Alexander Anievas

Kerem Nisanc@0131oglu

Mainstream historical accounts of the development of capitalism describe a process which is fundamentally European - a system that was born in the mills and factories of England or under the guillotines of the French Revolution. In this groundbreaking book, a very different story is told. How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to the dominant wisdom, capitalism's origins should not be understood as a development confined to the geographically and culturally sealed borders of Europe, but the outcome of a wider array of global processes in which non-European societies played a decisive role. Through an outline of the uneven histories of Mongolian expansion, New World discoveries, Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry, the development of the Asian colonies and bourgeois revolutions, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu provide an account of how these diverse events and processes came together to produce capitalism.

The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism

How the West Came to Rule

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Eurocentrism tends to overlook the multiple and interactive character of social development. In doing so, it sets up an epistemological distinction between Europe and 'the Rest' as theoretically incommensurable objects of study, turning the study of the origins of capitalism into an exclusionary process in which the agency of non-European societies is erased or over-looked. From these two assumptions emerges a third predictive proposition: that the European experience of modernity is a universal stage of development through which all societies must pass.

Capital 'as a thing' is often understood simply as 'profit, or an accumulated pool of money, or perhaps machinery, whose existence is independent of wider social relations. Treating capital solely as a 'thing' therefore tends to naturalise and eternalise capitalism.

In contrast, we follow Marx in conceiving capitalism as encompassing historically specific configurations of social relations and processes. Such a relation-al-processual approach helps us move away from 'abstract one-sided' self-rep-resentations of capitalism and toward uncovering the 'concrete living aggregate' of 'definite social relationships'

Here, non-waged forms of production - cooking, house-keeping, childbearing and so on - are fundamental to the reproduction of wage-labour, and capitalism as such. As we demonstrate throughout the book, such relations (and others) were absolutely crucial to both making the accumulation and reproduction of capital possible, and producing forms of subordination, exploitation and social stratification that were at the heart of alienating workers from their labour and from each other.

We must call out all such ahistorical reificatory and essentialist perspectives for what they really are: thinly veiled rationalisation (intentional or not) of power politics in attaining states' putative 'national interests'. In short, they are particular representations and articulations of the hegemonic ideologies of modern world politics masquerading as social 'scientific' theories - traditional IR as the Discipline of Western Supremacy', as Kees van der Pijl aptly terms it.

How the West Came to Rule quotes

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