Re: [Pen-l] On Eurocentrism

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

By these standards, Brenner isn't Eurocentric at all. But then again,
definitions are arbitrary. Bagchi combines the concepts of
Eurocentrism and pro-capitalism.

> From chapter 2 of "Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of
> Capital" by Amiya Kumar Bagchi (a review of this book by Immanuel
> Wallerstein is scheduled to appear in an upcoming MR.)
>
> As we have seen, the Eurocentric historians portray the record of Europe's
> internal ascent and its outdistancing of the rest of the world as a much
> more ancient history than it actually is. There is little evidence that
> European records of human survival, health, consumption, or incomes were in
> advance of major Asian countries before the nineteenth century. Most of the
> advances in the crude indicators of human development were registered in
> Europe only from the late eighteenth century. Even in England, the homeland
> of the first industrial revolution, the changeover to factory methods was
> not attended immediately with an improvement in consumption and nutrition of
> the ordinary people. The grandiose invocation of a "consumer revolution" in
> eighteenth-century England by McKendrick has not stood up to serious
> empirical scrutiny. As far as ordinary men, women, and children working in
> the fields, factories, and mines were concerned, the Industrial Revolution
> turned out to be an "industrious revolution" (to use a characterization of
> De Vries 1993, pp. 117-18). The industriousness was induced by poverty as
> well as the prospect of making a living by producing goods for the expanding
> market. The greater industriousness of workers was in many instances
> associated with worse states of nutrition, poorer physique, and shorter
> lives. In the phase of domination of merchant capital and so-called
> protoindustrialization, this also involved more work by women and children
> working under a putting-out system.

etc.

-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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