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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
Main Argument: The hegemonic European world system of the C16th-C20th CE was not somehow innately predetermined to have arisen; nor was it innately predetermined to have been dominated by Europeans. Detailed examination of the "world system" in place form the C14th-C14th, in which no one hegemon predominated and none of the participants had no more than regional participation or influence, but in which all actors nonetheless were mutually interdependet, bears this out. The question it asks, forcing you to answer is the question of what happened in the world system that allowed Europeans to take control of and reshape it into a new one in the C16th.
Historiographical Engagement: Manifold, particularly with primary sources throughout Eurasia, some of them quite old--but Abu-Lugbod is primarily writing in reaction to theorists and scholars such as Max Weber, who defined "the city" according to European examples and a priori excluded any non-European instances as not-real. Also particularly with Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, which purported to describe the same from within a profoundly Eurocentric worldview; also again with Karl Marx, and his ideas on the origins of capitalism.
Preface: Argument, Sources, Examples Contra Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolution, paradigm shifts arise within systems and within observers, from new observations. Paradigm shifts in historiography and the social sciences have arisen from 1) interdisciplinary scholarship; 2) subaltern and postcolonial scholars & scholarship; 3) global perspective in scholarships, despite its being looked at askance by specialists who usually concentrate on one area in one particular era.
Chapter 1: Introduction--Argument, Sources, Examples At its peak in the first decade of the C14th CE, almost all of Eurasia was integrated into a world system of economic exchange, broadly divisible into eight regional circuits, from which all derived economic benefit--and which, ironically, formed the pathway by which the Black Death traveled over the continents, visiting havoc on people and places to the degree to which they were integrated into the system. Zing!
Economic surpluses --> increased wealth --> greater foreign trade, as well as greater cultural products, the products of which are reinvested in a mutually beneficial loop. The world system was as much an archipelago of "world cities" as it was a set of circuits, and these trading partners were broadly similar: all possessed advanced money & credit institutions and instruments, sophisticated mechanisms for pooling capital and distributing risk, and rich merchants.
Methodological problems with research for book: 1) problem of data--different peoples record different things different ways, none are directly comparable; 2) problem of testimony--sources are inevitably asymmetrical in depth and quantity, and primary sources are skewed by observer's beliefs and priorities (Marco Polo went to China and said hardly anything about the non-Italian foreign merchants there); 3) problem of perspective--historians frame questions in a certain way relative to their own cultures, and thus distort "what actually happened" (cf. European and Arab accounts of the Crusades, Marco Polo's accounts of China versus disdain for barbarians in contemporaneous Chinese sources).
Part I: Europe
The Crusades were ultimately a mechanism to reintegrate (western) Europe--what its members called Christendom--into the world system and the Mediterranean world. Also, Europe was primitive.
Chapter 2: The Champagne Fairs--Argument, Sources, Examples (NB: Contains no actual champagne) The institution of the periodic market, such as in contemporary north Africa, or in medieval northeast France, arises when populations and development levels are low and transport is poor. Nonetheless, these markets can, as in the Champagne region, grow and complexify, attracting long-distance trade, for which 1) security; 2) agreed-upon exchange rates & credit mechanisms; and 3) a convenient site with relatively low usage costs are required. The techne level of trade determines sites--the level of surrounding development must be roughly conmmensurate. Shifts in demands and in needs of trade and industry can mutually affect relative costs and benefits.
As the fairs in Champagne prospered they drew more and more people into the nearby textile industry, which grew more complex as its products were exported further and further abroad and was at its height highly proto-capitalist. Also, contra Max Weber, medieval European towns were not actually completely free of feudal structures or engaged in laissez-faire capitalism.
Chapter 3: Bruges & Ghent--Argument, Sources, Examples
Agricultural productivity --> population increases --> development of other industries. Textile towns' dependency on foreign capital for marketing their products (Italian resident bankers and merchants who arranged the textiles' export abroad and who enjoyed extraterritoriality) and on raw materials (English wool, primarily) to make their products led to their eventual decline when the Italians left and took their capital with them and the English set up their own domestic textile industry to get in on the world market: when favorable conditions no longer obtain; capital moves, money never sleeps.
The Black Death! One of two most significant plagues in human history (the other being the epidemiological holocaust of the post-Columbian Americas)--in both cases, disproportionate benefits eventually accrued to Europeans, who stepped in to fill gaps that opened without their firing a shot.
Chapter 4: Genoa & Venice--Argument, Sources, Examples
Both cities played key roles in connecting Europe to the medieval world system and competed over centuries for control of the Mediterranean sea lanes: whose mare nostrum would it be? Venice eventually won, but the game changed. Each power enjoyed relative hegemony in their respective halves of the Med, but each participated equally in world system and the Mediterranean circuit.
Improvements in shipbuilding and navigation technologies, as well as alliances between state and private capital through the public debt to finance ventures, propelled both city-states to power. Ultimately, despite their success, their inability to project their power over other parts of the system and control events there led to their decline.
Possible roles in world trade: entrepot, shipper, producer, comprador; Genoa and Venice were shippers.
P.S. Surprise Crusades cannibalism!
Part II: The Mideast
C13th florescense in world system: the northern, middle, and souther routes across Asia functioned simultaneously for first time since classical period.
Chapter 5: The Mongols--Argument, Sources, Examples
Mongol economy based on exploitation of subject peoples (via 'tribute') and tax on trade through their zones of control. The Mongol state was inherently unstable, since it depends on the production of the oppressed and constantly needed new people to conquer.
Chapter 6: Baghdad & the Persian Gulf--Argument, Sources, ExamplesMuslims and Christians traded despite papal injunctions, frequently through subterfuge. The Persian Gulf & the Red Sea both offer routes to the Indian Ocean; historically these routes have either been in competition or in concert with one another--in the period here, the Persian Gulf declined vis-a-vis the Red Sea as a result of Baghdad's decline and conquest by the Mongols. Thus, a prime location at a chokepoint for trade does not guarantee prosperity or primacy--the health of the conduit is affected by the health of the route's termini, and external factors can affect the conduit's desirability.
Chapter 7: Cairo & the Mamluks--Argument, Sources, Examples Islam is quite friendly to business, thank you: Arab merchants had highly developed institutions of constracts, partnerships, depots, agents, and accounts at least as early as the millennium. Prosperous trade eventually gave rise to a class of merchants known as karimi, large-scale wholesalers who made quite a lot of money--their decline was precipitated by the Black Death, which saw the state stepping in to their role. The Mamluk state depended on imported slaves to form the lower echelons of its ruling class, and Venetians supplied them with the same in return for most-favored-nation status. Additionally, the state exercised a certain degree of control over the sugar and textile industries; after the Black Death, population losses at all levels forced the state to employ more repressive measures , harsher production quotas, etc, in an attempt to maintain revenue.
Like Venice and Genoa, Egypt's role in the world system was ultimately undermined by its inability to project its power to other parts of the system and control what happened there--when de Gama sailed around Cape Horn and broke the Arabian monopoly on the Indian Ocean trade, he dealt Egypt and Cairo a death-blow, since the IO trade had been the post-Black Death economy's only real source of surpluses. (Unlike Europe, the Egyptian population had nowhere to fluctuate to post-plague, and skilled industry was just as decimated.)
Part III: Asia
Tres partes divisa est: Muslim sphere; Hindu sphere, Chinese sphere--of cultural influence/regional supremacy. The monsoons form a set of absolute constrictions on travel and trade that govern the system and encourage merchants to settle long-term, which contributed to cultural diffusion.
Chapter 8: India--Argument, Sources, Examples
Trade between west India and west Asia/Europe is essentially perpetual, though levels fluctuate over the centuries. Southeast Asian linkages are similarly ancient, though more tenuous. The southern half of the subcontinent divides along a north-south axis; the west is Gujarat, and Malabar. Gujarat played a key role in the transshipment of goods in the medieval era, and prospered as the volume of that trade increased accordingly. To the south Malabar was similarly prosperous, though its success was partly the result of the fall of Baghdad, after which Arab traders landed in its port of Calicut.
Some words here on the Portugeuse: prior to their advent none of the IO powers (half of whom had withdrawn by the C16th) had tried to control the entire ocean; through military force, they compelled a radical restructuring of trade in the area.
The agrarian societies on the eastern half of the subcontinent became major textile producers, with comparable levels of technology as in Europe, although the levels of trade declined somewhat after the advent of the mountain-based Deccan sultanate, which was similar to the Mamluks in organization.
Raw materials alone are not sufficient to ensure prosperity; also, India's very wealth of resources kept it out of the world system to some extent, since it had so much of what it wanted locally--the more integrated into the system India became, the more it became a producer and the less a trader.
Chapter 9: The Strait--Argument, Sources, Examples
So here's a question: was there ever actually an "empire" of Srivajaya, or was it all just a front put up for the benefit of the Chinese by the prince of Palembang so as to get himself and various principalities of the Malacca Strait in on the tribute trade with China? (Cf. the subterfuge engaged in with the Ryuukyuu Islands by the daimyo of Satsuma to trade with China.)
Before the Sung dynasty in China, foreign trade was nominally interdicted, which meant that only states which already had tributary relations with China could play an intermediate role in getting goods out of China via "tribute"--thus the principalities of the Strait of Malacca, which had preexisting relations via the probably pretense of the "empire," played a vital role. When the Sung allowed foreign traders without tribute relations to several controlled treaty ports, the role of the Straits principalities declined. However, the city-state of Malacca itself continued to play a vital role as a transshipment choke point in the world system even under the Portuguese. Comprador states are dependent upon the regional prosperity and industry of the regions that use them; only as long as a particular port has an advantage over all the others can it be certain of prosperity.
Chapter 10: China--Argument, Sources, Examples
The idea that the Chinese did not engage in trade is preposterous; the form of the bureaucratic documents talking about "tribute" conceals the realities of this "public" trade, and much more private trade took place off the official books, though most likely not without the cognizance of officialdom, since officialdom was participating in it.
Also, China had an equally good chance of achieving hegemony; its technology, culture, and society were as advanced or more advanced than Europe's in the C14th.
Interesting contention that concentration of population on China's southeast coast was partially attributable to the decline of northern (Silk Road) trade after the collapse of the Roman Empire. By the C12th an agricultural revolution comparable to Europe's had generated surpluses which led the Chinese to venture out into direct foreign trade, enjoying thereafter two centuries of prosperity even after the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368. However, the Ming economy collapsed in the early C15th due to the closure of the northern "land" trading routes and the decline in oceanic trade; in 1435 China withdrew from foreign trade, leaving the question, What would the world look like had China achieved hegemony? forever unanswerable.
Chapter 11: Conclusion--Argument, Sources, Examples
The C13th world system was substantially the same in transport technology, social invention relation to money, credit and production, as that in the C16th, and there is no satisfactory "cultural" explanation for why Europe came to predominate the latter--the West "won" not because the West was the only possible winner, but because the other major players were severely weakened after the depredations of the Black Death. In the C13th a variety of religions, economic formations, and social structures, and roles all participated equally in the system.
The system declined as a result of the retrenchments brought about by the Black Death, which necessitated a refocusing of economic priorities on agriculture, and because the northern and middle routes across Asia were rendered impassable by the breakup of the Mongol empire and the founding of the Ming dynasty. However, the structure of the system remained intact and was not invented but rather transformed by European powers beginning in the C16th.
Along with their different philosophy of acquisition (i.e. trade as plunder), what fundamentally altered the world system, and gave rise to capitalism, was the Europeans' conquest of the Americas and the transfer of most of central America's precious metals to Spain and Europe, as well as the export of human capital in the form of slaves from Africa, over the course of several centuries.
There is no fixed set of principles for world systems, which are dynamic and undergo periodic restructurings; similarly, there is no fixed set of principals in the world system--over and over, the benefits of actions undertaken by one group accrue to those who succeed them in prominence, and though some cities are eternal none retain their preeminence as "global cities" indefinitely.
Similarly, systemic changes are as much a product of changes within the system as they are of changes in smaller components of the system--the system is fundamentally composed not of nodes but of the connections between them, and these connections are shuffled as systems evolve and shift. Nor are systemic causes and effects simple; instead, they are chaotic in that a small change may produce a huge outcome while a large change may have only a small actual consequence--furthermore, these changes are contextual; their effects depend on what is happening around them (the Vikings and possibly the Chinese reached the Americas to no real effect, for just one example).
Finally, studying the multipolar nonhegemonic world system of the C13th may enable us to extrapolate about the nature of the C21st world system which is gradually emerging.
Critical assessment: It's revelatory how much of Abu-Lugbod's analysis is directly applicable, often with only minor cosmetic changes in terminology, to today's global economy. If this book was as major a challenge to received wisdom 20 years ago as it appears to have been, the state of the field 20 years ago is frankly depressing--a lot of Abu-Lugbod's conclusions feel obvious, which is a testament to her success but makes for less than enthralling reading. I really wish she had gone whole hog and stopped using such terms as "Orient" and "Far East," which I hope make everyone cringe, but again, that this particular critique is even possible is partly the result of her points becoming generally accepted. I suppose one could point out that she neglects the Americas and Africa (and Australia, for that matter) almost entirely, but since they weren't heavily engaged in the C13th world system, which is fundamentally Eurasian, I am less impressed by that critique as such. The other critique I could anticipate is that Abu-Lugbod relies on sources in translation, but I think she compensates for not knowing all the sources' languages with the jaundiced eye she brings to the sources.
Further reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse; Edward Said, Orientalism and The Culture of Imperialism; Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt; the Travels of Marco Polo and of Ibn Battuta; Charles C. Mann, 1491; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities; Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes; William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
Meta notes: No one was ever harmed by looking at things on a macro scale, though the footwork involved in writing this book is extraordinary.
Main Argument: The hegemonic European world system of the C16th-C20th CE was not somehow innately predetermined to have arisen; nor was it innately predetermined to have been dominated by Europeans. Detailed examination of the "world system" in place form the C14th-C14th, in which no one hegemon predominated and none of the participants had no more than regional participation or influence, but in which all actors nonetheless were mutually interdependet, bears this out. The question it asks, forcing you to answer is the question of what happened in the world system that allowed Europeans to take control of and reshape it into a new one in the C16th.
Historiographical Engagement: Manifold, particularly with primary sources throughout Eurasia, some of them quite old--but Abu-Lugbod is primarily writing in reaction to theorists and scholars such as Max Weber, who defined "the city" according to European examples and a priori excluded any non-European instances as not-real. Also particularly with Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, which purported to describe the same from within a profoundly Eurocentric worldview; also again with Karl Marx, and his ideas on the origins of capitalism.
Preface: Argument, Sources, Examples Contra Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolution, paradigm shifts arise within systems and within observers, from new observations. Paradigm shifts in historiography and the social sciences have arisen from 1) interdisciplinary scholarship; 2) subaltern and postcolonial scholars & scholarship; 3) global perspective in scholarships, despite its being looked at askance by specialists who usually concentrate on one area in one particular era.
Chapter 1: Introduction--Argument, Sources, Examples At its peak in the first decade of the C14th CE, almost all of Eurasia was integrated into a world system of economic exchange, broadly divisible into eight regional circuits, from which all derived economic benefit--and which, ironically, formed the pathway by which the Black Death traveled over the continents, visiting havoc on people and places to the degree to which they were integrated into the system. Zing!
Economic surpluses --> increased wealth --> greater foreign trade, as well as greater cultural products, the products of which are reinvested in a mutually beneficial loop. The world system was as much an archipelago of "world cities" as it was a set of circuits, and these trading partners were broadly similar: all possessed advanced money & credit institutions and instruments, sophisticated mechanisms for pooling capital and distributing risk, and rich merchants.
Methodological problems with research for book: 1) problem of data--different peoples record different things different ways, none are directly comparable; 2) problem of testimony--sources are inevitably asymmetrical in depth and quantity, and primary sources are skewed by observer's beliefs and priorities (Marco Polo went to China and said hardly anything about the non-Italian foreign merchants there); 3) problem of perspective--historians frame questions in a certain way relative to their own cultures, and thus distort "what actually happened" (cf. European and Arab accounts of the Crusades, Marco Polo's accounts of China versus disdain for barbarians in contemporaneous Chinese sources).
Part I: Europe
The Crusades were ultimately a mechanism to reintegrate (western) Europe--what its members called Christendom--into the world system and the Mediterranean world. Also, Europe was primitive.
Chapter 2: The Champagne Fairs--Argument, Sources, Examples (NB: Contains no actual champagne) The institution of the periodic market, such as in contemporary north Africa, or in medieval northeast France, arises when populations and development levels are low and transport is poor. Nonetheless, these markets can, as in the Champagne region, grow and complexify, attracting long-distance trade, for which 1) security; 2) agreed-upon exchange rates & credit mechanisms; and 3) a convenient site with relatively low usage costs are required. The techne level of trade determines sites--the level of surrounding development must be roughly conmmensurate. Shifts in demands and in needs of trade and industry can mutually affect relative costs and benefits.
As the fairs in Champagne prospered they drew more and more people into the nearby textile industry, which grew more complex as its products were exported further and further abroad and was at its height highly proto-capitalist. Also, contra Max Weber, medieval European towns were not actually completely free of feudal structures or engaged in laissez-faire capitalism.
Chapter 3: Bruges & Ghent--Argument, Sources, Examples
Agricultural productivity --> population increases --> development of other industries. Textile towns' dependency on foreign capital for marketing their products (Italian resident bankers and merchants who arranged the textiles' export abroad and who enjoyed extraterritoriality) and on raw materials (English wool, primarily) to make their products led to their eventual decline when the Italians left and took their capital with them and the English set up their own domestic textile industry to get in on the world market: when favorable conditions no longer obtain; capital moves, money never sleeps.
The Black Death! One of two most significant plagues in human history (the other being the epidemiological holocaust of the post-Columbian Americas)--in both cases, disproportionate benefits eventually accrued to Europeans, who stepped in to fill gaps that opened without their firing a shot.
Chapter 4: Genoa & Venice--Argument, Sources, Examples
Both cities played key roles in connecting Europe to the medieval world system and competed over centuries for control of the Mediterranean sea lanes: whose mare nostrum would it be? Venice eventually won, but the game changed. Each power enjoyed relative hegemony in their respective halves of the Med, but each participated equally in world system and the Mediterranean circuit.
Improvements in shipbuilding and navigation technologies, as well as alliances between state and private capital through the public debt to finance ventures, propelled both city-states to power. Ultimately, despite their success, their inability to project their power over other parts of the system and control events there led to their decline.
Possible roles in world trade: entrepot, shipper, producer, comprador; Genoa and Venice were shippers.
P.S. Surprise Crusades cannibalism!
Part II: The Mideast
C13th florescense in world system: the northern, middle, and souther routes across Asia functioned simultaneously for first time since classical period.
Chapter 5: The Mongols--Argument, Sources, Examples
Mongol economy based on exploitation of subject peoples (via 'tribute') and tax on trade through their zones of control. The Mongol state was inherently unstable, since it depends on the production of the oppressed and constantly needed new people to conquer.
Chapter 6: Baghdad & the Persian Gulf--Argument, Sources, ExamplesMuslims and Christians traded despite papal injunctions, frequently through subterfuge. The Persian Gulf & the Red Sea both offer routes to the Indian Ocean; historically these routes have either been in competition or in concert with one another--in the period here, the Persian Gulf declined vis-a-vis the Red Sea as a result of Baghdad's decline and conquest by the Mongols. Thus, a prime location at a chokepoint for trade does not guarantee prosperity or primacy--the health of the conduit is affected by the health of the route's termini, and external factors can affect the conduit's desirability.
Chapter 7: Cairo & the Mamluks--Argument, Sources, Examples Islam is quite friendly to business, thank you: Arab merchants had highly developed institutions of constracts, partnerships, depots, agents, and accounts at least as early as the millennium. Prosperous trade eventually gave rise to a class of merchants known as karimi, large-scale wholesalers who made quite a lot of money--their decline was precipitated by the Black Death, which saw the state stepping in to their role. The Mamluk state depended on imported slaves to form the lower echelons of its ruling class, and Venetians supplied them with the same in return for most-favored-nation status. Additionally, the state exercised a certain degree of control over the sugar and textile industries; after the Black Death, population losses at all levels forced the state to employ more repressive measures , harsher production quotas, etc, in an attempt to maintain revenue.
Like Venice and Genoa, Egypt's role in the world system was ultimately undermined by its inability to project its power to other parts of the system and control what happened there--when de Gama sailed around Cape Horn and broke the Arabian monopoly on the Indian Ocean trade, he dealt Egypt and Cairo a death-blow, since the IO trade had been the post-Black Death economy's only real source of surpluses. (Unlike Europe, the Egyptian population had nowhere to fluctuate to post-plague, and skilled industry was just as decimated.)
Part III: Asia
Tres partes divisa est: Muslim sphere; Hindu sphere, Chinese sphere--of cultural influence/regional supremacy. The monsoons form a set of absolute constrictions on travel and trade that govern the system and encourage merchants to settle long-term, which contributed to cultural diffusion.
Chapter 8: India--Argument, Sources, Examples
Trade between west India and west Asia/Europe is essentially perpetual, though levels fluctuate over the centuries. Southeast Asian linkages are similarly ancient, though more tenuous. The southern half of the subcontinent divides along a north-south axis; the west is Gujarat, and Malabar. Gujarat played a key role in the transshipment of goods in the medieval era, and prospered as the volume of that trade increased accordingly. To the south Malabar was similarly prosperous, though its success was partly the result of the fall of Baghdad, after which Arab traders landed in its port of Calicut.
Some words here on the Portugeuse: prior to their advent none of the IO powers (half of whom had withdrawn by the C16th) had tried to control the entire ocean; through military force, they compelled a radical restructuring of trade in the area.
The agrarian societies on the eastern half of the subcontinent became major textile producers, with comparable levels of technology as in Europe, although the levels of trade declined somewhat after the advent of the mountain-based Deccan sultanate, which was similar to the Mamluks in organization.
Raw materials alone are not sufficient to ensure prosperity; also, India's very wealth of resources kept it out of the world system to some extent, since it had so much of what it wanted locally--the more integrated into the system India became, the more it became a producer and the less a trader.
Chapter 9: The Strait--Argument, Sources, Examples
So here's a question: was there ever actually an "empire" of Srivajaya, or was it all just a front put up for the benefit of the Chinese by the prince of Palembang so as to get himself and various principalities of the Malacca Strait in on the tribute trade with China? (Cf. the subterfuge engaged in with the Ryuukyuu Islands by the daimyo of Satsuma to trade with China.)
Before the Sung dynasty in China, foreign trade was nominally interdicted, which meant that only states which already had tributary relations with China could play an intermediate role in getting goods out of China via "tribute"--thus the principalities of the Strait of Malacca, which had preexisting relations via the probably pretense of the "empire," played a vital role. When the Sung allowed foreign traders without tribute relations to several controlled treaty ports, the role of the Straits principalities declined. However, the city-state of Malacca itself continued to play a vital role as a transshipment choke point in the world system even under the Portuguese. Comprador states are dependent upon the regional prosperity and industry of the regions that use them; only as long as a particular port has an advantage over all the others can it be certain of prosperity.
Chapter 10: China--Argument, Sources, Examples
The idea that the Chinese did not engage in trade is preposterous; the form of the bureaucratic documents talking about "tribute" conceals the realities of this "public" trade, and much more private trade took place off the official books, though most likely not without the cognizance of officialdom, since officialdom was participating in it.
Also, China had an equally good chance of achieving hegemony; its technology, culture, and society were as advanced or more advanced than Europe's in the C14th.
Interesting contention that concentration of population on China's southeast coast was partially attributable to the decline of northern (Silk Road) trade after the collapse of the Roman Empire. By the C12th an agricultural revolution comparable to Europe's had generated surpluses which led the Chinese to venture out into direct foreign trade, enjoying thereafter two centuries of prosperity even after the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368. However, the Ming economy collapsed in the early C15th due to the closure of the northern "land" trading routes and the decline in oceanic trade; in 1435 China withdrew from foreign trade, leaving the question, What would the world look like had China achieved hegemony? forever unanswerable.
Chapter 11: Conclusion--Argument, Sources, Examples
The C13th world system was substantially the same in transport technology, social invention relation to money, credit and production, as that in the C16th, and there is no satisfactory "cultural" explanation for why Europe came to predominate the latter--the West "won" not because the West was the only possible winner, but because the other major players were severely weakened after the depredations of the Black Death. In the C13th a variety of religions, economic formations, and social structures, and roles all participated equally in the system.
The system declined as a result of the retrenchments brought about by the Black Death, which necessitated a refocusing of economic priorities on agriculture, and because the northern and middle routes across Asia were rendered impassable by the breakup of the Mongol empire and the founding of the Ming dynasty. However, the structure of the system remained intact and was not invented but rather transformed by European powers beginning in the C16th.
Along with their different philosophy of acquisition (i.e. trade as plunder), what fundamentally altered the world system, and gave rise to capitalism, was the Europeans' conquest of the Americas and the transfer of most of central America's precious metals to Spain and Europe, as well as the export of human capital in the form of slaves from Africa, over the course of several centuries.
There is no fixed set of principles for world systems, which are dynamic and undergo periodic restructurings; similarly, there is no fixed set of principals in the world system--over and over, the benefits of actions undertaken by one group accrue to those who succeed them in prominence, and though some cities are eternal none retain their preeminence as "global cities" indefinitely.
Similarly, systemic changes are as much a product of changes within the system as they are of changes in smaller components of the system--the system is fundamentally composed not of nodes but of the connections between them, and these connections are shuffled as systems evolve and shift. Nor are systemic causes and effects simple; instead, they are chaotic in that a small change may produce a huge outcome while a large change may have only a small actual consequence--furthermore, these changes are contextual; their effects depend on what is happening around them (the Vikings and possibly the Chinese reached the Americas to no real effect, for just one example).
Finally, studying the multipolar nonhegemonic world system of the C13th may enable us to extrapolate about the nature of the C21st world system which is gradually emerging.
Critical assessment: It's revelatory how much of Abu-Lugbod's analysis is directly applicable, often with only minor cosmetic changes in terminology, to today's global economy. If this book was as major a challenge to received wisdom 20 years ago as it appears to have been, the state of the field 20 years ago is frankly depressing--a lot of Abu-Lugbod's conclusions feel obvious, which is a testament to her success but makes for less than enthralling reading. I really wish she had gone whole hog and stopped using such terms as "Orient" and "Far East," which I hope make everyone cringe, but again, that this particular critique is even possible is partly the result of her points becoming generally accepted. I suppose one could point out that she neglects the Americas and Africa (and Australia, for that matter) almost entirely, but since they weren't heavily engaged in the C13th world system, which is fundamentally Eurasian, I am less impressed by that critique as such. The other critique I could anticipate is that Abu-Lugbod relies on sources in translation, but I think she compensates for not knowing all the sources' languages with the jaundiced eye she brings to the sources.
Further reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse; Edward Said, Orientalism and The Culture of Imperialism; Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt; the Travels of Marco Polo and of Ibn Battuta; Charles C. Mann, 1491; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities; Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes; William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
Meta notes: No one was ever harmed by looking at things on a macro scale, though the footwork involved in writing this book is extraordinary.