How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée

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Main author: Anievas, Alexander
Other authors: Nisancioglu, Kerem
Format: Journal Article           
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id eprints-24382
recordtype eprints
institution SOAS, University of London
collection SOAS Research Online
language English
language_search English
description Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe's ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain's colonization of India.
format Journal Article
author Anievas, Alexander
author_facet Anievas, Alexander
Nisancioglu, Kerem
authorStr Anievas, Alexander
author_letter Anievas, Alexander
author2 Nisancioglu, Kerem
author2Str Nisancioglu, Kerem
title How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée
publisher Cambridge University Press
publishDate 2017
url https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/24382/

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