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ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
Berkeley: University of California Press 1998,xxix+416pp.
Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, August 1999
Hong Kong: Asia 2000, Fantizi [Unreformed] Chinese character ed.
in press. Forthcoming also in Japanese, Turkish, and German.
ReOrient argues that European hegemony in the modern era did not really emerge until the nineteenth century, and that before that Europe was a rather marginal player in the Eurasian world economy that was centered on China. Only the windfalls of American silver and the Atlantic slave trade enabled Europe to buy its way into the existing world economy and industrialize. Its holistic approach forces historians to look beyond Europe to understand the making of the modern world, and Frank's attention to historiographic issues is outstanding.
David A Chappell, Book Review Editor, Journal of World History
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Table of Contents Personal and Professional Honors and Memberships Research Interests Publications Summary Recent Publications On-line Essays Contact A.G. Frank |
Andre Gunder FrankReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age |
Available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble
Berkeley: University of California Press 1998,xxix+416 pp. [pb $19.95]
New Delhi: Sage India 1998 [Rps 495]
Beijing: Central Compilation and Translation Press, August 1999
Hong Kong: Asia 2000, Fantizi [Unreformed] Chinese character ed. in press.
Forthcoming also in Japanese, Turkish, and German.
David A Chappell
Book Review Editor
Journal of World History
This stunning synthesis by a veteran world historian looks sure to land in reading guides, figure in seminars and be the subject of conferences. It is written with verve and enthusiasm in a conviction of novelty that reaches prophetic fervor. Despite these [itemized] and other points of agreement and the greatest admiration for his boldness, I remain unconvinced
S.A.M. ADSHEAD, American Historical Review
ReOrient will prove an instant classic, rating among those great books that come along once in a generation, such as with Arnold Toynbee's The Study of History, William McNeill's The Rise of the West, and Immanuel Wallerstein's The World-System as seminal works in world history. For scholars researching the onset of industrialism and the West's eventual dominance, they will be introduced to a whole new set of questions found in neither Marx nor Weber that require exploration. This book will give world history a research agenda for a generation. Original, contentious, challenging, yet accessible, this is Frank at his best.
JEFFREY SOMMERS, World History Center, Northeastern University
This iconoclastic book is the culmination of one of the most prolific social historian's life-long struggle to explain world development. A central idea put forward by the author is that in order to understand history one has to place the analysis squarely into a world-encompassing model of the global economy. Frank provides a much needed perspective that we are 'all in the same boat', that there is 'unity in diversity', and that ideas such as that of a 'clash of civilisations' are nonsense. It would be too easy to dismiss it as just 'politically correct'. To sum up, 'ReORIENT' is a landmark book.
HANS-JUERGEN ENGELBRECHT, Massey University, New Zealand
in International Journal of Social Economics
Andre Gunder Frank's latest work ReORIENT:Global Economy in the Asian Age definitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, almost everybody who has ever touched on the subject.
PEER VRIES Itinerario, University of Leiden
Frank gained his world wide fame by making an argument that caused a revolution in thinking about Third World Development. Well, the same thing is about to happen again, except this time the stakes are much higher. Now it is the theories of the endogenous nature of change in the West that is being challenged. The Wallersteinian world economy did not give rise to the world-system, Frank argues, but the Afroeurasian world system gave rise to the European world economy. To correct the historical fact is to challenge the theoretical scaffolding of everyone from Marx to Weber to Braudel to Wallerstein. Frank shows how [they] got it all wrong. This book is conceptually that important. No other work both provides the exhaustive documentation and the theoretical clarity and conviction of thesis. You get the feel of the interconnectedness of the world in a way ... not felt before and the reminder that according to all received theory this is not supposed to be so. That is the power of this book. A fundamental rethinking absolutely essential to understanding world history.
ALBERT BERGESEN University of Arizona
A book for the millennium ... can be a landmark book that shapes substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact.
MARK SELDEN, State University of New York
Gunder Frank does it again. He turns standard Eurocentric historiography and social theory upside down, as he did many years ago in exposing the facade of economic development. He challenges the experts again, but this time they are quite a different group at least in terms of theory, e.g., ranging from Marx to Braudel. They all got it wrong because they did not see the whole picture, especially how the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Once again, his argument is clear, organized, and often exciting.
PAT LAUDERDALE, Arizona State University
This is a bold new interpretation that ... creates a distinctive argument to explain Europe's post-1800 successes. It departs from virtually all other 'global' or 'world' system perspectives by arguing that Europe was not the central location of economic dysnamism in the early modern world (1400-1800) and therefore that 'capitalism' was not a unique cultural phenomenon that can explain the differential economic success of Europe over Asia. The author redefines our baseline for assessing the 'rise' of Europe. I believe this book could become a benchmark study.
BIN WONG, University of California at Irvine
This will be an extremely important book of sufficient originality and importance to have a major impact. It could not be more ambitious.
KENNETH POMERANZ, University of California at Irvine
Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT is a heroic effort to reconstruct our conceptions of the world economy in the early modern age. A brilliant theory - Frank's single-mided, relentless, and compelling organic model achieves coherence and has much to offer.
PETER PERDUE, Massachussetts Institute of Technology
If challenging received wisdom is a trademark, this book is written as the mother of all challenges. The immense power of the book rests on the ability to provoke and force one to rethink many facets of history that have been taken for granted for a long long time.
HARBANS MUKHIA, Indian Express
ReOrient's biggest virtue: it forces the reader to at least look differently at world history- This impressive and illuminating analysis sets out to challenge the mother of all orthodoxies that Europe discovered capitalism and industrialisation and that what followed and is happening and will happen is essentially a fallout of this European preeminence..
SAUBHIK CHAKABARTI, The Statesman
This is a brave book, brave in the academic as well as the personal sense. It insists on a completely necessary reorientation of academic and political views. It will prove to be compulsory reading.
JACK GOODY, London Times Higher Education Supplement & St. Johns College, Cambridge
A work of highest intellectual, social and moral importance. Specialists will welcome the forcefulness, verve, and coherence of Frank's BIG PICTURE. Much will be completely new to many other historians and social scientists who will have to change their views and rewrite their lectures after they read it.
ANONYMOUS Publisher's Referee.
ReORIENT deserves to become an instant classic.
MARTIN LEWIS, Duke University
A fair competitor with Francis Fukuyama's The End of History
STEVE FULLER, University of Durham
The Preface gives an account of the 40 years over which the ideas of this book have developed, from dependence theory, to world system theory to the present globalism. It refers specifically not only to the various stages of the work by Frank, but also its mutual interaction with that of other contemporary authors, such as Abu-Lughod, Amin, Arrighi, Bergesen, Blaut, Chase-Dunn, Chaudhuri, Chew, Denemark, Ekholm, Friedman, Gills, Hall, Hodgson, McNeill, Wallerstein, and Wolf.
The Chapter 1 Introduction presents the 'unity in diversity' theme of this book and its general idea that the whole is more than the sum of, and also shapes, its parts and their relations. It applies this ground rule to the study of the global economy and world system between 1400 and 1800, which this book analyzes as an alternative to the past two centuries of Eurocentric historiography and social theory. The chapter contains very critical examinations of the work of classical authors such as Durkheim, Maine, Marx, Smith, Sombart, Toynbee, and Weber. It also reviews and challenges twentieth century economic historians and social theorists in general and in particular the resistance to the present thesis by Abu-Lughod, Amin, Arrighi, Bairoch, Blaut, Braudel, Brenner, Chase-Dunn and Hall, Chaudhuri, Cipolla, Gates, Jones, Landes, McNeill, Mann, Modelski and Thompson, North, O'Brien, Parsons, Polanyi, Redfield, Rostow, Sanderson, Wallerstein, White, and Wolf. On the other hand, the chapter recommends as complementary to the present book the recent and oft still unpublished work of Asiniero, Fletcher, Hodgson, Perlin, Pomeranz, and Wong.
Chapter 2 examines the structure and flow of trade, starting in the Americas and going eastward literally around the globe. It examines the pattern of trade imbalances, and their settlement through payment in money, which also flowed predominantly eastward. A dozen regions and their relations with each other are examined, going from the Americas, via Africa and Europe, to and through West-, South-, and Southeast- Asia, to Japan and China and from there both across the Pacific and also back across Central Asia and Russia. This review reveals both information about the strength and growth of these "regional" economies and their trade and monetary relations with each other. It also shows, at least implicitly, what kind of a world economic division of labor existed, expanded, and changed in the early modern period from about 1400 to 1800. At the very least, this chapter demonstrates that there was such world-wide division of labor. It identifies many of the different products and services, sectors and regions, and of course enterprises and "countries" that effectively competed with each other in a single global economy. Thus, we will see that all received economic and social theory based on the neglect or outright denial of this world-wide division of labor is without historical foundation.
Chapter 3 examines the role of money in the world economy as a whole and in shaping the relations among its regional parts. There is a large literature on the flow of money from the silver mines in the Americas to Europe, and there has been some concern also with its onward remittance to Asia. However, insufficient attention has been devoted to macro- and micro- economic analysis of why the specie was produced, transported, minted, re-minted, exchanged, etc. Beyond macro- and micro-economic analysis of this production and exchange of silver and other species as commodities, one section of this chapter also examines the very circulatory system through which the monetary blood flowed. Moreover, this monetary system is itself shown to have played an essential role in connecting and expanding the world economy.
Thus, another section examines why and how this capillary monetary system, as well as the oxygen carrying monetary blood that flowed through it, penetrated and fuelled the economic body of the world economy. We examine how some of these monetary veins and arteries were bigger than others, and how smaller ones reached farther into, and even served to extend and stimulate production on, the outward reaches of the world economic body at this and that, but not every, frontier. The hoary myth about Asiatic "hoarding" of money is shown to be without foundation, especially in the "sinks" of the world monetary supply in India, and even more so in China.
Chapter 4 examines some quantitative global economic dimensions. Although hard data are hard to come by, one section devotes some effort to assembling and comparing at least some world-wide and regional dimensions of population, production, trade, and consumption, as well as their respective rates of growth, especially in Asia and Europe. We will see that not only were various parts of Asia economically far more important in and to the world economy than all of Europe. The historical evidence also demonstrates unequivocally that Asia grew faster and more than Europe and maintained its economic lead over Europe in all these respects until at least 1750. If several parts of Asia were richer and more productive than Europe was, and moreover their economies were expanding and growing during this early modern period, how is it possible that the "Asian Mode of Production" under any of its European designations could have been as traditional, stationary, stagnant and generally uneconomic as Marx, Weber, Sombart et al alleged? It was not, and this also Eurocentric proposition should already appear as absurd as it is prima facie. Other sections also bring evidence and the judgements of authorities to bear on comparisons of productivity, technology as well as of economic and financial institutions in Europe and Asia, especially with India and China. These comparisons show that the European put-down of Asia is unfounded in fact; for Asia was not only economically and in many ways technologically ahead of Europe at the beginning but still also at the end of this period. However, this chapter also launches the argument that production, trade, their institutions and technology should not only be inter-nationally compared, but that they must also be seen as being mutually related and generated on a world economic level.
Chapter 5 proposes and pursues a "horizontally integrative macrohistory" of the world, in which simultaneity of events and processes is no coincidence. Nor are simultaneous events here and there seen as differently caused by diverse local "internal" circumstances. Instead, one section after another inquires into common and connected causes of simultaneous occurrences around the world. Demographic/structural, monetary, Kondratieff and longer cycle analysis is brought to bear in different but complementary attempts to account for and explain what was happening here and there. Such cyclical and monetary analysis is used to help account in the 1640s for the simultaneous fall of the Ming in China and of revolution in England, rebellion in Spain and Japan, and other problems in Manila and elsewhere. The French, Dutch Batavian, American, and industrial revolutions in the late eighteenth century are also briefly examined in cyclical and related terms. Another section inquires whether the so-called "seventeenth century crisis" of Europe was world wide and included Asia; and I explore the important significance of a negative answer for world economic history. Observation of the continuation of the "long sixteenth century" expansion through the seventeenth and into part of the eighteenth century in much of Asia is used also to pose the question of whether there were very long, about 500 year long, world economic and political cycles.
Chapter 6 opens with this question about very long cycles opens on how and why the West "won" in the nineteenth century, and whether this "victory" is likely to endure or to be only temporary. In previous works (Gills and Frank 1992, Frank and Gills 1993, Frank 1993), I claim to have identified half-millennium long world economic system wide cycles of expansive "A" and contractive "B" phases, which were some two-three hundred years long each. I traced these back to 3000 BC and up to about 1450 AD. Three separate test attempts by other scholars [cited below] offer some confirmatory evidence of the existence and my dating of these alleged cycles and their phases. Did this pattern of such long cycles continue into early modern times? That is the first question posed in this section. The second one is that, if they did, do they reflect and can they help account for the continued dominance of Asia in the world economy through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, as well as for its decline and Europe's rise thereafter? The chapter also culminates the book's historical account and theoretical analysis to argue how the "Decline of the East" and the "Rise of the West" may have been systemically related and mutually promoted. To do so, one section examines the unequal regional and sectoral structure and the uneven temporal or cyclical dynamic the growth of production and of population in the single global economy. The argument is that not Asia's alleged weakness and Europe's alleged strength in the period of early modern world history, but rather the effects of Asia's strength led to its decline after 1750 and that Europe's actions reflected the weakness of its perviously marginal position in the world economy and led to its ascendance after 1800. This development also took advantage of the "Decline of Asia" after 1750, whose roots and timing are also examined in a separate section of the chapter. Moreover, the suggestion is made that within the same still continuing process of global development, a possible twenty-first century reversion of the balance of economic, political and cultural power to Asia may already have begun again. "The Rise of the West" is also examined more concretely in the last section. My thesis - echoing but extending that of James Blaut - is that the West first bought itself a third class seat on the Asian economic train, then leased a whole railway carriage, and only in the nineteenth century managed to displace Asians from the locomotive. One section examines, and cites the analysis of Adam Smith about how the Europeans managed to do so with the use of American money. They used it not only to expand their own economies, but also or even especially to buy themselves into the expanding market in Asia. Thus, the industrial revolution and its eventual use by the Europeans to achieve a position of dominance in the world economy cannot be adequately explained on the basis only of factors "internal" to Europe, not even supplemented by colonially based accumulation of capital. We need a world economic accounting for and explanation of this world economic process and event. This section proposes and then examines a hypothesis based on world-wide and subsidiary regional demand-and-supply relations for labor-saving and power-producing technological innovation.
Chapter 7, the conclusion, re-examines the implications of this need for holistic analysis and our derivative findings and hypotheses for further research about historiography, received theory and the possible and necessary reconstruction of both. That is, since the whole is more than the sum of its parts, each part is not only influenced by other parts, but by what happens in the whole world [system]. There is no way we can understand and account for what happened in Europe or America without taking account of what happened in Asia and Africa - and vice versa- nor what happened anywhere without identifying the influences that emanated from everywhere, that is from the structure and dynamic of the whole world [system] itself. In literally a word, we need a holistic analysis to explain any part of the system. The first part of the chapter summarizes the historiographic conclusions of what not to do, especially the divisionism of Fukujama's 'end of history,' Huntington's 'clash of civilizations,' and Barber's 'Jihad vs. McWorld.' The second part of the final chapter goes on to suggest better alternative theoretical directions for new historiogrpahy and theory to promote unity in diversity.
ORIENT = The East; lustrous,sparkling,precious;radiant,rising,nascent;
place or exactly determine position, settle or find bearings; bring into
clearly understood relations; direct towards; determine how one stands
in relation to one's surroundings. Turn eastward !
ReORIENT = Give new orientation to; readjust,
change outlook (from THE CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY; thank you for being
so CONCISE)