From: Patrick Manning
To: H-WORLD@h-net.msu.edu
Subject: H-WORLD review--Frank on Landes, Wealth & Poverty
Editor's note: With this posting, H-WORLD returns to distributing book reviews to its
subscribers. After an early start in 1994-95 led by Dan Segal, H-WORLD is now ready to
make the effort to commission and post reviews of significant books in global history,
from a global perspective. The review below is also being posted on H-ASIA and perhaps on
other lists. [It and the entire 2 month long discussion among circa 100 participants was
carried simultaneuosly by 4 nets. These two plus econ-hist, and world-systems/WSN, and it
is stored in some or all of their archives, whose addresses i couild supply only with
difficultry if at all - AGF] It is preceded by a note from H-ASIA editor Marilyn Levine.
PM
EDITOR'S NOTE
The following is a response to a review in the _New York Review of Books_ about David
Landes' work, _The Wealth and Poverty of Nations_. This response is by Andre Gunder Frank,
University of Toronto, whose own work, _ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age_, will
be published May/June 1998 by the University of California Press. Professor Frank has been
communicating with Professor Landes about making this a dialogue and we welcome and will
publish a response from Professor Landes in the hopes of making this a better dialogue.
Members of H-ASIA are certainly welcome to respond to the issues raised here, which are
relevant to understanding both Asian and World History.
The Review
The opening sentence of David Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations [reviewed in
NYRB April 23, 1998] is that "my aim in writing this book is to do world
history." The reviewer, William McNeill, shows that Landes missed his target
completely. Indeed, "Landes does not try to understand this history....[Instead his]
vision of the human past remains shaped (and I would say skewed) by ... European economic
history .... Nothing else matters much to him." I join McNeill in arguing "that
there are serious defects in his approach," but I shall demonstrate several of the
many more that McNeill missed or was too diplomatic to point out. It is alarming therefore
that this book has received rave reviews in other media and is endorsed by Nobel laureates
in economics and by the statement of John Kenneth Galbraith that this book is "truly
wonderful." For in reality, it is instead dreadful that Landes fails even to attempt
any global world history, which also leads him to misinterpret the comparative not to
mention relational places of the West and the rest within it. Following my more detailed
critiques, below I offer the outlines of an alternative much more world historical, not to
mention realistic, analysis in which the predominance of Asia until 1800 foreshadows its
re-emergence today.
The opening sentence of McNeill's review is a quotation from Landes, which is
reproduced in all other reviews I have seen as well: "If we learn anything from the
history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference." For
other reviewers, that seems to be the principal virtue and success of the book. For
McNeill and myself it is the second major failing of the book and its author. Granted that
we all make mistakes, but some of us try with time to correct them. McNeill (1990) himself
revisited his own the Rise of the West twenty-five years later and found that he had been
mistaken in neglecting world systemic connections in the past and excessively reflecting
American domination in the present. I myself now revise the 1967 core-periphery and the
1978 world accumulation versions of development/underdevelopment that were based on
presumptions of Eurocentrism and replace them by ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
(1998). But what has Landes learned since he addressed the same issue in his Unbound
Prometheus in 1969? Only more of the same 'West vs. the Rest' to quote Samuel Huntington's
similarly misguided and [temporary] winner-take-all version of history.
However doing any kind of history, let alone world history, like that had already been
shown to be wrong three decades ago, and it is even more clearly wrong again to do the
same now. For, as the Islamicist and world historian Marshall Hodgson already wrote before
his death in 1968
All attempts that I have yet seen to invoke pre- Modern seminal traits in the Occident
can be shown to fail under close historical analysis, once other societies begin to be
known as intimately as the Occident. This also applies to the great master, Max Weber, who
tried to show that the Occident inherited a unique combination of rationality and activism
(Hodgson 1993:86).
Hodgson (1993) and Blaut (1991,1992,1993,1997) derisorally call this "tunnel
history" derived from a tunnel vision, which sees only "exceptional" intra-
European causes and consequences and is blind to all extra-European contributions to
modern European and world history. But Landes remains steadfast and still ignores or
denies all of the world history we have learned since then.
Witness that McNeill can justly write that Landes "assumes an unchanging culture
[in China] ... and his chapters on Latin America, the Muslim lands and China [also Russia]
bluntly attribute their fumbling in making progress toward modernity to defects in the
culture and institutions of the peoples concerned." McNeill calls many of these
"assumptions" "unabashedly triumphalist dubious assertions" that are
reflected in Landes' terminology like dour, dull, diligent; avaricious, sanctimonious,
hypocrites; intrinsic capabilities, curiosity quotient, highly competitive, dumb
submission; simulacrum of homogeneity and docility in Iberian society where skills,
curiosity, initiatives and civic interests wered wanting; Gallic bete noire and can't
trust the Brits; Mediterranean religious and intellectual intolerance; self-imposed
archaism, cupidity and inefficient Ottoman yoke; Egypt's social and cultural incapability;
the Russians were worse [and] used to poverty and ignorance. India dreamt wistfully of
technological revolution but was not ready for it because that would have required
imagination outside the Indian cultural and intellectual experience and used to poverty
and ignorance. Yet India not only dominated the world cotton textile market as we all
know; but the Indians produced better, longer lasting and cheaper sailing vessels, which
the British East India Company bought and even commissioned until after 1830 they were
replaced by steamships.
Although Landes writes "anyone who wants to understand world economic history must
study China," [23] his 'study' finds that also the Chinese lacked range, focus, and
above all, curiosity; they were a culturally anbd intellectually homeostatic society that
could live with little change; they had indifference to technology, technological and
scientific torpor; lacked institutions for finding and learning [in the world's most
literate society!]; abhorred mercantile success, and were not motivated by greed and
passion. They showed deliberate introversion, isolationism, risk aversion, irrationality,
xenophobia, arrogance, haughtiness, stunned submissiveness, self-defeating escapism; were
insecure and brittle, and so on and on. Yet even Landes seems aware of some contradiction
with reality, and indeed with himself, since he also writes that "some of these may
sound like a collection of cliche's" [523] and he even observes that "these
stereotypes held an ounce of truth and a pound of lazy thinking" [174] by others.
Then what about his own assumptions and allegations of "what lay inside: culture,
values, initiative" [253] and the institutions that "make all the
difference" ?
Moreover, Landes contradicts himself and the evidence again and again elsewhere as
well, for as McNeill rightly notes "Landes seemingly cannot make up his mind":
Portugal had intellectual shortcomings [137] and Iberia missed the train of the so-called
scientific revolution [180], but a Portuguese professor of astronomy and mathematics
invented the nonius to give navigational and astronomical readings a major boost [204].
Spain easily conquered the Aztecs because they were divided [102]; but "Spain, though
nominally united, was divided" [249] and Catalonia was "exceptional" [250].
Guilds assumed a zero-sum game of costs and benefits [42]and therefore offered resistance
to change [445], but "guilds were found all over the world - in Europe, but also in
Islamic lands, India, China, and Japan" [242].
These and many other instances in which Landes' account is contradicted by the evidence
and indeed often by himself all derive from this original Eurocentric sin that McNeill
also identifies: "his assumption that only what happened in Europe really mattered,
while the rest of the world reacted to innovations that Europeans thrust down their
throats. This is intrinsically improbable ... [as is] dismissing economic changes
elsewhere as trivial ... [since] most of humankind - four fifths or thereabouts - descend
from non-European peoples." However, neglecting to look seriously at the historical
reality of the much of rest of the world, not to mention of the world as a whole, also
leads Landes to make at least three dozen 'factual' statements and propositions about them
that are flatly contradicted by the bulk of historical evidence itself. That in turn also
vitiates his comparisons with 'the rest' of the alleged 'exceptionalism of the West,'
which has long since been disconfirmed by historical research and social theory, most
recently again by Jack Goody (1996) under the title The East in the West. So many of
Landes' central and derivative propositions reflect factually mistaken Eurocentrist
assumptions whose uses and repetitions he could have avoided it he had taken due account
of the past three decades and more of serious scholarship.
Yet Landes also goes on to make many other statements that are totally contrary to
fact, such as "interruption of Islamic and Chinese intellectual and technological
advance" [200] "clearly Chinese agriculture could not run fast enough"
[24]; Europe's shipping could have run circles around the Chinese in 1450 and then
"Europe could now plant itself anywhere on the surface of the globe within reach of a
naval cannon" [89 Landes' italics]; and "two hundred and fifty years ago, this
[income] gap ... between Europe and, say East or South Asia (China or India) was around
1.5 or 2 to 1." In reality, none of the above, and many more of Landes' beliefs have
any basis in reality. Indeed, mostly the opposite has been historically and empirically
demonstrated again and again. But not to Landes, who also instead makes claims such as
"Britain made itself" [215] and "in Britain, enterprise got nothing from
the state" [265], which also draws critique from McNeill for disregarding state
military demand and protection.
So why does and how can Landes incur all these and so many other grievous historical
errors? He himself provides the answer when he writes "just because something is
obvious does not mean that people will see it, or that they will sacrifice belief to
reality" [493] and in his dismissal of it regarding India in one page [165]:
"Numbers deserve credence only if they accord with the historical context."
Therein Landes himself hits the nail on the head, and indeed into his own. He does not
realize how much he hangs on to his beliefs against all reality precisely because he got
the world historical context all wrong. That is why all the long since historically and
empirically demonstrated facts that Landes either cannot see or still denies "seem to
me [Landes] implausible in the light of the gulf between European and Asian
techniques," which contrary to Landes vastly favored Asia until 1800. For the
problem, as McNeill stresses but still insufficiently documents, is that Landes' extreme
Eurocentrism and Weberianism [yes and Marxism!] totally blinds him to the realities of the
world economy and its history.
In claiming that "culture makes all the difference; (here Max Weber was right
on)" [516] Landes does exactly what he himself criticizes in Aristotle, "to
explain phenomena by the 'essential' nature of things" and neglects and denies the
very world history he 'aims' to write. Instead, as McNeill notes, fully one third of
Landes' chapters are devoted to European "exceptionalisms." The most important
is the alleged European "invention of invention" [chapter 4] and the
"seventeenth-century scientific revolution." Yet Landes himself cites Newton's
belief in alchemy and the transmutation of matter and writes that still "scientists
of the eighteenth century could not have explained why and how a steam engine worked"
[206]. So how could it be, as Landes also claims on the same page 206 that
"scientific method and knowledge paid off in application - most importantly in power
technology"? "The fact of Western technological precedence is there.... My
assumption of the ultimate advantage and benefience of [Western] scientific knowledge and
technological capability is today under sharp attack, even in the Academy [and is] couched
in preferences for feeling over knowing.... (514, 513 italics in the original and
exemplifying footnote reference to "thus A.G. Frank").
But whatever his or my feelings, Landes' own knowledge and assumptions are based on
"facts" that are wrong. The fact is that Western science did not contribute to
technology before 1870, as was recognized by scientific authorities from Francis Bacon
(1561-1626) to Thomas Kuhn (1967). Robert Adams (1996) reviews case studies and the work
of other authorities on the question and himself concludes on a dozen occasions that
science had no impact on technology whatsoever until a full century after the industrial
revolution. Indeed Steven Shapin (1996) even denies that there was any so-called
seventeenth century scientific revolution and Floris Cohen (1994:500) says that "the
concept has by now fulfilled its once useful services [to the likes of Landes]; the time
has come to discard it." But not for Landes.
Apart from the logical fallacy stressed by Jack Goody (1996) of deriving novel changes
like scientific and industrial revolution in the world from permanent
"qualities" in Europe, not only are the alleged causes of this transformation
historically or empirically false, but so are many of his other assertions. For not only
are, as McNeill rightly insists, four fifths of the world non-European; but Asian, and
particularly Chinese and Indians, were also richer, more productive and much more
competitive than the still quite marginal Europe in the Eurasian world economy and history
before 1750-1800, as Adam Smith noted time and again in 1776. The legendary East-West
"Oriental" trade earned them far less than the silver the Europeans brought to
the intra-Aasian "country" trade; and in that, as the Director of the British
East India Company himself recognized in 1688, at any major Indian port all Europeans'
share put together was less than ten percent of the Asians' Indian Ocean trade among
themselves. In the flourishing South China Sea trade, the Europeans were even more
marginal; and in the North China Sea, not to mention in China itself, Europeans were
altogether absent. Nor was Europe and the West nearly as dominant there more recently as
Landes' triumphalism falsely alleges.
McNeill mentions several other reasons for Landes' many failings, including a crucial
one: "Landes simply neglects demography ... a fundamental aspect of the human
condition - population growth and decay ... [and makes] a misleading, and probably false,
proposition." Not just probably, but certainly! All recent empirical estimates,
including those by the European authorities Bairoch and Maddison, whom Landes cites and
whose help he even acknowledges in his preface, agree that in 1800 per capita income was
still higher in China than in Europe in 1800. Their and other estimates all show the same
basic pattern of total world and comparative regional growth of population, production,
and income, which is exactly contrary to what Landes alleges: In the centuries leading up
to 1800, European population remained stable at about 20 percent of the world population
and produced less than that share of world output, while production in Asia grew enough to
support the increase in its share of total world population from 60 percent to 66 percent,
which also produced a significantly higher 80 percent share of world production (Frank
1998). That is contrary to Landes, still through the eighteenth century Asia and
particularly China and India were far more productive than Europe; and their per capita
levels of income and consumption, as well as their productivity and life expectancy, were
also correspondingly higher and still rising faster than in Europe and even in Western
Europe and Britain.
McNeill also justly rebukes Landes for claiming that the world of Adam Smith was
already taking shape 500 years before his time and that the sources of the 'Rise of the
West' and the industrial revolution began in the year 1000. Yet after all that time, Smith
was still unable to recognize them or even the industrial revolution itself in 1776; nor,
as Landes himself notes, did Malthus and Ricardo one and two generations later. Yet with
hindsight Landes now claims to see the causes of this sudden and unexpected transformation
and that "the key factor - the driving force has been Western civilization and its
dissemination" [513], which moreover have been embedded in almost time-less
"Judeo-Christian" values since Biblical times [38,58], but only in Europe!
Against the contrary proposition that "Europe is a latecomer," Landes claims
"that is patently incorrect. As the historical record shows, for the last thousand
years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity"
[xxi]. For still more alarming is that this counter-historical opinion is shared by the
two dozen editors and scores of consultants who produced LIFE magazine' September 1997
special issue on "the Millennium" in which 83 of the 100 most important
"movers and shakers" were of European extraction. Fernand Braudel exaggerated a
bit when he said that Europeans invented history, but not when he added that then they put
it to good use - for themselves. For all historical and conceptual challenge to this
European "invention" of history, Landes dismisses as mere "Europhobia"
and "anti-Eurocentric thought [that] is simply anti-intellectual; also contrary to
fact" [514].
Nonetheless, it is Landes' own claim that is contrary to fact and patently incorrect:
The historical record shows quite unambiguously that during the whole first half of that
millennium Europe was only the most marginalized western peninsular outpost of development
in Eurasia and especially in China, as McNeill also points out. Yet according to my
reading of the historical evidence, even for the following three centuries from 1500 to
1800 Europe still remained at most a very minor player in the world economic casino, in
which the only chips it had to ante up were the gold and particularly the silver from the
Americas. Moreover, the calories derived from imported colonial sugar and Baltic wheat and
the Indian cotton textiles that replaced home grown wool [thus requiring less sheep to eat
less grass and "men" as the saying went] all supplemented capital and freed
natural and human resources that could be used for investment and development in Western
Europe. But all these supplements and replacements were prduced elswhere by slaves and
serfs and/or were bought with American supplied silver and gold. Even so, just to be able
to get and keep this parasitic seat at the world economic table, Europe had to ship and
pay out the only export good it had, the silver that Europe was looting from the Americas.
With that, Europe had to pay for its own the perpetual balance of trade deficit and help
settle that of China, whose agriculture and manufacturing were the world's most productive
and competitive, as Adam Smith still noted in 1776.
So paraphrasing the motto of the New York Times that so highly praised Landes' book,
everything that fits, we print. Alas, four-fifths of the world and its history does not
fit into Landes and The Times Euro-Western centric scheme of things and is either omitted,
or stereotyped and skewed, or dismissed as "a weird pattern of isolated initiatives
and sisyphean discontinuities," as McNeill also notes. Again to quote Landes himself,
"this is history cart before horse, results before data, imagination before
experience. It is also wrong" [197]. Wrong indeed is it for Landes to make his dozens
of mistaken comparisons of alleged essential essences, and wrong for Landes to write
"no one has abrogated the law of supply and demand" [522]. For he has sought to
abrogate it himself, albeit unsuccessfully so, in the next paragraph when he adds that
"culture can make all the difference" for his many wrong assumptions about
institutions here and there.
Landes is even more wrong in failing to apply this law of supply and demand on a
world-wide competitive market basis. Indeed Landes' theoretical and analytic procedures
are the very opposite of being world historical or holistic, as he self-styles them on
page 120. Landes observes that British coal "was [a] fortuitously suitable... lucky
strike" [189] and that wages were high in Britain relative to continental Europe. But
his analysis, if any, is only parochial. He does not even attempt to examine how local
relative factor prices and availability of capital were derived from and responded to
demand and supply in a competitive world market, eg. for textiles not to mention capital.
Much less does he consider how differing but related demographic and ecological pressures
[high wages and expensive wood] made investment in labor saving and energy producing
technological change suddenly rational in some 'Newly Industrializing Economies' in Europe
but temporarily not so in Asia where labor costs were lower even with higher incomes.
Again to quote McNeill also regarding other shortcomings in this book, "Landes does
not raise the question, much less answer it.... All this is absent from Landes's pages.
Surely it belongs in any adequate explanation of how we got to where and who we are."
In Landes' book instead, "Britain made itself" and his "explanation"
is its alleged "nonmaterial values (culture) and institutions"! [215].
Landes also dismisses the contrary findings of the "New Economic History, beguiled
by numbers" [231,193], Marxists [274,382] "leftist political economists and
economic historians" [252], "Europhobia [and] globalists" [514] and others,
especially "the H-World site on the Internet - a magnet for fallacies and fantasies
[and] the invention of folklore" [54n]. Moreover on the basis of only the briefest
e-mailed excerpts on the H-World and Economic History nets based on my still forthcoming
book, Landes also seems to apply these dismissals to me and writes that I am only an
"iconoclast" [89n] who "would argue (thus A.G. Frank) that Europe's
knowledge and know-how did not surpass those of other civilizations until the Industrial
Revolution. Bad history" [514n].
What I write may today indeed be the work of what Landes calls an iconoclast. But it
was still historical reality and standard knowledge even for mainstream Europeans like
Leibnitz, Voltaire and Smith, whom Landes [mis]cites out of all historical context. Indeed
Adam Smith's successors Malthus and Ricardo still held the same opinion, and except for a
couple of iconoclasts in their own time like Montesquieu, "economists have not always
felt this way" as Landes recognizes himelf. It was only since the mid- nineteenth
century that Marx, Maine, Durkheim, Sombart, Weber, Parsons, Polanyi, Rostow and still
Landes and their followers invented their own Eurocentric folklore, fallacies and
fantasies, which are still all too widely shared today. I can only hope that, if not
immediately iconoclast, such unabashed Eurocentrism and triumphalism will at least soon
again become obsolete, the moreso as Asia is REgaining its 'traditional' place and role in
the world, which itself ReOrients.
My modest contribution to that end is my own book ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian
Age (University of California Press May/June 1998), which addresses - and redresses - the
main theoretical concerns voiced by McNeill and myself about Landes, especially his
disregard of the history of four fifth of humanity and his Weberian and other unfounded
assumptions about their and Western institutions and culture. My only 400 page book also
remedies many of the ommissions that McNeill noted in the 600 page book of Landes:
Demography, agriculture, military and other technology as well as production and trade in
Asia. Moreover, my book traces the historical development of the real world economy in
which, until 1800, China and secondarly India have predominant roles, which are omitted or
even denied by Landes and others. Most important unlike Landes and others, my book offers
a truly global world economic/ demographic/ ecological analysis of how and why the
subsequent Decline of the East and Rise of the West were mutually related and derivative
from the structure and dynamic of the world economy itself, and not from any European
miracle or exceptionalism. If if Landes will that he does none of the above and therefore
also no world history at all, I will readily agree with Landes that I [still] do them
badly.
Indeed Landes himself observes rightly, alas not about himself, that "just because
something is obvious does not mean that people will see it, or that they will sacrifice
belief to reality; in the effort to have things both ways, or every way, to appease old
interests, to encourage new" [493]. At least we can agree that "a good historian
tries to keep his balance" [62] and "without controversy, no serious pursuit of
knowledge and truth" [203]. So after Landes and others have had the opportunity to
read both books and whatever else we may write, let reality, history and our readers
themselves be the judge of the wealth of nations and the poverty of David Landes or
myself. For let controversy, balance and cooperation flourish even between Landes and
myself; and when all is said and done, let's just all try to do better.
In closing, I wish to cite and make my own the very words with which Landes himself
closes: "The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No
perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid
dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to chose the
means" [524]. Then, instead of promoting Samuel Huntington's "Clash of
Civilizations," perhaps even David Landes and I could agree to summarize the end with
Wendell Wilkie's motto of "One World" and the means through the "Unity in
Diversity" that Mikhail Gorbachev proposed to the United Nations.
Respectfullly submitted
Andre Gunder Frank
May 6, 1998 [53rd anniversary of VE Day] .
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