redefined superior conduct in the late twelfth century.




The Left Case Against the EU


Book Description

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU’s response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas’s powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.