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Before European Hegemony by Abu-Lughod revisited

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On Chinese President Xi Jinping's two days (March 20, 21) visit to Moscow, Pepe Escobar said: In Moscow this week the Chinese and Russian leaders revealed their joint commitment to redesign the global order, an undertaking that has 'not been seen in 100 years.' Escobar recalls: In Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Janet Abu-Lughod built a carefully constructed narrative showing the prevailing multipolar order when the West "lagged behind the 'Orient.'" Later, the West only "pulled ahead because the 'Orient' was temporarily in disarray."

We may be witnessing a similarly historic shift in the making, trespassed by a revival of Confucianism (respect for authority, emphasis on social harmony), the equilibrium inherent to the Tao, and the spiritual power of Eastern Orthodoxy. This is, indeed, a civilizational fight, Escobar concludes.

In 1976 Janet Abu-Lughod was awarded a John Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Sociology. She received over a dozen prestigious national government fellowships and grants to research in the areas of demography, urban sociology, urban planning, economic and social development, world systems, and urbanization in the United States, the Middle East and the Third World.

However, she was especially well known for her monograph Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, wherein she argued that a pre-modern world system extending across Eurasia existed in the 13th century, prior to the formation of the modern world-system identified by Immanuel Wallerstein.

In Before European Hegemony, Abu-Lughod challenges the notion that there was only one world system with its origins in sixteenth-century Europe. She argues that the early world system relied on the linkages among the three subsystems, or cores: China (the most advanced), the Arab World (Egypt and the Near East), and Western Europe. She says the Black Plague played a significant role in causing the disintegration of this world system .

Abu-Lughod highlights the period of 1250 to 1350 because she posits that it constituted a critical turning point in world history and during this period, the Middle East was central in connecting the East and the West. Essentially, the book's pivotal thesis is that there was no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to favor the West rather than the East, nor was there any inherent historical necessity that would have prevented cultures in the Eastern region from becoming progenitors of a modern world system.

Immanuel Wallerstein's "world system"

She is very critical of traditional world system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, which she views as deeply Eurocentric. Her primary purpose in this book is to present a descriptive survey and analysis of the world economic system in this period, while exploring the reasons for its decline.

Immanuel Wallerstein's "world system" theory justifies Europe's customary historical prominence. However useful it may be from the fifteenth century on, it has been only suggestive for earlier periods of history.

In attempting to describe a "world system" proper to the period AD 1250-1350, Janet Abu-Lughod both criticizes and expands Wallerstein's approach. Critical of his Erocentrism, she argues that the modern European "world system" is, in large measure, simply the inheritor and continuator of an antecedent "word system" centered on Asia.

Following her theoretical framework and drawing on a wide array of works, Abu-Lughod concentrates on financial and commercial networks within and between the main zones she sees in her "word system": Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and western Indian Ocean, the western Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia and China.

Berry K. Gills [1]

According to Barry K. Gills, Professor of Global Development Studies at Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, Janet Abu Laghod made a remarkable contribution to scholarship, earning for this seminal work the status of a true classic. The intellectual influence and significance of this book was both pivotal and permanent, influencing the emergence and consolidation of post-Eurocentric perspective of global history, which radically reinterpret the original and historical development of the old system. What follows is a set of personal reflections on the intellectual context, arguments and frame work of analysis put forwarded in this deservedly famous work.

Gill also pointed out that in Before European Hegemony, Abu-Lughod had concluded that the 13th century world system of international trade and production was substantially complex and sophisticated. This included the technology of shipping and navigation, the social organization of production and marketing, and the institutional arrangements for conducting businesss, such as pernerships, mecianisms for pooling capital and techniques for monetization and exchange.

She is adamant that "the rise of the west was facilitated by the preexisting world economy it restructured" (p 361). It was above all European "trade-cum-plunder" practices "that caused a basic transformation in the world system that had developed and persisted over some five centuries" (Ibid).

Saskia Sassen [2]

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Author and journalist. Author of Islamic Pakistan: Illusions & Reality; Islam in the Post-Cold War Era; Islam & Modernism; Islam & Muslims in the Post-9/11 America. Currently working as free lance journalist. Executive Editor of American (more...)
 
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