[Marxism] Arrighi on East/West comparisons at the dawn of capitalism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Historical Perspectives on States, Markets and Capitalism, East and West

Giovanni Arrighi

Giovanni Arrighi, an authority on the political economy and geopolitics 
of world social change, here reflects comparatively on states and 
markets East and West at the dawn of capitalism. Ranging widely across 
Smith, Marx, Weber and Braudel, he assesses the logic and interplay of 
China’s tribute trade system and Europe’s emerging capitalism. This 
article draws on and extends a chapter from his new book, Adam Smith in 
Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century, which looks across the 
last five hundred years to consider the emerging position of East Asia 
in an epoch that marks the end of US hegemony. MS

The Five-Hundred Years’ Peace

One of the great myths of Western social science is that national states 
and their organization in an interstate system are European inventions. 
In reality, except for a few states that were the creation of European 
colonial powers (most notably, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines), 
the most important states of East Asia–from Japan, Korea, and China to 
Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Kampuchea–were national states long before 
any of their European counterparts. What’s more, they had all been 
linked to one another, directly or through the Chinese center, by trade 
and diplomatic relations and held together by a shared understanding of 
the principles, norms, and rules that regulated their mutual 
interactions as a world among other worlds. As Japanese scholars 
specializing in the China-centered tribute trade system have shown, this 
system presented sufficient similarities with the European interstate 
system to make their comparison analytically meaningful. [1]

full: http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2630

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