Before European Hegemony: The
World System A.D. 1250-1350 by
Janet L. Abu-Lughod
A Landmark Of The "New" Economic History
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.
Personal Review: Before European Hegemony: The World
System A.D. 1250-1350 by Janet L. Abu-Lughod

A work drawing on deep scholarship providing welcome adjustment to
views that overstate Europe's precocity and importance before 1500.
Europe was a peripheral backwater prior to its export of the Eurasian
disease pool to the Americas (and even for some time after). Abu-Lughod
examines each major area of the Eurasian trading network in term,
bringing out how much events in one area were affected by changes
elsewhere (in particular, how much Europeans were responding to such
changes).
I also found Abu-Lughod's scepticism about grand conceptual schemas
and strong preference for considering the complex texture of reality
engaging. She sets out a highly informative history of the creation of an
interacting Eurasian economy under the period of Mongol domination and
how changes among the various participating powers (particularly China)
resulted in the interactions falling back to a lower level. She also argues a
power vacuum was set up in the Indian Ocean that the Europeans (first the
Portugese, then the Dutch and finally the British) were able to fill. That
there was a "Fall of the East" prior to there being a "Rise of the West".
She does a nice job of debunking "cultural" and "Confucian-isolationism"
explanations for China's shift, placing the public policy considerations the
Ming court was dealing with in a more plausible context.
My first quibble is with the title. This is about the Eurasian system, not a
global one, a point the author herself concedes (p.37). It is a "world"
system only in terms of the Old World/New World usage and, to be fair,
she is responding to Immanuel Wallerstein's coinage of the term. The
second is she suffers from the modern academic fetish for shudder quotes,
though at least she is often prepared to explain in more detail why
concepts are problematic, rather than simply engaging in the tedious
knowing-virtue wink. The worst bit of the book, as so often is the way, is
when she attempts to look forward. The talking down of the stability of the
current world-system, and the situation of the US in particular, reads rather
poorly for a book published in 1989 with clearly no sense whatsoever of
the impending collapse of the Soviet empire.
But the book is very readable and extremely informative, the personality of
the author engaging. An excellent way of coming to grips with how global
history works.
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