Jack Goody - The Eurasian Miracle

Alternation or supremacy?

A short introduction to a short book. This book is about the relative unity of the European and Asian continents rather than their differences, a relative unity that began with the Bronze Age Revolution. That great change what the prehistorian Gordon Childe has described as the beginning of the Culture of Cities (hence Civilization in his sense) did not result in a bifurcation between the dynamic west, passing through antiquity, and feudalism, to capitalism, and the east that produced a static, hydraulic, bureaucratic, despotism, which was not about to modernize. This was the nineteenth-century theory of the earlier sociologists, Marx, Weber and many European historians, who saw the world from the standpoint of Europes predominance and presumed it had always had an advantage. No one is doubting the achievements of Europe in the Industrial Revolution, nor yet in the Renaissance. What is at stake is the extent to which this was European. In some respects its roots were Eurasian, but in any case the key movement is alternation between post-Bronze Age societies, rather than viewing one as having a permanent advantage over the other.

This first chapter attempts to deal with various Europeanist arguments that propose a completely different trajectory in the west. It is based upon my contribution to a conference held in Cambridge in September 1985 under the title of The European Miracle. On this occasion I began to query the whole discussion on the grounds that it placed too much emphasis on the invention of something called capitalism, it neglected the contributions of other societies to the achievements of the Industrial Revolution and, in particular, it overlooked the contributions of the east to modernization, mechanization and industrialization. The thesis of the book was not wrong in recognizing the advantage gained by the west after the Renaissance and especially in the nineteenth century after the Industrial Revolution, but it seemed to be an example of ethnocentric teleology in so far as it attributed that European achievement to deep-rooted, quasi-permanent features of the west, rather than recognizing the phenomenon of alternation of advantage in an exchange economy (which included the exchange of information).

This short book contains little that I have not hinted at before but much that I wanted to clarify and, specifically, the aspect of alternation among the major civilizations of Eurasia, which raises the question of why I think the so-called European miracle was part of a wider Eurasian phenomenon, developing as it did in the nineteenth century (and even before in the Renaissance), but also of why I cannot agree with the kind of essentialist account that Europeans have been only too ready to offer. Alternation automatically rejects essentialism and the notion of permanent advantage.

The idea for this book came from John Thompson who pointed out that I needed to deal more specifically with the question of why capitalism in Europe? That made me look again at the report of the conference, which only confirmed my belief that capitalism had to be seen in a wider Eurasian context where there were a succession of miracles and rebirths. What happened in Europe in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was part of these. Today we are experiencing another swing towards the east, which is not simply copying the west but picking up on earlier achievements. Only such a hypothesis can explain the different records of development in Asia and in Africa, which never experienced the Bronze Age Revolution. The foundation of the culture of cooking and the growth of a grand cuisine as well as the culture of flowers are things I constantly refer to, partly because these are areas in which I have done extensive research.

But also they are areas outside the normal range of economic purview, even though they were much influenced by the economy, and they are areas associated with more general cultural achievement. Nevertheless, as I have argued, they are areas in which the west remained in constant comparison with the east, which in many respects had the advantage over a long period, so that neither the economy nor the knowledge system was inferior to that of the west.

Note

J. R. Goody 1982, 1993.