Extricating the Analytics: Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony

Abstract

Janet was critical of what she saw as the Europe- centered bases and histories from which Wallerstein developed the analytic tools underlying his theorizing of a world-system. [...]these emergent geographies cut across multiple divisions: for instance, the United States is a great host of global finance, but so is China.

Armed with her strong ideas and desire to discover, rather than merely replicate, Janet Abu-Lughod was fearless in launching new interpretations about complex conditions. She saw no problem in developing critical analyses of the work of those she considered her friends, albeit in some Abu- Lughodian version of friendship. Over the decades, walking on ground strewn with her devastating critiques, Janet was always already focused on her next project.

All these features are present in her major contribution to world-system analysis, the much admired and controversial Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. It took enormous work and courage to engage this subject. And it took seeing the complex shape of a historical possibility: a "world system" in a pre-European era - the period A.D. 1250-1350-where Europe was merely one component. In this project Abu-Lughod both criticized and expanded Wallerstein's seminal The Modern World System. Janet was critical of what she saw as the Europe- centered bases and histories from which Wallerstein developed the analytic tools underlying his theorizing of a world-system. Abu-Lughod argues that the modern European "world system" is, in large measure the inheritor and continuator of an antecedent, a "world system" centered on the Asia of the Moguls.

Her theoretical framework is anchored in financial and commercial networks within and between the main zones she sees in her "world system": Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and western Indian Ocean, the eastern Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, and China. Empirically much of the focus is on major trading centers. So began the massive work of studying and sorting out vast literatures. The result was a masterful and often controversial account about a multimodal, distributed world-system. Janet's construction of this world-system is hers, even as each part of this world-system is the subject of much scholarly work.

Indeed, much of this scholarship has covered several centuries before her 1250-1350 focus and generally finds that the great commercial and trading periods for many of the components of this world system had happened earlier. However, what Janet emphasized is the articulation of these various components and thereby the possibility of a world-system. Prosperity and rising economic capacity was not enough for Janet's analysis. What she was after was the existence of networks connecting these diverse components and the modalities of such connections. This led her to focus on more than simply periods of maximum prosperity, as some of her critics argued she should have. In her interpretation of the evidence, the networks connecting the diverse parts of this system came later, often after the periods of highest growth. This explains why, for Janet, maximum prosperity or growth was not necessarily the defining factor.

What was particularly important for Janet's analysis was that Europe became part of that world system: one dominated by the Moguls, not by Europe! The interconnections among various parts of Asia had been in some cases stronger a century or so before 1250. And while it had included some parts of Europe, notably Spain, the core elements of that world system were far from Europe. In Janet's world system, it was the rise of the Moguls in the 13th century and onwards that were the dominant glue. Further, what mattered in her analysis was that they supported trans-Asian caravan trading, which in turn led to networks that enabled Europe's incorporation into a larger space of Eurasian commerce. This analysis both brought Europe into a vast Asian geography dominated by the Moguls and sought to show that, whatever the conditions explaining the rise of the later European world-system of the 16th century onwards, these conditions were not the only ones that could lead to a world-system.

Yet another major contribution of the research in Before European Hegemony is Janet's focus on the structural architecture of world-systems. The existence of a complex Asia-centered territorial formation long before the European world-system offered an opportunity for comparing this structural aspect. It was especially so because it was as yet unexamined through the lenses of world- systems analysis-though much studied by diverse specialized disciplines which in fact made Janet's examination possible. What matters most, perhaps, is that this literature allowed her to establish significant structural differences between that earlier Asian world system of the 1200s and the European one that took off in the 1500s. What she found, even if controversial among historians, was that the Asian system was marked by a sort of balanced interdependence. This was a major contrast with the familiar developmental and spatial hierarchy of the European system under capitalist hegemony.

This then also led Janet to yet another important insight, already mentioned above: The conditions internal to Europe that are generally considered to have enabled the emergence of the European world-system were not the only ones to enable world-system formation. Other, non- European types of conditions could also enable this process. There was no historical necessity explaining the outcome of European domination over much of the planet. Even more, some of the technical advances that enabled the European trajectory came from the East, from that earlier, Asia- centered world-system. Janet also saw in this the fact that it was not European superiority that brought down the Asia-centered system: the latter degraded due to its own specific conditions long before Europe's rise. Rather, what might be more likely is that the fall of the Asia-centered system enabled the later rise of a Europe-centered system. It cleared the imperial space, so to speak.

I would so much like to have a long conversation with Janet and ruminate with her about the emergent formations, possibly world systems, that I detect today in our world. The fact that she had the courage and did all this work to establish the existence of an earlier world-system with its own specific dynamics and conditionalities, makes me think she would at least be open to some of what I see.

I see yet another structural architecture in the making today. It is neither similar to the Asian nor the European. Neither is it quite Arrighi's rise of a hegemonic China examined in his masterful The Long Twentieth Century. Very briefly, I see a disassembling of older, bounded formations, particularly of nation-states, but also of the ongoing de facto (even if not de jure) imperial dominations. While interstate borders are pretty stable, the emergent geographies that mark our epoch give us a very different shape. We see the making of economic and power spaces that cut across those boundaries and encompass only part of nation-states. Further, these geographies cut across many of the old divides, notably North-South and East-West. They incorporate elites and elite projects in all these diverse zones and discard much of the rest -in the Global South especially, but now increasingly also in the Global North. They are partial assemblages of pieces of existing national territories and are predicated on a growing range of expulsions of the people, places, and operations that do not fit the new mode. While these expulsions may have been especially sharp in the Global South, now they are also increasingly happening in the Global North. Further, these emergent geographies cut across multiple divisions: for instance, the United States is a great host of global finance, but so is China. What matters more to our understanding of today's world? Is it that the political systems of these two countries are very different or that both increasingly financialize their economies? These new geographies are brutal, even if often complex and constituted through forms of knowledge we admire and respect -such as the algorithms so central to finance or the complex logistics of outsourcing jobs. It may well be a kind of new world-system, but one not centered in the old familiar distinctions.