How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over theLongue Durée

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2109028
AutoresAlexander Anievas (0000-0001-5882-8124, University of Connecticut, autor correspondente), Kerem Nişancıoğlu (0000-0003-0571-3248, University of London), Kerem Nişancioğlu
Ano2017
Volume59
Fascículo1
Páginas34-67
Data de publicação2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoComparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0010417516000608
OpenAlexW2582684510
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas8
Referências citadas69

Traditional explanations of the 'rise of the West' have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe's ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between 'West' and 'East' and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists' emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies' development over thelongue duréeand traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain's colonization of India

Capitalism · Contingency · Divergence (linguistics) · Dominance (genetics) · Economic geography · Epistemology · Feudalism · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism