Table Of ContentEurope and the
Rise of Capitalism
Edited by
;
Jean Baechler John A. Hall and
Michael Mann
Basil Blackwell
Copyright© Basil Blackwell Ltd 1988
First published 1988
Reprinted and first published in paperback 1989
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Europe and the rise of capitalism.
1. Europe—Economic conditions 2. Asia
—Economic conditions
I. Baechler, Jean II. Hall, John A.
III. Mann, Michael, 1942-
330.94'02 IIC240
ISBN 0-631-15006-4
ISBN 0-631-16942-3 Phk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Europe and the rise of capitalism.
Based on papers from a symposium organized in
Septemher 1985 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, under
the title of “The European miracle”, sponsored bv the
Economic and Social Research Council in co-operation
with the Centre national de la recherche seientifique,
Paris.
Includes bibliographies and index.
1. Capitalism—Europe— I Iistory—Congresses.
2. Capitalism—Asia—I Iistoiy—Congresses. 3. Europe—
Economic conditions—Congresses. 4. Asia— Economic
conditions—Congresses. 1. Baechler, lean. II. I Iall,
John A., 1949- . III. Mann, Michael,' 1942- .
IV. Emmanuel College (University of Camhridge)
V. Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain)
VI. Centre national de la recherche seientifique (France)
I IC240.9.C3E97 1987 330.94 87-12293
ISBN 0-631-15006-4
ISBN 0-631-16942-3 (phk.)
'Typeset in IOV2 on 12 pt Ehrhardt
hy I lope Services, Abingdon, Oxon, UK
Printed in Great Britain by T. J. Press, Padstow
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
(3 Introduction
Ernest Gellner
(J) European Development: Approaching a Historical
^ Explanation
Michael Mann
fly States and Societies: The Miracle in Comparative Perspective
^ John A. Hall
The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India,
Europe and J^pan)
Jean Baechler
4 The Uniqueness of the East
Chris Wickham
5 China as a Counterfactual
Mark Elvin
6 The Mamluk Military System and the Blocking of Medieval
Moslem Society
Jean-Clande Garcin
7 Islam: A Comment
Michael Cook
8 The Modernization of Japan: Why has Japan Succeeded in its
Modernization?
Jacques Mutel
9 The Russian Case
Alain Besangon
10 Political and Social Structures of the West
Karl Ferdinand Werner
iv Contents
11 The Cradle of Capitalism: The Case of England 185
Alan Macfarlane
12 The European Tradition in Movements of Insurrection 204
Rene Pillorget
13 Republics of Merchants in Early Modem Europe 220
Peter Burke
14 The European Family and Early Industrialization 234
Peter Laslett
Index 243
Preface
In September 1985 we organized a symposium held at Emmanuel
College, Cambridge, under the provocative title of ‘The European
Miracle’. This title - borrowed from E. L. Jones’s book The European
Miracle (Cambridge, 1981) - indicated our interest in explaining the
massive and, perhaps, unique development of medieval and early
modern Europe towards capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and
modernity. To that end we gathered a group of distinguished,
international scholars from several academic disciplines. The Economic
and Social Research Council generously provided funds for the
symposium under its programme of Anglo-French co-operation with the
Centre National de la Recherche Seientifique, Paris.
All but two of the chapters here presented were given in earlier form
in either English or French at the symposium - the exceptions being
invited contributions from Ernest Gellner and Chris Wickham. (Chris
Wickham’s chapter has also appeared in the Journal of Peasant Studies.)
We would like to thank all those who participated in Cambridge for their
contributions to our lively and stimulating discussions.
The French contributions have been translated into English by
W. D. Halls.
Jean Baechler, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris
John A. Hall, University of Southampton and Harvard University
Michael Mann, London School of Economics
Acknowledgements for the illustrations in chapter 5
Figure
3 a Reproduced by kind permission of Mark Elvin.
3b Diderot, Encyclopedic, vol. XXVIII, plate VIII Sig. H, fol. Bs 459-486
(K.5.221), is reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Library,
Oxford.
3c Diderot, Encyclopedic, vol. XXVIII, plate XII Sig. M, fol. Bs 459—486
(K.5.221) is reproduced by kind permission of the Bodleian Library,
Oxford.
4a The Mansell Collection.
4b Reproduced by kind permission of Mark Elvin.
5a Reproduced by kind permission of Glasgow University Library.
Introduction
Ernest Gellner
The conference on which this collection of essays is based was originally
called The European Miracle’, and the idea of the miraculousness of the
European experience continues to haunt much of the argument. The
European Miracle sounds like an extraordinary example of European
vainglory and vanity. We are the miracle. Le miracle, c’est moi. It is all a bit
like the man who explained his failure to take part in the war by saying —
/ am the civilization you are fighting to defend. The rest of you simply
exemplify the ordinary condition of humanity, unblessed and unhallowed
by any miraculous intervention.’ We need to be explained; you constitute a
kind of unproblematic and unexciting baseline, a moral null hypothesis,
which invites no intellectual exploration, and contains no valuable
lesson.
That is what it sounds like. The truth of the matter is exactly the
opposite. The phrase should not be read — the European miracle. It must
be read - the European miracle. We know not what we do, and we do not
know what hit us. We cannot take credit for it. Economic, social and
cognitive development, like thought itself, cannot properly be spoken of
in the first person. Just as one should always say ‘it thinks’ and never ‘I
think’, so one should also say that it developed, and not that we
developed. The underlying puzzlement, the perception of a problem
which inspires the question, is not any kind of Europocentric vision of
history, but on the contrary, a sense of proportion, of the general and
pervasive obstacles to progress, and a humility in face of the occasional
rare surmounting of those impediments.
Europeans had indeed once been vainglorious and Europocentric.
Then they equated their own history with human history as such, and
lacked a sense of any specific miracle. They had only received what was
2 Ernest Gellner
their due. Their own fate was what was intended for humanity. Life or
history itself had intended them to be the beneficiaries of what had come
their way. They were and deserved to be at the head of the queue. Thus
the new humanist faith in work was a covert glorification of one kind of
man.
The period stretching roughly from the end of the eighteenth to the
beginning of the twentieth century, the age of the faith in progress, was,
of course, also the time of an awareness of fundamental social and
intellectual change. It was linked, in most cases, to an optimistic
conviction that this change was for the better. Global change was
endowed with a systematic direction, and it was underwritten by some
persistent mechanism or force which guaranteed that this overall
direction should remain beneficial and operative. Basically there was but
one principle and one mechanism of change. It manifested itself, in its
most striking and best developed form, in European or Western history.
The age whose thought had fused history and philosophy, which saw
historic change as the manifestation of our collective salvation and as
the clue to human destiny, focused on Western history. What of the rest
of mankind?
The question was not always asked with very much insistence. What
did the rest- of the world matter? But for those who did ask the question,
the answer was obvious. The rest of the world exemplified the same
principles, the same mechanisms, the same destiny, as did the West. But
these other cultures or races or civilizations exemplified them in feebler,
slower and retarded forms. They could see their future in us. We could
see our barbarous past in them. That indeed constitutes their scholarly
significance. As late as the second half of the twentieth century, Claude
Levi-Strauss could point out that for the Marxisant Jean-Paul Sartre,
backward races could only enter history proper by courtesy of
incorporation in the European dialectic. This was la mission civilisatrice
in Marxist language.
So the Europocentric nineteenth-century philosophies of history
tended to assume that the recent dramatic transformations, which had
disturbed the earlier certainties and seeming stabilities of Europe, were
firmly inscribed on a universal human agenda. These were issues facing
mankind, not Europe as such. Their solutions were valid for humanity,
not just for Europeans. These problems and solutions had been ever
present, latent in the destiny of mankind. Europe attained them first, but
they were not specifically European. Europe was the avant-garde model.
It was through the European situation that the human condition as such
was to be understood. The principles of human society were the same
everywhere, but Europe, being most advanced, provided the norm.
Philosophy had become historical when it became manifest that radical
Introduction 3
social change was not an aberration, but was inherent in the human
condition. Change ceased to be seen as part of social pathology, as it had
been for Plato, and became, instead, the central theme and device of a
new, secular soteriology. But the vision did still assume that the
turbulence of European history revealed human destiny as such.
This assumption, so often tacitly accepted, has now been abandoned.
The historical nature of philosophy (though repudiated or ignored by the
academic trade) continues to be valid: change is the law of all things, and
we cannot understand ourselves without understanding the patterns of
change. But we no longer constitute the model which explains all else.
We are an aberration, which can only be understood by investigating the
other, more typical social forms. What has disappeared is the supposition
that the changes which occurred here - if only we can pick out their
crucial features and their underlying principles — were inscribed into the
order of things, into the very essence of human society, requiring nothing
but time and maturation to reveal themselves generally.
Of course, nothing can happen unless it is possible. But a great deal
can happen without being necessary. The emergence of a society without
poverty, a society blessed with perpetual economic and cognitive growth,
an egalitarian and/or fraternal society which incorporates everyone in a
shared moral citizenship and a high culture, a society without oppression
or arbitrariness - whichever of these or similar features you consider to
be central to an optimistic vision of social development - is not inscribed
into any historic plan. On the contrary, it is plausible to argue that
agrarian society as such is a trap, and moreover one from which it was
almost impossible for mankind to escape. A stored surplus needs to be
guarded and its distribution enforced. No principle of distribution is
either self-validating or self-enforcing. Conflict is inevitable, and victors
have no interest in permitting a return match. They have every reason to
prevent it by pre-emptive action. Herein lies, as Plato amongst others
saw, the root cause of political coercion. Few agrarian societies escape
this coercive destiny.
The consequences of the codification and storage of knowledge, in
other words of the discovery and use of writing, are no better, as David
Hume noted: the guardians of a centralized and codified doctrine are
less tolerant than the priests of traditional, non-scriptural religion.
Codification makes possible the definition of orthodoxy and hence of
heresy, and hence the extension of social control to belief as well as of
practice. The monopolists of truth are as jealous as the monopolists of
power, and have as good reasons for eliminating competition. So
oppression and dogmatism which is, in diverse forms, the shared lot of
agro-literate societies, is not an accident but a fatality.
How then did we manage to escape the dreadful regiment of kings and
4 Ernest Gellner
priests? Certainly not because we were any better than those who failed
to escape. The miracle occurred, not in the West as such, nor even in
Europe, but in one small part of Europe, and on one occasion only. It did
not occur in other parts of the same continent, and was often suppressed
when attempts were made to spread it. Those who achieved it once had
not been able to perform it on earlier occasions. Had this one instance
been suppressed, as it very nearly was, there is no evidence that they
would have been able to repeat it later. Of course we cannot be sure
about this, as we do not know what would have happened: but that is
what the evidence suggests.
So the sense of miracle is not inspired by the vainglory or self
congratulation of those who were its first beneficiaries, but, rather, by a
sense of its precariousness. This sense springs from a vivid perception of
the difficulties of diffusing the benefits of the new order, but also from an
awareness of its fragility, and of its mysteriousness in its original
homeland. Looking at those caught in the agrarian trap, we know that but
for the Grace of God, that would be our condition,. This is the switch
from the entelechy, acorn-to-oak tree vision (exemplified, for instance,
by Marxism), to the fortuitous, contingent opening of a normally shut
gate, to the accidentally open gate model (exemplified by Max Weber).
When a great deal of twentieth-century philosophy turned its back on
history and on any preoccupation with historic patterns, it did not do so
because its nineteenth-century predecessors had been Europocentric. It
did so because it claimed that history as such, whether ethnocentric or
not, was irrelevant. In so doing, it became, in effect, essentialist, whether
or not this was recognized. It assumed, or affirmed, that human nature,
society, institutions, could be understood and/or evaluated by somehow
approaching their given, inherent essences, which were independent of
the historically revealed transformations. R. G. Collingwood saw the
absurdity of this clearly, but he was not heeded.
Nowadays, there is a variety of such fashionable von Munchhausen
philosophies, whose practitioners would lift themselves, and the rest of
us, by their own breeches from the ditch of contingent reality to the
heights of normative essence. These trans-historical essences are
allegedly approached by diverse patented methods - linguistic, phenom
enological, formal-logical, contractarian and other. In fact, their
trascendence of history is spurious. Philosophy must become historical
again, but it may not absolutize any one condition or pattern of change.
It must explain how, against all odds, a dramatic transformation became
possible - not why it was necessary. It can illuminate options, not
prescribe any one of them.
If we now return, as we must, to a concrete investigation of the historic
constraints which define the range of our options, the manner in which
