Global longue duree approaches fail to explain European capitalism’s unique structure

Evidence

Anievas and Nışancioğlu’s argument in How the West Came to Rule is no more sustainable than similar others. The Ottoman threat to Atlantic Europe is said to have contributed to the rise of capitalism by virtue of forcing Western European countries to find markets and economic opportunities westward, through the Atlantic. At the same time, the capitulatory commercial privileges given to them by the Ottomans permitted access to raw materials and staple commodities of which they would have otherwise been deprived. The idea being conveyed here is that the emergence of capitalism cannot be explained through an exclusive focus on the English countryside. While the idea of the need for a more “global” and longue durée approach is irreproachable, it fails to account for the uniqueness of the capitalist structures arising in Western Europe (mainly in Britain and the Netherlands). The Ottoman threat itself cannot be linked to that particular structure, just as the alleged “breakthrough to capitalism” already made in medieval Buddhist China and pre-Tokugawa Japan can hardly be said to have developed, much less articulated, the structural features that became necessary for the rise of European capitalism. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 557

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader debate on the ‘Great Divergence’ (Pomeranz) and how postcolonial/global histories of capitalism often collapse the distinction between global interconnection and structural uniqueness.
• QUESTION: What exactly constitutes the ‘differential’ — the structural features unique to Western European capitalism? The chapter promises an answer in terms of something with ‘exclusively European roots.’