Synopses & Reviews
How the West Came to Rule offers a unique interdisciplinary and international historical account of the origins of capitalism. It argues that contrary to dominant wisdom, capitalisms 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 colonies, and bourgeois revolutions, Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu offer an account of capitalisms origins that convincingly argues against the prevailing Eurocentric narratives.
About the Author
Alexander Anievas is an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow at the Department of Political and International Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Capital, the State, and War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years' Crisis, 1914-1945.Kerem Nisancioglu is a visiting lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Westminster, London
Table of Contents
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