Two types of ReOrient
2012-09-26
Notes on ReOrient
Many historians would agree with Fernand Braudel and Andre Frank that "Europe invented historians and then made good use of them to promote their own interest at home and elsewhere in the world " (p.2). Modern historians in the West dug very hard either to find out why Europe was the only area in the world to be modern. Historians in the East at roughly the same time asked themselves why the East failed to bear the seeds of capitalism. For Frank, these two types of historians in both West and East are at a fundamental level enchanted by the spell of Eurocentrism, that Europe has something that's unique to help itself develop capitalism and be modern. The East is always in the position of the "lack". In doing so, historians are stuck in the mud of essentialism.
To get rid of Eurocentrism that's deeply embedded in historical, economical and regional studies, Frank proposes that historians should locate Europe IN the world, instead of in opposition to other areas OF the world. The former de-exceptionalizes Europe and treats it as a region as common as any other areas in the world, while the latter dichotomizes regions in the world.
He discusses the world division of labor in chapter two, circulation of money in chapter three, technological and institutional mechanisms in chapter four, Kondratieff cycles in chapter five, and the rise of the West in chapter six. What interests more me is the measure units Frank chooses, although he emphasizes a lot the importance of analysis units (p.61, etc.). He chooses the division, distribution and circulation of labor, money, technology and others to explain the economic links that globalizes the world. Unlike Dipesh Chakrabarty, Frank takes labor, money and technology as unbiased measurement and employs them to map the centers of the economic globe. For DC, however, these measuring tools themselves are deeply rooted in Western ideology and can only be cautiously used after severe scrutiny. And Frank might accuse DC of being too much preoccupied by the Indian experience. Clearly, both of them are consciously detaching themselves from Orientalism. However, the contradictory standing points of these self-reflective scholars are telling. Each of them fell into what the other might call traps of history or modernity, while at the same time each of them manages to break through from the traps and present the mechanisms of the traps in one way or another. How do we account for this?
One weakness of this book, is that it piles up all kinds of numbers and suppose the readers know what they mean. For historians who do not have expertise in world monetary history, they might not be able to aptly conceptualize the economic connotations of importing 50000 tons of silver from Americas to China in 1700. Also, Frank sometimes spend more pages on disputing observations of other scholars than on his own observation (the section on technology, for example).
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