Customer Reviews

The East in the West

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Sir Jack Goody's lifework as an anthropologist has been, besides the study of the Lo-Dagaa in Ghana, the refutation of many a Eurocentric myth or assumption about the differences between West and East. Indeed, practically all his works to greater or lesser extent are aimed at showing and emphasizing not the differences but the similarities between East and West, in particular as relates to economic history in the broad view. This book is no exception, and as usual for Goody examines critically some claims about specific aspects of these supposed strong differences, while putting this in the context of the greater discussion about the differentials in economic development between Asia and Europe over time.

This has the downside of sometimes making the work somewhat slow, although Goody is a remarkably cogent and crisp writer on a subject (economic history) so often seen as dry and abstract. In "The East in the West", the specific claims he engages and refutes are the ideas of greater rationality in the West than in the East, a better or earlier development of bookkeeping (itself often used as an example of the former), differences in family life and size, and differences in mathematics. Although these are important issues because of the way they are used to solidify the thesis of inherent European cultural superiority or the early development of the same, Goody's analysis of matters like details of bookkeeping in late medieval Italy go on too long and are sometimes simply boring.

This is unfortunate, because both the rest of the book and the general theme are important and interesting. Goody again shows, as Eric Wolf, A.G. Frank, Wallerstein etc. had also done, to what great extent the differences between West and East in development during the Middle Ages has been exaggerated: until roughly 1600-ish, India and China were clearly ahead both in living standards and technology, and mercantile capital was as developed in Asia and the Middle East as it was on the European continent. The poorly conceived ad-hoc explanations for later European dominance, from Weber's Protestant ethic to Malthusian claims about Chinese overpopulation, are easily refuted by Goody simply by making the comparison. It is indeed amazing how poorly scientifically undertaken many such studies are, even mainstream ones like Landes: there is barely any attempt at actually first checking whether something claimed as the unique cause for European advancement over Asia wasn't actually present in Asia during the same time as well!

Particularly excellent and worth reading are the last two chapters, which deal with the main issue underlying these claims: the difficulty of integrating our new knowledge of economic history with the traditional ideas about the successive modes of production, influenced by Marx and Weber. Indeed it is clear that the traditional scheme of successive modes as described by Marx has to be rewritten, since we now know vastly more about the matter than Marx did and it is clear that the stark differences in historical development between for example India and England, which Marx assumed true based on the knowledge he had in the late 19th Century, are simply false. However, there is also no reason to abandon the concept entirely and revert to confused and unexplained bourgeois assumptions equating development with trade volume, as André Gunder Frank does, correctly criticized for that by Wolf and Goody both. It is a pity that in this book as well as others Goody is not much inclined to offer a solution himself, preferring to analyze the discussion so far and emphasizing the incorrectness of the traditional views. Clearly the work of systematizing the new information into a newer and better model of successive production systems is a task science still has to undertake.

Not in the least because of Goody's pleasant, friendly tone and his excellent writing skills, this book is much recommended for everyone interested in economic history.