Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 [Paperback]

Janet L. Abu-Lughod (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195067746 | ISBN-13: 978-0195067743 | Publication Date: February 21, 1991

In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A provocative, well-researched, imaginative book."--Contemporary Sociology

"A useful and stimulating economic history that juxtaposes data from many different regions....The book should prove useful and popular in world history courses."--merican Historical Review

"An important work in historical sociology."--Science & Society

"A beautifully written work, whose scope is comparable to those of Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel."--American Sociological Association

"World history at its best, combining breadth and depth, pattern with detail....A first-class contribution that will become a major reference point in future scholarship."--American Journal of Sociology

About the Author

Janet L. Abu-Lughod is at New School for Social Research.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 21, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195067746
• ISBN-13: 978-0195067743
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #76,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'New World History' Classic, August 1, 2000

By 

Thomas M. Martin (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Paperback)

Among teachers and students of world history, this book is already considered a classic. It is not so much a book about people, places, and events, as it is a book about processes and networks in a non-Eurocentric 13th century Old World.

Welcome to a world whose hub is India. To the east Southeast Asian gold and spices and Chinese silks and porcelain. From the west come carpets, dye, incense, gold, silver, and slaves from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea - gold, ivory, and slaves from East Africa. To the north, the Mongols control Central Asia and the Silk Road that Marco Polo takes to China. However, much like "westernization" is sometimes used as a concept in modern history, this was a time of "southernization" in an Asia-centered world connected by monsoon winds. Way out on the periphery of an overlapping Mediterranean network lie Genoa and Venice. Indeed, if Europe were mentioned at this time, most literate people would think of Constantinople - not medieval Western Europe, but the postclassical Byzantine Empire.

*Before European Hegemony* is obviously a `not for everyone' history book. Nevertheless, the reason that I gave it 5 stars is because I consider it the most accessible `world systems' history - and also because of the maps of overlapping trading networks which are probably known even better than the book. I can recommend the book to teachers (and students) of AP and college-survey world history courses without hesitation, or any reader whose tastes run to historical scholarship.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative, February 12, 2005

By 

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Paperback)

This book is approaching the status of a classic. While a work of history, the author is not a historian but rather a sociologist with an interest in the role of cities. Perhaps because she was a disciplinary outsider not specializing in a given historical period, as well as being used to comparative analysis, Abu-Lughod adopted a cross-cultural approach. The starting point for this book was the prevailing belief that a world economy was created by Europeans in the early modern period. More naive interpretations saw this as a logical development of European capitalism and that capitalism was unique to Europe. A major point of this book is that a world economic system, spanning all of Eurasia and including Southeast Asia and Eastern Africa existed prior to the early modern period. This world system was based on pre-existing regional trade networks in the Eastern Mediterrenean, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and China. Some of these linkages, like the famous Silk road across Central Asia and trade across the Indian Ocean, were ancient.
Abu-Lughod reconstructs a true world economy stretching from western Europe to China reaching its peak during the 13th and 14th centuries and then declining. She shows that Europe joined this system relatively late and was a smaller component of these large trade networks. The peak of this world system is associated with the Mongol conquest of Central Asia and China. Mongol successes are seen as simultaneously making trade across Central Asia, the northern axis of the world system, and trade through the Indian Ocean and south China, the southern axis, more efficient. This lead to a Eurasian boom. As a corollary, Abu-Lughod explores the richly capitalist nature of trade in the Muslim, Indian, and Chinese regions making up the world system. Some of the institutional innovations attributed to Medieval and Renaissance European merchants may have been borrowed from the Muslim world.
If the Mongols were the inadvertant architects of this system, they were also the inadvertant cause of its collapse. The key event is the Black Death, a Eurasian pandemic which probably originated in central Asia and was spread by Mongol armies and trade made possible by their states. The resulting depopulations and political instability, including the Ming expulsion of the Mongol from China, crippled the Medieval world system, though it left intact regional trade networks, particularly in Asia that the Europeans would join and come to dominate in the Early Modern period.
A final and more controversial point made by Abu-Lughod is that the success of Europeans in subsequently reconstructing and dominating, in an unprecedented way, the Eurasian trade system was the withdrawal of the Chinese state from interest in trade. Under the later Ming, the powerful Chinese navy was dissolved and trade through southern China ceased to be an important issue for the Chinese state. The subsequent power vacuum made European domination possible. This may not be entirely correct but is argued well.
This book has become the point of departure for much subsequent important work in world history. It is well written and has a nice bibliography.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A World Economy in the 1200s, March 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Paperback)

A completely convincing presentation of a world economic system before the surge of the West, in which Europe played only a minor part. Not as Marxist as Wallerstein, and not as over-the-top as Andre Gunner Frank's new book Re-Orient, which draws on it considerably. Her prose style does not scintillate, but neither is she difficult; reads like it grew out of her thesis. Because this is a big idea, and she explores it thoroughly, it's one of the most exciting books I have read in a long time.