*Winner of International Studies Association (ISA)'s International Political Sociology Best Book Prize for 2017
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*Winner of British International Studies Association (BISA)'s International Political Economy Working Group Book Prize of 2016
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*Shortlisted for the ISA Book Prize
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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 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.
By:
Alexander Anievas,
Kerem Nişancıoğlu
Imprint: Pluto Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 230mm,
Width: 150mm,
Spine: 25mm
Weight: 560g
ISBN: 9780745336152
ISBN 10: 0745336159
Pages: 404
Publication Date: 20 June 2015
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Transition Debate: Theories and Critique 2. Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism: The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development 3. The Long Thirteenth Century: Structural Crisis, Conjunctural Catastrophe 4. The Ottoman-Habsburg Rivalry over the Long Sixteenth Century 5. The Atlantic Sources of European Capitalism, Territorial Sovereignty and the Modern Self 6. The ‘Classical’ Bourgeois Revolutions in the History of Uneven and Combined Development 7. Combined Encounters: Dutch Colonisation in South-East Asia and the Contradictions of ‘Free Labour’ 8. Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ Conclusion Notes Index
Alexander Anievas is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War 1914-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 2014), How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015) and editor of Marxism and World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism (Routledge, 2010). Kerem Nişancıoğlu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author of How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015), and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018). He also blogs at The Disorder of Things.
Reviews for How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism
This excellent book, which builds upon extant non-Eurocentric analyses of the Eastern origins of the rise of the West, intervenes in the recent neo-Trotskyist IR literature by showing how uneven and combined development operated prior to European industrialisation and how this international process was in fact formative of, rather than something which flowed on subsequent to, this great economic transformation. -- Professor John M. Hobson (University of Sheffield) In this rigorously argued book, Anievas and Nisancioglu present a compelling challenge to standard narratives of capitalist modernity. They combine theoretical sophistication and a wide-ranging account of extra-European histories to provide a superb - and provocative - alternative. -- Gurminder K Bhambra, author of Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury)
- Winner of ISA Book Prize 2017 (UK)
