I hope I'll be permitted shameless self-advertising in this posting.(posted 8756 days ago)I would like to point out here that this week the Dutch version of my magnus opus "Arabian seas 1640-1700" has appeared (475 pages, 200.000 words, 1.675 footnotes). I do not have further information available as yet (price, ISBN etc.) and will post these when I have returned from a long trip to the Australian outback (from 9 th of july) at the end of august.
Now, relevant to the Landes-Frank discussion and especially Pommeranz posting to H-world, apart from many other matters (such as legal and social history) Arabian seas deals with many things which are directly relevant. Gunder would now probably say that I'm only looking under the Arabian seas' streetlight but, then, the Arabian seas are the Arabian seas, they are of no minor importance. And we know much less about the western Indian Ocean than we do about China (or Western Africa):
A.)It shows that in spite of the huge total size of the production Indian manufacturing (I logically focus on textiles but this also relates to metal) was not likely to have led to an industrial revolution. The market was too much segmented as to region, class, yes, caste and taste and too unpredictable and manufacturing was organized according to the `quasi'-unlimited supply of labour in India. The problem was not how to produce goods it was how to sell them.
While the eighteenth century in Britain witnessed both a standardisation of demand and a rapidly growing demand from the West Indies and North America, demand in India and the Middle East was still segmented. Indian manufacturing was more efficient in it's segment of the market than imports though as labour-costs could almost indefinitely be pushed down by an ever more intricate division of labour. Therefore, mechanisation would not have made sense. (By comparison remember that even now it is more efficient to use manual labour than cranes in construction-work in India.)
B.)Most critically, the discussion on the `American factor' has too much focussed on South America and on silver. For, indeed, bullion was merchandise in Europe-Asian trade but it was NOT (as Flynn argues) traded because it was profitable - this is, alas, all too complicated to dwell on it in a single posting.
Sure, silver was the most conspicious product traded by the Europeans. And it was traded to some extent since they enjoyed a comparative cost-advantage in this product (but this was not the main reason). I will not go into the issue of inflation at length here either but I argue Jim Blaut is partly right but for the wrong reasons: imports of silver indeed contributed to income-inequalities in the Arabian seas but not (except in Iran) because of inflation.
In `Arabian seas' I spent a good 200 pages proving that the silver- imports were merely the beginning of a world-wide process of product- substitution. This was basically away from `Asian' land-intensive agriculture to American land-extensive agriculture which I call in the terms of the `old' Gunder the development of underdevelopment. Not only was a wide range of products imported from Asia in Europe being substituted by American products in the 17 th century but American products were substituting for Asian products in inter-Asian trade as well. I treat a long series of examples which together make up much of the trade in the Arabian seas: coffee, sugar, tobacco, indigo, cotton, wood and pearls. And, yes, much of this was increasingly coming from Maryland and Virginia.
The rise of the Atlantic economy leads, I further argue, on the one hand to an expansion of demand for labour-intensive Indian products: Guinee textiles from the Coromandel coast have that name for a reason, whilst the buccaneers in the Arabian seas were mainly smugglers of Indian textiles to colonial New York and the West Indies. On the other hand it leads to an accumulation of money in the city of London which can then be invested in the East India Company and, more importantly, in the British inter-Asian trade.
For - as I show this for the British and the Portuguese - much (for the British), most (for the Portuguese) of the funds invested in Asian trade derived from American revenues.
The American edition which is in preparation will deal in more detail with the effects of the growth of the Atlantic economy (slavery in particular) on East Africa which bears a strong, and not at all coincidental, resemblance with developments in West Africa described in an earlier posting by Pat Manning.
C.)I argue furthermore that, because of these investments from the City, the British in particular (to some extent the French and the Portuguese but not the Dutch VOC) were able to construct a powerful system of private banks (or better `agency houses') in India which financed both British private trade and the British military. The British therefore were financially superior to most Indian princes. But this was not because Indian banking was primitive, far from it - As I show in a 45-page section trade in Surat (Gujarat) was as sophisticated as in Amsterdam because both were focal points of global trade but it was structured very differently -.
D.)The history of European expansion is a single process but its study has become separated between specialist on the Atlantic (America and Africa) and on Asia and this has seriously distorted our vision. (I would add now that treating East Africa as `African' and neglecting its Indian links seriously distorts our vision of the African past too.)
I argue two cases at length: the American slave-trade with Madagascar which was a mainstay of the economy of colonial New York and the Portuguese empire in India which at the end of the seventeenth century became increasingly a sub-colony of Brazil.
Now, since both empires were constructed on the `American conncetion' why the British and not Portugal? That is partly related to the different structures of the Brazilian and New England economy (basically New England's agriculture generated more purchasing-power than Brazil) but it is mainly caused by different initial positions: to wit Portugal's `semi-peripheral' position in European trade and basic weaknesses in the metropolitan economy.
`Arabian seas 1640-1700' was originally written five years before Gunder's `Asia' book was, but, I guess, in the Landes-Frank discussion which developed since this leaves me (with many other discussants) in the position that both are to some extent right.
Pro Landes I would argue that not all institutions were the same in Western Europe and South Asia and some may indeed have been important for the industrial revolution. Thus, English common law, thus, financial institutions, thus `the scientific revolution'. The `energy- base' argument is a weak one, I think, though.
And, to come back to Arabian seas, I would not deny that Europe WAS having an important impact on Asia in the 16-18 th century - and probably less so vice versa. "Indian ships might well have sailed to England but there were no Mughal factories in Britain" I write in `Arabian seas'. And the empirical problem is that if Asian trade in the 17 th and 18 th century grew, European trade in Asia grew much faster. Moreover, the Portuguese and the chartered companies did indeed drive out Asian merchants out of the trade and not only through violence but also as they were better organized. So, some roots of the Europe-Asia bifurication DO lie at least in the 16 th century.
But pro Gunder - and I do sympathize with the main tenants of Gunder and a fortiori of the so-called `California school' - this does NOT mean that Europe was in the 18 th century in all respects superior to Asia, let alone earlier. There is also no denying that Asia was still very important for `world-trade'. And moreover we should remind W.H. Moreland old remark that the entire long distance-trade of the Arabian seas might just have filled one freighter (I would say a supertanker) for maybe 90% of trade in the Arabian seas was regional and local. Therefore, the European impact on the economy as a whole was very, very limited until at least the mid-nineteenth century. And it is also certainly true that some parts of Asia were even in the eighteenth century at least as wealthy as Britain (and that parts of the British isles such as Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were as poor as the poorest parts of Asia.) The `third world' only arose from the mid-nineteenth century onward.
Gunder would probably say this is a half-baked `both and' position but there are no sharp `either-or' positions in answering large historical questions (however hard that may be for economists and sociologists to accept). And I would emphasize contra Jack Goldstone that in `Arabian seas' which is based on fifteen years work in original sources in seventeen languages I do attempt to transcend the mere criticism of the `Eurocentric school'.
Let me emphasize finally though, that even if I'm no `Californian', I sympathize with their position. For if history is as W.H. Mc Niell argues to a large extent myth-making (and the sociology and economics of our Californian colleagues are even more so) I think that even ethically this is a much more hopeful sign to give to poor countries than the Landes-line. Landes et alii basically signal to the third world that it has to discard all of its institutions and its culture (from the family to religion, from law to language etc. etc.) if they ever want to catch up with `modernity'. If I can be essentialist here: the Landes-line is a kind of `structural readjustment' of the third world's past.
And they signal moreover, that the history of all other people has been a failure since dim antiquity compared to the relentless onward march of the Anglo-Saxon race. (For the roots of the industrial revolution go back to King Arthur if not Boedica in their view). Is this an essentialist caricature as Pat Manning would now say too ? Maybe - but, then, to me - a citizen of a small non English speaking country - it often seems as if the British and Americans often do see the nationalist splinter in the eyes of Dutch, Hindhi, Chinese or Russian historiography. (And are immediately prepared poke fun at it. No, the Dutch did not originally `sail into our country near Lobith in 66 B.C.' - as we got taught at school - and, of course, the Rus' were not Russians) But they do not perceive the nationalist beam in their own eye in which they were the originators of anything useful - with the Romans and the Greeks US- and British citizens honoris causae -.