John M.

Hobson

Explaining the Rise of the West:

A Reply to Ricardo Duchesne

I very much welcome Ricardo Duchesne’s impressive, bold, and

extremely wide-ranging critique of my recent book, The Eastern Origins of
Western Civilisation,1 which he entwines with a more general attack on a
number of other non-Eurocentric world historians.2 Duchesne undoubtedly
raises many salient points in his extensive discussion. But because these are
often entwined in a whole series of further issues that cut in and out of the
discussion, this necessarily makes for an ever-moving target. And this, of
course, makes my task in responding much more difficult. Accordingly, I
will break the discussion down into what I see as his three major criticisms,
each of which will be dealt with in its own separate section.

The Non-Eurocentric Representation of Eurocentrism

as a Straw Man?
The first point Duchesne makes is that I and other non-Eurocentric writ-
ers have in effect created a straw man version of “Eurocentrism.” This is a
function of two main problems as he sees it. First, I allegedly rely too heavily
on extreme claims made in out-of-date texts and ignore more recent and
well-known contributions.3 Second, and interrelatedly, these recent Euro-
centric contributions cannot be represented in monolithic terms since they
invoke a range of non-Eurocentric arguments (thereby producing a “complex

The Journal of The Historical Society VI:4 December 2006 579

 Th e J ou r na l

Eurocentrism”—a term that I have taken the liberty of deploying to char-

acterize Duchesne’s framework). The principal example of an author who
utilizes such a “complex Eurocentrism,” he claims, is David Landes in his
book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.4 This, however, is particularly sur-
prising given that Landes insists that Europe, not Asia, has been the prime
mover of world history in the last thousand years before he goes on to state
that, “[s]ome would say that Eurocentrism is bad for us, indeed bad for the
world, hence to be avoided. Those people should avoid it. As for me, I prefer
truth to goodthink. I feel surer of my ground.”5 It is also surprising given
that Landes’s Eurocentrism was one of the principal targets in my own book.
But for these reasons this is fortuitous, given that Landes provides the hard
test case for considering whether many Eurocentric accounts are really as
complex as Duchesne would have us believe.
Duchesne claims that my depiction of the standard analysis of the Mughal
polity—as a “brutal, insatiable Leviathan” that sucks the resources of
the Indian economy dry, thereby preventing economic development from
occurring—is an unfair characterization. He complains that my source for
this characterization is an outdated eighty-year old text: W.H. Moreland’s
1923 book, From Akbar to Aurangzeb.6 Duchesne claims that a better source
is Landes’s book in which we receive a much more positive view: that “far
from having a ‘static’ and ‘backward’ economy, India in fact ‘produced the
world’s finest cotton yarn and textiles . . . India had a large and skilled work-
force.’”7 Before I turn to analyzing the relevant section of Landes’s book to
appraise this, I need to establish an important point by way of ground-
clearing, which revolves around the issue of Eurocentric selective bias.
As I explain in the first chapter of my book, when Eurocentric scholars
concede that a certain economic achievement or “resource portfolio” (idea,
institution, or technology) originated in the East, this is immediately fol-
lowed by what I call an Orientalist Clause.8 For example, to my claim made
in Chapter 3 that the Sung dynasty in China achieved an industrial miracle
in the eleventh century, the Eurocentric reply is that it was but an “abortive
revolution” with Chinese economic progress drying up thereafter.9 In this
way, any achievements made during the Sung era are dismissed as inconse-
quential. And when all the relevant Orientalist Clauses have been made the

580
 Explaining the Rise of the West

net result is a picture of innovation and ingenuity that is monopolized by

Western Europe. The whole purpose of my book was to reimagine world his-
tory by bringing the East back into focus as a co-agent of modernity while
simultaneously returning Europe to its proper place. Is Landes’s Eurocen-
trism, then, really as complex as Duchesne would have us believe? Let me
turn to considering the wider context of Landes’s discussion of the Mughal
polity from which Duchesne distilled the relevant quote.
Landes does indeed assert that Mughal India “had a large and skilled
industrial workforce, whose products circulated throughout the region.”10
But, he argues, “the Indian economy yielded a substantial surplus that sup-
ported rulers and courts of legendary opulence.” That is, all money raised
within the economy failed to stimulate progress since it was siphoned off, or
sucked dry, by a predatory despotic state. He then proceeds to argue that the
Mughals “held the land as a despotic occupier and commanded no loyalty.”
On the next page he insists that “the tyranny of these Muslim rulers” led
on to the classic Weberian patrimonial-state strategy whereby the rulers—in
contrast to the situation in Western Europe—ensured that local non-state
sources of power were blocked. The ruler’s “aim became to make and take
as much as possible as fast as possible, spending little on social capital. All
take and no give.” He then reiterates another crucial sign of the Oriental
Despotism thesis: “the peasant (and indeed all subjects) had no reason to
improve the land, holding it as he did at the pleasure of the ruler.” He cites
the seventeenth-century French observer, François Bernier, who commented
that in India there was

no right or sense of property. No one, he wrote, dares to show his

wealth, for fear of extortion or seizure. No one cares to improve ways
or tools of production. Hence, wrote Bernier, the appalling contrast
between the opulent few and the impoverished many; the decrepitude
of the houses; the humiliation of the mass; the absence of incentives to
learning and self-improvement.11

Thus it seems clear that Landes reiterates the standard Eurocentric depiction
of an Indian Oriental despotic state that was made some eighty years earlier
by Moreland.

581
 Th e J ou r na l

Moreover, the case of Islamic science is instructive and also relevant here,
given that Duchesne engages in a discussion of it. Duchesne concedes that
Landes has paid inadequate attention to the originality of Islamic science.
But he then offers up Landes’s claim that “from about 750 to 1100 . . . Islam
was Europe’s teacher.”12 In response I argue that in this context Landes de-
ploys the standard Islamic Oriental Clause which asserts that the Muslims
were simply passive holders or translators of the Ancient Greek texts, and
that all the Muslims did was simply return them unchanged to the Euro-
peans once the latter had emerged out of the Dark Age “interlude.” Or as
Margaret Wertheim characteristically expressed it, “ultimately the mantle of
the Greeks passed to the Islamic world, where in the bosom of Allah, the
Hellenic heritage was kept in custody until Western interest rekindled.”13
The full extract from Landes asserts that, “[F]rom about 750 to 1100, Is-
lamic science and technology far surpassed those of Europe, which needed
to recover its heritage [i.e., Ancient Greek ideas] and did so to some ex-
tent through contacts with Muslims in such frontier areas as Spain. Islam
was Europe’s teacher.”14 Thus it turns out that Islam’s main contribution
was merely to relay the original Greek texts back to the Europeans. And,
moreover, the implication is that the Muslims had progressed in science only
because they had relied on the Ancient Greek texts, with no sign of an au-
tonomous contribution made by Islamic thinkers.
One of Duchesne’s primary claims is that “Hobson has a hard time find-
ing a single author advocating what he calls ‘the standard Eurocentric ac-
count.’”15 There is a veritable wealth of sources that I could draw upon
here (as I did in my book) that indeed reproduce the conventional Euro-
centric narrative. It is, therefore, worth briefly considering a number of
these to defend my reading of Eurocentrism. Many of the most promi-
nent theorists on the rise of the West—liberals, world-systems theorists,
and neo-Weberians—derive much of their impetus from the classical God-
father of Eurocentrism, Max Weber. And given that elsewhere Duchesne
argues for a Weberian theory, it makes sense to begin by turning to Weber
first.16
It is often assumed that Weber’s analytical pivot hinged on the distinc-
tion between rational religion (Protestantism/Calvinism) in the West and

582
 Explaining the Rise of the West

irrational or growth-repressive religions in the East.17 But just as important

is Weber’s more materialist argument that Europe enjoyed a “social balance
of power” between all major social and political groups, whereas in the East
social and political power was monopolized at the center. As he put it in his
posthumous Economy and Society:

All in all, the specific roots of Occidental culture must be sought in the
tension and peculiar balance, on the one hand, between office charisma
and monasticism, and on the other between the contractual character
of the feudal state and the autonomous, bureaucratic hierocracy. . . [In
contrast to the non-Western world] authority was set against authority,
legitimacy against legitimacy.18

Europe was unique for Weber because Christendom was riven with domes-
tic and regional social balances of power in which no one institution could
dominate. Secular rulers were balanced domestically by their vassals (knights
and priests) as well as externally by the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy.
In turn, the papacy was balanced against by the Empire—thereby preventing
a potential domination by a “Caesaropapism” (unlike in Islam). Moreover,
capitalists were not repressed by despotic domestic institutions but were
granted “powers and liberties,” which ultimately created the permissive en-
vironment within which rational capitalism could develop. This social bal-
ance of power at the domestic and regional levels constituted for Weber the
key that unlocked the secret door to modernity in the West. By contrast,
throughout Weber’s vast and pioneering array of sociological writings, it
was his central claim that in Islamic civilization, China, and India, patri-
monial states and/or Caesaropapist institutions prevented the emergence of
an autonomous civil society.19 The resulting power “stand-off” blocked the
development of a social balance of power either at the regional or domestic
levels.20 As a result, social and economic energy outside of the West was
inhibited and no “progressive” movement forward was possible. All in all,
this is pristine Eurocentric logic.
Significantly, Weber’s approach has come to constitute a resource pool
into which many scholars dip. Indeed the social balance of power frame-
work, which is really a “European powers and liberties” argument, can be

583
 Th e J ou r na l

found in liberal analyses,21 neo-Marxism,22 world-systems theory,23 and, of

course, in neo-Weberian scholarship.24 Intimately related to this framework
is a “geopolitical balance of power” argument around which many contem-
porary Eurocentric analyses converge.25 Here it is claimed that the West’s
uniqueness lay in its multistate system that was maintained by the balance
of geopolitical power. This is contrasted with Eastern imperial (suzerain)
state systems, with China being the usual counterfactual case. Explicitly, or
implicitly, they all follow Weber’s cue here.26 Thus warfare between compet-
itive states in Europe led to a process of political emulation (state formation)
and economic emulation (the rise of capitalism). Specifically, states sought
to grant powers and liberties to civil society (actually to capitalists) in or-
der to enable capitalist development,27 which in turn enhanced the tax base
and thus the state’s military power. Conversely, in the Eastern “imperial”
or suzerain state systems neither state formation nor the rise of capitalism
could occur because there was no interstate competition that could enable
all this. Hence the “alley of freedom,” as Weber called it,28 whereby the state
grants powers and liberties to “the people,” remained blocked and therefore
no progress was possible.
These approaches, referenced in the accompanying endnotes, deploy the
rigid Eurocentric “line of civilizational apartheid” between East and West
and similarly reproduce the standard story about the “growth-permitting”
Western liberal state and the “growth-blocking” Oriental despotism or the
“non-growth permissive” capstone or lethargic Asian state.29 The crucial
point here is that none of the texts cited above accord the East any role
whatsoever in enabling the rise of capitalist modernity.30
But it is at this point that Duchesne issues an intellectual health warning. “I
welcome readers to look at the bibliographic notes of Hobson’s book. . . and
observe how many Western-based sources he cites from the 1960s, 1970s,
and 1980s to back up his ‘anti-Eurocentric’ claims, with some sources ac-
tually dated as early as 1895, 1926, 1933, 1944, 1945, and 1946.”31 His
complaint is that these are all outdated and that a complex Eurocentrism
can be found in various works that were published in the 1990s. Apart from
the fact that I have cited several from the 1990s, including Landes, it is
noteworthy that none of these have produced the “complex Eurocentrism”

584
 Explaining the Rise of the West

that he believes exists. Indeed, not one of them has added anything new to
that which was produced in the previous thirty years, if not two hundred.
In any case, if one fine-tooth combs Duchesne’s references it becomes clear
that most of the books he cites from the 1990s turn out to have first been
published between 1963 and 1983, thus making his argument something of
a red herring.

The Issue of Europe’s Adaptive Capacity

While Duchesne concedes that the West was, albeit only to a very modest ex-
tent, helped by the diffusion of Eastern resource portfolios, what he claims
ultimately made the difference was Europe’s inherently superior adaptive
capacity. To this end he cites from Carlo Cipolla’s Before the Industrial
Revolution.32 Cipolla insists that the Europeans developed an original in-
ventiveness from the twelfth century on. But he also asserts that on the few
occasions “when Europe absorbed new ideas from outside, it did not do so
in a purely passive and imitative manner, but often adapted them to local
conditions or to new uses with distinct elements of originality.”33 In this
context Duchesne asserts that

a distinctive trait shown by Europeans was precisely their willingness

to imitate inventions made by foreigners, in contrast to the Chinese
who ceased to be as inventive after the Sung era, and showed little
enthusiasm for outside ideas and inventions . . . . A major secret of Eu-
ropean creativeness is precisely its multicultural inheritance and its
wider geographical linkages with the peoples of the world.34

Duchesne’s claim is not that Europe in 1500 was ahead of the East (which,
he argues, has been misleadingly claimed by many European historians), but
that it was round about then that Europe began an inevitable collision course
with modernity as its self-generated capacity for innovation and adaptive
creativity took off.35 This occurred at the same time that the major Asian
economies allegedly failed to attain such an edge. Specifically, he argues
that I am unable to provide an account of Europe’s adaptiveness. But I be-
lieve that this seriously misrepresents my approach as well as those of other
non-Eurocentrics.

585
 Th e J ou r na l

Let us turn for a moment to the “world system” writings of Andre Gunder
Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod, which provide a strictly materialist frame-
work that exorcises cultural and institutional factors altogether.36 To this
end, Abu-Lughod asserts, “[m]y contention is that the [global] context—
geographic, political, and demographic—in which development occurred
was far more significant and determining than any internal psychological
or institutional factors.”37 Frank does likewise.38 For both, it was changes
in the global economy that proved vital. And both argue that the rise of the
West occurred only because the East was in temporary disarray at precisely
the wrong moment—that in Abu-Lughod’s felicitous phrase, “the Fall of
the East preceded the rise of the West.”39 The key difference is that Frank
locates the moment of divergence in the post-1760 era at the time of a down-
turn in the global economy, whereas Abu-Lughod locates the moment more
conventionally at 1500. For Frank, the East was left behind because of its
low-wage economies. By contrast, the high cost of labor in the West required
the Europeans to develop labor-saving technologies in order to adapt to the
global downturn. It was this that enabled the industrial breakthrough. Still,
he insists, this was only possible because of the capital that flowed into Eu-
rope in the form of silver and gold bullion that was imperially plundered
from the Americas. Without such external non-European help, the moment
would have passed the Europeans by and the East would have remained
dominant.
A second major approach is founded on a “contingency perspective.” The
two eminent scholars here are James M. Blaut and Kenneth Pomeranz. Blaut’s
argument is that before 1492 Europe and Asia enjoyed similar levels of de-
velopment and showed no differences in institutional capacity or cultural
outlook. What led on to the divergence thereafter was that the Europeans
benefited from a particularly fortuitous contingency: that Europe was closer
to the Americas than was any other continent.40 Thus having fortuitously
stumbled on the Americas, where the Europeans no less fortuitously stum-
bled on gold and silver, their subsequent plundering of this bullion supplied
the capital necessary to stimulate capitalist development in Europe. Europe
enjoyed no innate cultural or institutional supremacy; it just happened to be
in the right place at the right time.

586
 Explaining the Rise of the West

Similarly, Pomeranz emphasizes two points of good fortune that enabled

the rise of the West. First, Britain’s industrial revolution was enabled by the
transmission of land-saving products from the American colonies, without
which Britain would have been unable to industrialize (since more domes-
tic resources would have been diverted away from industrialization back
into agriculture).41 And second, the “great divergence” between China and
Britain was a product of good fortune once again. For while China’s coal
mines were shallow and arid, Britain’s were deep and flooded.42 Moreover,
Britain’s mines, unlike China’s, were conveniently located close to the main
iron production and market centers. Above all, it was because Britain’s mines
were deep and flooded that the invention of the British steam engine was nec-
essary in order to pump the water out. And the rest, as they say, is (modern
industrial) history.43 Once again, the claim is that up until then the economic
trajectories of China and Britain were about equal, diverging thereafter only
through ecological contingency. The main difference is that Pomeranz locates
the moment of divergence in the post-1800 period whereas Blaut broadly fol-
lows the more conventional post-1492 periodicity.44
A third approach can be discerned in the work of Jack Goldstone.45 He, in
fact, grants Europe some cultural agency while retaining a perspective that
emphasizes contingent “freakish accident.” Goldstone claims that the mid-
seventeenth century is the moment when the origins of the later divergence
between East and West can be discerned. In responding to common problems
of internal rebellion (as is charted in his path-breaking book, Revolution and
Rebellion in the Early Modern World),46 the Ottoman Empire and China
restored traditional, inflexible cultural norms that subsequently held them
back. By contrast, a “freakish accident” occurred in England. This unex-
pected twist saw the invasion of England by the Protestant William of Or-
ange, which subsequently prevented a domination of Europe by Catholicism.
No less importantly, the nature of how Protestantism unfolded in England
meant that monarchs could not monopolize political power, the net result
of which was the creation of an open and tolerant cultural milieu within
which the Scientific Revolution could flourish. This was given further im-
petus by the Anglican Church’s nurturing of the new mechanical worldview.
These two developments provided a permissive environment for the rapid

587
 Th e J ou r na l

progress of technological inventiveness, which in turn led to the invention of

the steam engine in order to solve the problem of deep and flooded mines.
And, as with Pomeranz, the rest was (modern industrial) history.
Standing back from the fray we can see that these three variants revolve
around different conceptions of European adaptiveness that are often en-
twined with the issue of contingency. Typical of the structuralist ontology
advocated by Frank, the Europeans adapted to the global downturn in the
only effective way that they could: by developing labor-saving technologies
to reduce costs given the problem of high-wage labor. By contrast, the East-
ern economies were not inherently maladaptive but were spared this route
because of their low-wage economies. For Pomeranz, the British adapted
to the contingent ecological problem of deep and flooded mines by invent-
ing the steam engine, no less than they were able to adapt to the ecologi-
cal constraints of industrialization by importing land-saving products from
the Americas.47 For Goldstone, the British adapted to the mid-seventeenth-
century crisis by replacing the Catholic King James II with the Protestant
William of Orange. The upshot of this created, albeit through a series of
chance factors, a permissive environment in which science flourished. And
Goldstone matches the adaptive/contingency argument of Pomeranz con-
cerning the invention of the steam engine to solve the problem of flooded
mines. Another way of putting this is to say that adapting to various crises
and challenges had the largely unintended consequence of leading to the in-
dustrial breakthrough. Certainly, this knocks out the Eurocentric claim that
the breakthrough was the inevitable culmination of centuries of exceptional
institutional and cultural/moral progress. By contrast, for Duchesne, the sci-
entific breakthrough was a natural function of superior and innate cultural
ideas that had promoted European self-generation ever since the thirteenth
century. Either way, however, Duchesne’s claim that European adaptiveness
can be captured only by Eurocentrism cannot stand. What then of my own
work?
Duchesne complains that “Hobson would no doubt reply that Europe
absorbed practically everything from the outside in a passive and imitative
way.”48 But in the final chapter of my book, having outlined the many ideas,
institutions, and technologies that diffused across the Afro-Asian-led global

588
 Explaining the Rise of the West

economy and were subsequently assimilated by the Europeans, I immediately

asked whether “the West arose because of its superior adaptive capacity?”49
I then cited Francis Oakley who, echoing Cipolla’s and Duchesne’s claim,
argues that:

What made [the West] extraordinary was less the capacity to invent
than the readiness to learn from others, the willingness to imitate, the
ability to take over tools or techniques discovered in other parts of the
world, to raise them to a higher level of efficiency, to exploit them for
different ends and with a far greater degree of intensity.50

I then stated that “this adaptive argument would certainly hold some water
given that the Europeans did manage to assimilate Eastern resource portfo-
lios effectively” (even though I argue that this adaptive argument provides a
necessary though not sufficient explanation for the European breakthrough
given that imperialism was also vital). This means that conceiving Europe
as an adaptive civilization is not the monopolistic preserve of Eurocentrism.
Nevertheless, even if Duchesne were to concede this, he might well reply
that non-Eurocentrism is unable to locate any distinctly social or cultural
European attributes that fueled this adaptiveness. As the final section will
show, I am in some, though not complete, sympathy with Duchesne here.

Constructing an “Explanation’’ of the Rise of the West

As Duchesne recognizes, most non-Eurocentric scholars are highly skeptical
of any argument that privileges internal European attributes, precisely be-
cause they see in this an expression of Western exceptionalism. Typical here
are the words of James Blaut:

Europe’s environment is not better than the environment of other

places—not more fruitful, more comfortable, more suitable for com-
munication and trade, and the rest. Europe’s culture did not, histori-
cally, have superior traits, traits that would lead to more rapid progress
than that achieved by other societies: individual traits like inventive-
ness, innovativeness, ambitiousness, ethical behavior, etc.; collective
traits like the family, the market, the city. The rise of Europe cannot be
explained in this Eurocentric way.51

589
 Th e J ou r na l

Or as Frank expressed it, “Europe did not pull itself up by its own economic
bootstraps, and certainly not thanks to any kind of European ‘exceptional-
ism’ of rationality, institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a
word—of race.”52 In essence, writers like Blaut or Frank reject the notion
of a Europe whose breakthrough to modernity was self-generated. But in
fairness one is, I think, indeed entitled to ask: Surely Europe did something
“right,” for was it not the Europeans rather than the Easterners who made
the breakthrough?
Despite what I see as the pioneering brilliance of Kenneth Pomeranz’s
Great Divergence from which I have drawn much inspiration, I ask if it re-
ally is enough to account for the divergence simply by arguing ultimately
that Britain’s mines were deep and flooded and “functionally required” the
invention of the steam engine.53 For this does not explain what it was that
enabled its invention. This is rendered yet more problematic by the fact
that many of China’s mines were in fact not just deep, but were flooded as
well.54 Invoking “functional-ecological necessity” or pure ecological contin-
gency does not explain the factors that enabled the Europeans to invent the
steam engine in the first place. For “[n]ecessity may indeed be the mother of
invention, but it is well to remember that ‘it is ideas which make necessity
conscious.’”55
Still, in the light of this, Pomeranz might respond by arguing that he draws
close to providing an explanation beyond ecological/functional necessity and
ecological luck when he asserts that “[t]he bridging of the social distance
between artisans, entrepreneurs, and the sources of scientific knowledge was
a triumph of Jacob’s ‘scientific culture’—in which Europe had a significant
edge . . . .’56 However, the door to locating such an internal source of British
scientific/inventive adaptiveness is then immediately shut by his follow-up
claim:

But, even so, if it had been Europe that faced a huge geographic distance
between its coal and its concentrations of mechanically skilled people,
and China that had had only a small distance to bridge, it is possible
that the results in either place might have been vastly different; certainly
the history of China’s early coal/iron complex suggests as much.57

590
 Explaining the Rise of the West

This profound resistance to locating an internal causal source of both

Europe’s adaptiveness and breakthrough is also found in Frank’s book. Here
he emphasizes the point that Britain invented the steam engine and other
“labor-saving” technologies out of the structural-functional imperatives im-
posed by the global economic downturn of the 1760s (as was noted above)
but tells us nothing about what enabled this. Indeed, structural economic or
ecological functionalism explains little and provides only circular logic or
tautology.
Tied in with this issue is that of tracing the sources of Europe’s adaptive-
ness historically before 1800. While I have argued that Europe only moved
ahead of the principal Eastern economies some time in the nineteenth century
(depending on which indicator of economic power we deploy), nevertheless
at this point in the proceedings this has only superficial resonance with the
temporal chronologies of Pomeranz and Frank. For with both these schol-
ars it appears as though Europe—or Britain—emerged at the top almost
overnight. Explaining the breakthrough by locating some factors that are
endogenous to Europe and that stretch back well before 1800, I suggest,
should be the next stage of the non-Eurocentric research agenda. Accord-
ingly, I seek in this section to develop a crude first cut into developing a theory
of European agency that can explain Europe’s adaptiveness and industrial
breakthrough.
In contrast to the materialism of Blaut and Pomeranz, Frank and Abu-
Lughod, I accord a certain autonomy not just to ideas and culture—as does
Goldstone—but to identity. This emphasis on identity is certainly charted
in considerable detail in my book but it was done in the context of specif-
ically explaining Europe’s drive to imperialism after 1492. Here I deploy it
to explain Europe’s adaptive capacity to assimilate Eastern resource portfo-
lios and to eventually deploy them to “higher economic ends” in order to
promote the industrial breakthrough.
The argument here begins principally in the year 1453, when the per-
ception of an Ottoman “identity threat” confronted Christendom, leading
the Papacy to issue a series of papal bulls. These effectively ordered the
Iberians to undertake another round of Crusades by expanding outward to
make links with the Catholic Priest-King, Prester John, in the “Indies,” with

591
 Th e J ou r na l

whom they were to forge a Christian alliance and attack the Muslims from
the rear. Columbus, of course, dutifully sailed westward in search of the
(East) Indies.58 But in literally “stumbling” across the Americas,59 the tragic
encounter with the “Amerindians” led the Europeans to believe—for the
first time in a millennium—that they were superior to another civilization.
And this emergent sense of superiority was exacerbated through their subse-
quent exploitation of Black African labor. The sixteenth century in European
history saw not the rise of Europe to the top (as Duchesne concedes), since
Europe was still far behind China, India, Islamic West Asia, and an emergent
Japan under the Tokugawa (after 1600), but the rapid rise of a new aggres-
sive European identity. This identity furnished the Europeans with a more
urgent drive to “catch up” with the still vastly more advanced Asian world.
This was reinforced as first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and then the
English arrived in the Indian Ocean “all-conquering,” only to be delivered
a rude shock. For they quickly found that they had no choice but to cooper-
ate with the more advanced Islamic/Asian merchants and Asian rulers right
down to 1800 just to gain a meager slice of the Indian Ocean trade.60
Crucial to my argument is that after the mid-fifteenth century Europe was
a “late-developer” civilization.61 And late developers enjoy the many “ad-
vantages of backwardness.”62 This refers to the fortuitous situation whereby
late developers benefit from the advanced technologies that were pioneered
previously by the early developers. The key early developers of central signif-
icance here were the Muslims, Indians, and Chinese.63 Thus the Europeans,
having begun to access Islamic scientific ideas around 1085, resorted to
working with them more urgently, which in turn helped promote the Renais-
sance and later on the Scientific Revolution.64 This coincided with Europe’s
development of military power during its Military Revolution between 1550
and 1660, which centered on the deployment of the gun, gunpowder, and
cannon. But these were in fact invented during China’s Military Revolution
(c. 850–c.1290), and were subsequently assimilated and then later adapted
to higher ends as the Europeans became intent on conquering other parts of
the world.
Then, from the late seventeenth century the Europeans began to vora-
ciously consume and appropriate Chinese ideas and technologies, which in

592
 Explaining the Rise of the West

turn directly promoted the British agricultural and industrial revolutions.

It is certainly the case that Chinese ideas had been relayed back to Europe
mainly via the friars who visited China in the thirteenth century (with Marco
Polo being the most famous). But it took a long while for these ideas to have
much impact, partly because Europe had not yet developed the aggressive
mentality to use them, and partly because Marco’s reports appeared incred-
ible to the then backward “red-haired barbarians.” By the eighteenth cen-
tury, however, Chinese ideas such as rationality and laissez faire (the French
translation of wu-wei), which had been around for almost 2,000 years in
China, directly entered the vocabulary of the Enlightenment philosophes—
though at least in this instance many of these, such as Voltaire and Quesnay,
gave full credit to the Chinese. The Europeans fed off the many pamphlets
and books that flooded Europe in the seventeenth century, which in aggre-
gate revealed the manifold technologies and advanced features of Chinese
civilization. These included seed-drills and horse-hoeing husbandry, crop-
rotation systems, ideas that enabled the invention of the steam engine, canal
pound locks, bulkheads and watertight ship compartments, steel produc-
tion techniques, and many more. And not infrequently, the actual technol-
ogy itself was brought over, as in the curved iron mouldboard plow and
rotary winnowing machine. Moreover, many Europeans traveled to China
specifically to learn of their inventions and industrial and agricultural pro-
duction processes.65 These multiple transmission circuits provided a crucial
knowledge base that helped promote the British agricultural and industrial
revolutions.66
Marshall Hodgson once noted in passing that the Occident was “the un-
conscious heir of the industrial revolution of Sung China.”67 As should be
apparent by now, but for the word “unconscious” I concur, given that the
British consciously acquired Chinese ideas and technologies in order even-
tually to adapt them to higher industrial ends. Perhaps, then, the British
could be likened here to the Eurocentric characterization of the Japanese af-
ter 1945: that they developed a highly adaptive capacity and were excellent
at copying and refining further others’ ideas and technologies. For in the
end the Europeans adapted some of these resource portfolios to higher ends.
This is what one expects from an adaptive late-developer civilization, though

593
 Th e J ou r na l

Europe was no ordinary example of one. For ultimately, these developments

were fueled by a relentless racist restlessness.
The internal adaptive drive found its external expression in the drive to
imperialism as a rapidly rising racist identity fueled the exploitation of East-
ern resources—land, labor, raw materials, land-saving products, bullion, and
markets—all of which were vital to supplying the British industrial revolu-
tion.68 This was the second major input that the “non-West” provided in
enabling British industrialization. Moreover, in the British case, this was
supported by a highly fiscal-militarist, interventionist, late-developer state
that applied heavy protectionism at home and tolerated protectionism and
wars in continental Europe, while imposing free trade, backed up by naval
cannon, on the imperial economies abroad.69
All in all, I see industrialization not as a purely British or European event,
but as a fundamentally global phenomenon. Deconstructing the British in-
dustrial revolution reveals that it was but the final conjunctural moment,
albeit an important one, in a long-term cumulative world-historical devel-
opmental trajectory that began in China in the sixth century BCE.70 En route,
this trajectory passed through Warring States China and Han China, on to
Islamic West Asia and North Africa, back to (Sung/Ming/Ch’ing) China,
then on to the Ottoman and Persian empires and India to the east, Black
Africa and Aboriginal Australia to the south, and the Americas to the west,
before finally coming to rest in Europe. Accordingly, despite the undoubted
presence of a significant internal European adaptiveness, it would be wrong
to characterize the breakthrough as an exclusively self-generated European
process.
Given my emphasis on European agency, this naturally raises the question
as to whether this framework can be deployed to explain why China did
not go on and make the breakthrough. If China lacked anything it was an
identity-based drive equivalent to that of Europe at this crucial historical
moment. China was reluctant to engage in imperialism since its identity was
a defensive construct that was designed to maintain the emperor’s legitimacy
in the eyes of his or her domestic population.71 This was internationalized,
as was Europe’s identity, though it led not to imperialism but to the Chinese
tribute system—for its social function required gaining the allegiance of the

594
 Explaining the Rise of the West

“barbarian world” so that the emperor could maintain the legitimacy of the
Chinese state and society.72
This means that the messianistic drive that spurred on European develop-
ment, internally and externally, was indeed lacking in China. But we should
not write off China’s capacity in the post-Sung period either to innovate73
or to learn from foreign ideas.74 Nor should this argument be conflated
with the standard claim that China withdrew from the world trading system
into its own regressive Sinocentric closure after the official ban of 1434.75
Historians take too literal a view of the ban and thereby fail to understand
the Chinese government’s need to be “seen” as withdrawing—in accordance
with Confucian norms—at the very time when China radically stepped up
its external engagement.76 The ban was a myth for a number of reasons.
First, many Chinese merchants found all manner of ways of circumventing
it. Second, the ban was a myth even in the eyes of the emperors precisely
because they knew that the tribute system was simultaneously a disguised
international trading system. Indeed, the very presence of the tribute sys-
tem is itself testimony to the point that China remained internationalized,
politically and economically. And the proof of all this lies in the point that
after 1450 China moved to the center of the global gold and silver trad-
ing system.77 There was, however, one sense in which the Chinese broadly
“withdrew”: They withdrew not from global trade but abstained from the
imperial power politics that would grip the Europeans after 1492.
Finally, these different identity-based “drives” cannot be conflated with
Weber’s contrast between Europe’s “ethic of world mastery” and China’s
passive ethic of “adjustment to the world.” Here Peer Vries’s conclusion is
noteworthy:

Even if Weber were right about his claim that Confucianism had
Weltanpassung (adjustment to the world) as its ideal, in everyday prac-
tice the Chinese were, and are, permanently and intensively active in
adapting the world to their will [i.e., the ethic of world mastery].78

Indeed, should anyone doubt that the Chinese are doomed to an outlook of
passive conformity to the world, they would surely benefit from traveling to
any one of China’s many urban centers today.

595
 Th e J ou r na l

In the light of all this we can qualify Duchesne’s point noted earlier: that
it was specifically the European outlook of “benign” multicultural openness
that enabled the Europeans to adapt Eastern resource portfolios to higher
ends, in contrast to China’s regressive mentality of ethnocentric closure from
the outside world. Surely, in contrast to European racist imperialism, the
Chinese should be given some credit for choosing not to colonize and exploit
Europe and other major parts of the world, even though for a long time they
had the means to do so and even though they remained fully integrated in
the global economy.79 China’s colonial forbearance indeed “remains one of
the most remarkable instances of collective reticence in history.”80 Perhaps,
then, it was the relatively benign source of this forbearance that ultimately
constituted China’s greatest economic mistake.
None of this is to say, however, that identity factors provide the explana-
tion here, since materialist factors were also of crucial significance. Nor is it
to say that Europe’s breakthrough was the inevitable culmination of internal
developments in Europe since about 1453. The whole process was funda-
mentally contingent in the sense that the Europeans benefited from a great
deal of luck, without which modernity in the West would almost certainly
have been stillborn. The Europeans were extremely lucky that they stumbled
across the Americas. They were just as “lucky” that the Native “Americans”
were neither immune from Eurasian diseases nor unified, thereby enabling
these differences to be ruthlessly exploited. Conversely, they were no less for-
tunate that Black African slave labor was immune from these diseases, and
that its super-exploited product provided crucial resources to fuel Britain’s
industrialization.81 And, of course, the Europeans were extremely fortunate
that the Chinese chose not to colonize them on the one hand, while pro-
viding them (in addition to the many contributions made by other Eastern
societies) with all manner of advanced resource portfolios on the other. But
I accept that the Europeans did indeed do something “right”—they con-
structed a late-developer racist identity that fueled a relentless and ruthless
adaptive drive to appropriate and plunder the many resources and resource
portfolios of the Eastern societies in order to achieve modernization.
In sum, then, there is no doubt that my reading of Eurocentrism dif-
fers from Duchesne’s interpretation. Nevertheless, I agree with him that a

596
 Explaining the Rise of the West

satisfactory account of the rise of the West needs to develop a theory of Eu-
ropean agency that can furnish the causal origins of European adaptiveness.
And I also agree that this needs to have some historical lineage, given that
the final breakthrough was no miraculous event that simply came out of
nowhere around 1800. Most importantly, I believe that in the absence of
such a theory, we lack an explanation of the rise of the West. But unlike
Duchesne, I believe that furnishing an explanation within a non-Eurocentric
approach is possible and should, I submit, constitute the next stage of the
non-Eurocentric research agenda.

NOTES
1. John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2004).
2. Ricardo Duchesne, “Asia First?” Journal of the Historical Society 6 (1) (2006): 69–91.
3. Duchesne, “Asia First?” 70.
4. David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).
5. Landes, Wealth and Poverty, xxi.
6. W.H. Moreland, From Akbar to Aurangzeb (London: Macmillan, 1923).
7. Landes cited in Duchesne, “Asia First?” 71.
8. Hobson, Eastern Origins, 22–23.
9. E.g., Landes, Wealth and Poverty, 55–59; Alan K. Smith, Creating a World Economy (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1991), 27–29; Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London:
Verso, [1974] 1979), 541–546.
10. Landes, Wealth and Poverty, 156.
11. Ibid., 157. Interestingly, Bernier’s writings also influenced Marx’s and Montesquieu’s theories
of oriental despotism.
12. Landes cited in ibid., 79.
13. Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers (London: Time Books, 1996), 35.
14. Landes, Wealth and Poverty, 54.
15. Duchesne, “Asia First?” 74.
16. Ricardo Duchesne, “Peer Vries, the Great Divergence, and the California School: Who’s In
and Who’s Out?” World History Connected 2:2 (2005), 24 pars.
17. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin,
1976).
18. Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978),
II, 1192–1193.
19. Caesaropapism refers to those (Asian) societies in which religious authority and imperial
political power are fused. This is contrasted with Western Europe, where they were separate
and balanced against each other.
20. Max Weber, The Religion of China (New York: Free Press, 1951); The Religion of India (New
York: Free Press, 1958); The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); Economy
and Society; General Economic History (London: Transaction Books, 1981).
21. E.g., Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1973); Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1981); Landes, Wealth and Poverty.
22. E.g., Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” Past & Present 97
(1982), 16–113.
23. E.g., Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, I (London: Academic Press, 1974);
Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (London: Penguin, 1995).

597
 Th e J ou r na l

24. John A. Hall, Powers and Liberties (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

25. In addition to those cited above, see also: William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 1982); Anthony Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity,
1985); Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986 and 1993); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD
990–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Graeme D. Snooks, The Dynamic Society (London:
Routledge, 1996); Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (London: Vintage, 1998).
26. Max Weber, Economy and Society, I, 199–201, 354; Weber, General Economic History, 249.
27. Still, one should not confuse the “powers and liberties” argument with the presence of democ-
racy, given that the majority of the European population was only enfranchized as late as the
twentieth century—long after the breakthrough. For a full discussion see Hobson, Eastern
Origins, Ch. 12; Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder (London: Anthem, 2002).
28. Max Weber, Briefe 1906–1908 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1990), 587–588.
29. For the capstone state thesis see Hall, Powers and Liberties; for the lethargic state thesis see
Eric L. Jones, Growth Recurring (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
30. See also James M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (London: Guilford Press, 2000); Andre
Gunder Frank, ReOrient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Ch. 1; Jack Goody,
The East in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Ch. 1.
31. Duchesne, “Asia First?” 89, n. 17.
32. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution (New York: Norton, 1976).
33. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, 180, cited in Duchesne, “Asia First?” 75.
34. Duchesne, “Asia First?” 76, 79.
35. Ibid., 75–77, 79–84, 87–89.
36. Note that the “world system” approach is very different from, and highly critical of, Waller-
stein’s Eurocentric “world-systems” perspective. See the debate between Frank/Gills and
Wallerstein in A.G. Frank and B.K. Gills, eds., The World System: Five Hundred Years or
Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1996).
37. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),
18.
38. Frank, ReOrient, xvi, xxvi.
39. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 361.
40. James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (London: Guilford Press, 1993), 180–
183.
41. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Ch.
6.
42. Ibid., 65.
43. Ibid., esp. Ch. 1.
44. Though he notes that Europe’s technological edge became apparent only after the beginning
of the industrial revolution; Blaut, Colonizer’s Model, 108.
45. Jack A. Goldstone, “The Rise of the West—or Not? A Revision to Socio-economic History,”
Sociological Theory 18:2 (2000): 175–194.
46. Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991).
47. The key difference between Pomeranz and Frank here is that the former explicitly denies that
the steam engine and other technological innovations were a function of the need to save on
high wage-labor costs: Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 50–55; cf. Frank, ReOrient, 286–288,
300–308, 315.
48. Duchesne, “Asia First?” 76.
49. Hobson, Eastern Origins, 304.
50. Francis Oakley, The Crucial Centuries (London: Terra Nova Editions, 1979), 100.
51. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians, 1–2, emphases in the original.
52. Frank, ReOrient, 4, and esp. Ch. 7.
53. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 65.

598
 Explaining the Rise of the West

54. Peter J. Golas, Science and Civilisation in China, V (13) (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 186, 336; Hobson, Eastern Origins, 207–208; Peer Vries, “Is California the
Measure of All Things? A Rejoinder to Ricardo Duchesne, ‘Peer Vries, the Great Divergence,
and the California School: Who’s In and Who’s Out?’” World History Connected 2:2 (2005),
n. 50.
55. Oakley, Crucial Centuries, 99–100.
56. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 68.
57. Ibid., 68, and similarly, 43–45.
58. Hobson, Eastern Origins, 135–137, 162–168; Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne
Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Hutchinson, 1969); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of Amer-
ica (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
59. Although Duchesne quibbles with the word “stumbles,” he need not take my word for it
given that Columbus himself steadfastly refused to accept that he had failed to arrive in China,
which is precisely why he referred to it as the (West) Indies; cf. Duchesne, “Asia First?” 86–87;
Hobson, Eastern Origins, 164.
60. Hobson, Eastern Origins, Ch. 7.
61. Note that Frank too deploys this term but in a somewhat different context. Moreover, he dates
the European late-developer strategy to the nineteenth century; ReOrient, esp. 318–319.
62. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).
63. Hobson, Eastern Origins, Chs. 2–4; see also Jones, Growth Recurring.
64. Hobson, Eastern Origins, 173–183; Jack Goody, Islam in Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2004),
56–83.
65. For example, Louis XIV sent six Jesuits to China in 1685 to find out as much as they could
about Chinese knowledge. Just over a century later, Turgot sent two Christian missionaries
to China with a long list of questions. Others, such as the scientist Captain Ekeberg, traveled
independently to China to learn more, and in this case published his findings in An Account
of Chinese Husbandry.
66. Hobson, Eastern Origins, Ch. 9.
67. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1974), III, 197.
68. Hobson, Eastern Origins, Chs. 10–11.
69. Cf. Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder.
70. For a justification of this date see Hobson, Eastern Origins, 51.
71. Ibid., esp. 68–70, 307–308.
72. Y. Zhang, “System, empire and state in Chinese international relations,” in M. Cox, K. Booth,
and T. Dunne, eds., Empires, Systems and States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001).
73. E.g., Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 47–48; Jones, Growth Recurring, 143–144.
74. Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
75. As does Landes, Wealth and Poverty, 96; Duchesne, “Asia First?”, 84.
76. Hobson, Eastern Origins, 61–70; see also Waley-Cohen, Sextants of Beijing, Ch. 3.
77. Frank, ReOrient; Waley-Cohen, Sextants of Beijing, 50–53; Hobson, Eastern Origins, 66–67.
78. Peer Vries, Via Peking Back to Manchester (Leiden: CNWS, 2003), 35.
79. Incidentally, I did not agree with Gavin Menzies that the Chinese “discovered America” as
Duchesne incorrectly claims; Duchesne, “Asia First?” 91, n. 49; Gavin Menzies, 1421: The
Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam, 2002). The relevant passage here refers to
the argument of Needham and his co-authors, which does not provide confirmation of Gavin
Menzies’s controversial claim. See Hobson, Eastern Origins, 138; Joseph Needham, Wang
Ling, and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and Civilisation in China, IV (3) (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1971), 501–502.
80. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Millennium (London: Black Swan, 1996), 134.
81. Hobson, Eastern Origins, 265–272.

599