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CUTTING THE GORDIAN KNOT 102 Second, and more fundamental to world-systems analysis, these projections are based on, or rather motivate, a model of the Great Divergence and Convergence that aims to supplement The Long Twentieth Century but creates new ambiguities in doing so. Given that the aim of worldsystems analysis, in the words of Wallerstein, is about offering “more plausible explanations of historical reality” (2007:19), Arrighi’s conceptual struggles with capitalism and the worldeconomic unit do not seem to lead to a better understanding of the Gordian knot of World History. We agree with Christopher Chase-Dunn that Arrighi “does far better than Frank” in seeing that until deep in the nineteenth century East Asia and Europe threaded down different developmental paths, and that there was a substantially independent East Asian international system prior to the nineteenth century (Chase-Dunn 2009). However, the real problem is Arrighi’s assumption that Asia’s market-oriented legacy survived within a European, and later, a North American, political-military interaction network. Characterized as a process of subordination, formal dissolution or hybridization, it is difficult to understand the place of China and East Asia within the world during the long 20 th century. Adam Smith presents an impressive historical analysis to remind us that world history is not a teleological march towards Fukuyama’s End of History (1993), but this does not automatically render Arrighi’s speculations on the “End of Capitalism” more credible. East Asia may not have had an inherent tendency to generate the capital- and energy-intensive developmental path opened up by Britain, but one could argue that it is emulating this path today to the full extent. In sum, what stimulated much of Arrighi’s research but finally turned against him is his “presentist” approach to historical sociology (Moore 1997:105). Ever since The Geometry of Imperialism (1978), Arrighi’s main concern lay with the future directions of the world economy and how to understand the economic downturn of/since the seventies. Moore stresses that this attitude allowed Arrighi to discern long-run cycles with tremendous clarity but made him vulnerable to the very problem World-Systems Analysis aims to remedy: an ahistorical analysis of the evolution of capitalism. The problem with Adam Smith is not so much that the analysis once more risks to ahistorical argument, but that this time around, the analysis has lost some of its tremendous clarity. Instead of fine tuning the rigorous model Arrighi presented in The Long Twentieth Century, we are offered a supplement that does fairly little to cut The Gordian knot of the Great Divergence and Convergence. Nor does Adam Smith address other problems with The Long Twentieth Century such as its underestimation of technological factors in the study of the global economy (Elvin 2008:92-93). Despite these problems, The Long Twentieth Century’s analysis of “long centuries” of converging and diverging relationships between the production of wealth, power and space in the history of capitalism stands as one of the most stimulating in the historical sociological literature. It deserves to be criticized, updated and tested, but “unthinking” it in the light of an East Asian development with an unclear outcome seems a big risk to take – and it might not be the most promising option to understand much of this development itself. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS An earlier version of this text was used for a roundtable discussion of Adam Smith in Beijing and Arrighi’s intellectual legacy, organized by Eric Vanhaute during the 2009 World Economic History Conference in Utrecht. We thank the participants to this discussion, Peer Vries, Kenneth
103 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH Pomeranz, Patrick O’Brien and Kaoru Sugihara, for their reflections. The writing of this article also benefited from the suggestions made by the reviewers. REFERENCES Abbeloos, Jan-Frederik. 2008. “La Chine, dernière chance du capitalism?” La Revue Internationale des Livres et des Idées 8:28-31. Abu-Lughod, Janet. 2008. “Review of Adam Smith in Beijing.” Trajectories, Newsletter of the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section of the ASA 20(1):15-18. Alden, Chris. 2007. China in Africa. London: Zed Books. Allen, Robert C. 2009. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Andreas, Joel. 2008. “Changing Colours in China.” New Left Review 54:123-142. Arrighi, Giovanni. 1978. Geometry of Imperialism. The Limits of Hobson’s Paradigm. London: Verso. _____ . 1994. The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. _____ . 1996. “The Rise of East Asia and the Withering Away of the Interstate System.” Journal of World-Systems Research 15(2):1-28. _____ . 1999a. “Globalization, State Sovereignty, and the `Endless’ Accumulation of Capital.” Pp. 53-73 in State and Sovereignty in the World Economy, edited by David Alden Smith, Dorothy J. Solinger and Steven Topik. London: Routledge. _____ . 1999b. “The World According to Andre Gunder Frank.” Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 22(3):327-354. _____ . 2000. “Globalization and Historical Macrosociology.” Pp. 117-133 in Sociology for the Twenty-First Century. Continuities and Cutting Edges, edited by Janet Abu-Lughod. Chicago: Chicago University Press. _____ . 2007a. Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. _____ . 2007b. “States, Markets, and Capitalism, East and West.” Positions 15(2):251-284. _____ . 2009. “The Winding Paths of Capital. Interview by David Harvey.” New Left Review 56:61-94. Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly J. Silver. 1999. “Conclusion.” Pp. 271-289 in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, edited by Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arrighi, Giovanni, Iftikhar Ahmad and Miin-wen Shih. 1999. “Western Hegemonies in World- Historical Perspective.” Pp. 217-270 in Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, edited by Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bair, Jennifer. 2009. “The New Hegemon? Contingency and Agency in the Asian Age.” Journal of World-Systems Research 15(2):220-227. Bin Wong, Roy. 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. New York: Cornell University. Braudel, Fernand. 1958. “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 13(4):725–753
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BOOK REVIEW ESSAY 236 Review Essay:
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FIVE CENTURIES OF REGIONAL DEVELOPM
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