THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD SYSTEM IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY JANET ABU-LUGHOD Northwestern University the middle of the thirteenth century the Occident (Western Eu- rope) and the Orient (as far as China) were linked together through a system of trade and, to a much lesser extent, production that had begun to form into what might be termed a “world system” rather than a set of imperial systems.' Not unlike today, the nodes that were linked together were central places and port cities, rather than whole countries. The geographic nexus of this system was the Muslim heart- land through which items of exchange had to move, either overland across the great so-called silk route or primarily via the sea, transiting the region from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and then beyond, via either the Arab/Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. By then, goods originating in the Middle and Far East were being sold in European fairs, and Europe was exporting in exchange raw materials, metals, and woolen textiles. Such trade was being conducted by merchants from highly diverse regions, speaking quite different lan- guages and in touch with one another not only physically but by writ- ten instruments. “Capitalistic” institutions were well established in the sense that: (1) there existed conventional ways for credit to be extended and then paid off (Udovitch, 1967; de Roover, 1948; Sapori, 1970; Yang, 1952); (2) there were developed techniques for pooling capital and risks and for sharing profits and losses (Byrne, 1930; Udovitch, 1970; Lopez, 1976); and (3) production for export had begun to re- organize the way goods were produced and exchanged in the domestic economies of East and West (Laurent, 1935; Nicholas, 1971; Shiba, 1970). Significantly, this development was considerably more ad- vanced in China and the Arab world than it was in Europe. Granted, this system of commercial “capitalism” was scarcely the labor-defined version described by Marx,? nor was the “psychology” of modern capitalism described by Weber (1904-5) yet in existence.‘ In- deed, if one depends upon those criteria, a capitalist world system certainly did not predate the sixteenth century, which is Wallerstein’s (1974) position.’ However, by those criteria I suspect that even the sixteenth century is too early a date, for heightened productivity4 Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 through technological/institutional changes had not yet occurred on a grand scale. Regardless of the details, however, we must recognize that all three theorists have taken the same end point, namely, the system of capitalism that eventually developed in Western Europe. From this outcome they then reason backward to origins. This, it seems, raises a basic methodological problem in historiogra- phy. One must acknowledge, of course, that in ail history the outcome determines the narrative that historians construct—a narrative of events that appear to lead inexorably toward that outcome. The in- cisive comment of Germaine Tillion, written in a very different con- text, is striking. She remarks (1983: 20) that “as we all know, events must run their course before becoming history, so that all true history exists only by virtue of its conclusion, and begins its historical career from there.”6 If this is indeed correct, then beginning with a different outcome at a different moment in time will lead us to a different account of the prior sequence and a different set of problems/issues to be explained. Rather than taking the outcome of the later industrial revolution for granted and then trying to explain “its causes,” one can start at a different end point and try to reconstruct history retrospectively from there. By doing this, a revisionist view of “what occurred” will emerge. Before presenting my alternative hypothesis, however, one needs to clear away a few natural and expected objections. First, this author has no intention, in this article, of entering a fruitless argument concerning the “origins” of “true” or “modern” capitalism. The debate between a Weberian definition of modern capitalism, which depends upon an attendant “psychological” attitude, and a Tawney (1926) definition of modern capitalism, based upon the existence of “modern” institutions of rational book-keeping and credit,’ is the last analysis not a good guide for research. I am less interested in definitional debates than in capturing what did exist during the time period in question. Furthermore, this author shall not try to defend a position that claims that the scale of exchange in the thirteenth century represented a sufficient “threshold” to allow one to claim a “world system.” I admit in advance that, in comparison to the sixteenth century, the scale of production and trade in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth cen- turies was not large (although it was larger than in the fifteenth cen- tury!), but that is hardly a fair measure. In comparison with the scale of international commerce today, the miniscule exchanges of the six- teenth century wither away into obscurity. The important comparison is not with the future but with the past.Abu-Lughod 5 Did a significant jump in trade occur in the thirteenth century? And did it tie together many developing areas? Most medievalists claim that it did. Lopez (1976: 93-94) notes: At first glance, if we compare the patterns of trade in the Commercial Revolu- tion to those in the Industrial Revolution, certain differences will strike us . . . All proportions are almost unbelievably smaller. Luxury products . . . tend to play a more important role than commodities for mass consumption. Many .. . business men show greater interest in enlarging profit margins . . . than in enlarging the number of sales. . . . Still the volume of exchanges . . . [is] im- pressive... [T]he sea trade of Genoa in 1293 was three times as large as the entire revenue of the Kingdom of France in the same year. The same could be said for the radical increase in the scale of inter- national trade observed in Sung China. Mark Elvin (1973: 171-72) describes the thirteenth century expansion of China’s international trade, noting that by then China was exporting copper and iron goods, porcelain, silks, linens, chemicals, sugar, rice and books, and receiving in exchange spices and other exotic items. Parts of the Chinese rural economy became directly linked to production for the overseas market. I will not belabor this point. There was more than enough going on in the thirteenth century—in Europe, in the Middle East, and in the Far East—to justify an investigation. Our intellectual problem is not to identify the origins of the twentieth century but rather to evaluate the state of the world system that did exist by the thirteenth century. This brings us to the guiding hypothesis of my research. HYPOTHESIS By about 1250 A.D., East and West were becoming evenly balanced on a fulcrum in a system which was already taking impressive steps toward integration. Hegemony could have developed in either direc- tion and, at that time indeed, it appeared more likely that Asia, rather than Europe, would be dominant, since it was more developed, tech- nologically and institutionally. In short, there was nothing inevitable about the “Rise of the West.”® And yet, 150 years later, the balance had tipped. Western gains out- weighed Asian advances. And by the sixteenth century, Europe had not only conquered the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic but had gained control over the Mediterranean Sea (see especially the works of Braudel, 1972; Chaunu, 1979; Chaudhuri, 1985), thus sealing a world6 ‘Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 hegemony that, from the point of view of the thirteenth century, was certainly not foreordained. A REFORMULATION OF THE QUESTION From this vantage point, a question somewhat different from that of most historical sociologists arises. Almost all Western writing has been both Eurocentric and written from the hindsight of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has posed the question, crudely paraphrased: What was so special about the West that made it, rather than some other region, the “master” of the world system? Put this way, the ques- tion has a self-congratulatory ring. It looks into the special qualities of the West to account for its success. By contrast, then, it judges the other contenders as deficient insofar as they /acked the characteristics of the ‘West.? This is a loaded question because it takes for granted the inevitability of the outcome. Certainly, a different question would be as legitimate, namely: What interfered with the expected development of the East which prevented it from translating its existing strengths into further growth? Some Western scholars have, indeed, posed these questions, but the form of their answer has been equally Eurocentric. Certain charac- teristics of Eastern cultures are criticized as preventing further develop- ment.'° Thus, after-the-fact explanations are advanced which blame the stagnation of the Chinese economy on its strong imperial system (in contrast to the spatial anarchy of Europe), forgetting all the while that it was the strength of the imperial system that had led to China’s advanced state throughout history and that European strength did not really translate into world power until the state began to play a more active protectionist role.'' Similarly, the failure of the Arab world to move on to a Western version of capitalism is attributed to the deleteri- ous effects of the region's religion, Islam, which set up barriers to the accumulation of capital. This explanation similarly ignores the fact that merchant capitalism developed in this region along with the re- ligion (Rodinson, 1974; Goitein, 1967; 1958; Fischel, 1958; Wiet, 1955; Ashtor, 1983; Lambton, 1962) and indeed controlled international trade for many centuries. In short, most explanations for why the balance tipped in favor of Europe cite internal strengths in the West and internal weaknesses in the East to account for the outcome. This form of explanation is scien- tifically inadequate because it fails to consider the geopolitical-demo-‘Abu-Laghod 7 graphic context within which societies develop and evolve, rise and fall. However, Western scholars have been content with this inadequate explanation because it tends to be self-serving. ‘We can test this by examining how different are Western explana- tions for the fall of Rome. For the latter, two types of explanations are seen as moving together—both internal decline and external threat. And yet, when the rise of the West and the fall of the East are consid- ered, the external explanations—such as the expansion and then breakup of the Mongol Empire (Grousset, 1939; Boyle, 1977) or the spread of the Black Death, inter alia—are, with the notable exception again of McNeill (especially 1976), forgotten or downgraded to pe- ripheral issues. My own work begins with the hypothesis that the crucial reorgan- ization of the world system that occurred between 1250 and 1400 was at least as attributable to systemic geopolitical and demographic causes as it was to any cultural characteristics inherent in East or West. Dif- ferences in cultural systems were sufficient to allow differences in the Jorms that industrialization might have taken, but were not sufficient, in themselves, to account for the presence or absence of development.'? There is very little written on the world system at that time. Most of the attempts to view the international picture, viz. the important con- tributions of Braudel (1973; 1982-84) and Eric Wolf (1982),'3 begin with the year 1400. Despite the fact that the sources are more meagre before that date, we shall try to describe it because it was at that time that the outcome, already predictable by 1400, remained in question. THE MAJOR OUTLINES OF THE SYSTEM IN 1250-1350 It is impossible to grasp the shape of the world system as it wavered on the fulcrum of the second half of the thirteenth century without some mechanism of selection. One can therefore choose to examine this system through a comparative analysis of a sample of cities located along the major world trade routes that ran from northwest Europe to China. The accompanying map shows schematically the shape of the subsystems that, linked together, made up the world system, and it also shows the locations of the cities being studied in detail. One might reasonably ask—why study cities rather than whole so- cieties? The answer is simple. In comparative work it is important to compare commensurables. While China, the Arab world, and the ter- . Titories in the Khanates of Central Asia were organized into empires, the boundaries of these units were characterized chiefly by their elas-‘Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD SYSTEM IN THE 137 CENTURY ‘SHOWING SUBSYSTEMS | THROUGH VEAbu-Lughod 9 ticity. In contrast, their central places had greater continuity; they tended to play a more permanent role in the world system than did the states and empires that rose and fell around them. Furthermore, in the western region, the state or national system had not yet become the unit of action (Anderson, 1974). Indeed, the only commensurate units found in all places, albeit enjoying varied degrees of autonomy, were cities. In addition, while most cities exist only by virtue of the wealth generated in the rural areas around them, the key to the thirteenth century commercial world system was long distance trade which al- lowed some entrepots (notably on the Arabian Peninsula and along the Straits of Malacca) to exist without any agrarian hinterland'4 and gave to other cities a second economic base that supplemented the agrarian one. In many instances, this trade became the key to industrialization, a third and growing economic base in many of the cities we are consid- ering. (We find, for example, that the demand for good quality wool to provision the expanding textile industry of Flanders strengthened the links between English and Flemish cities, just as imported raw silk was originally essential to produce the Middle Eastern brocade called Damask, after Damascus.) Thus, whether cities were integrated into imperial systems or not, they constituted links in the chain or rather the network of international commerce. I decided to study cities strategically positioned in the growing world system of the thirteenth century not only because they make logical units for analysis and comparison but because they are of intrinsic interest, since this author’s view of the world has always been through the urban lens. By focusing on a limited sample of cities, patterns that the full canvas might otherwise obscure can hopefully be clarified. The set of cities being examined includes: . The four towns of the periodic Champagne Fairs—Lagny and Bar-sur-Aube, which had one fair each per year, and Provins and especially Troyes, which hosted two. 2. The Flemish textile-trade towns, especially Ghent as an example of a pro- ducer city and Bruges as an example of an international trading center. 3. The key sea-trading city states of Genoa and Venice, locked in a bitter competitive battle to become the “hinge” (McNeill, 1974, used this term as a descriptor of Venice) between Europe and the Orient; both struggled to control Constantinople, the Black Sea, and thence the overland connections to the East; both were rivals to monopolize the spice trade that moved through Egypt in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. 4. The great overland caravan centers through Central Asia, especially Sa- markand and Bukhara. |. The urban-based system that had Baghdad as its core, Aleppo/Antioch as its a10 Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 western link to the Mediterranean, and Basra as its southern outlet to the Arab/Persian Gulf. Aleppo and Baghdad were also key take-off points for the overland route. 6. The urban-based system that had Cairo as its core, Alexandria as its link to the Mediterranean and, on the southeast, the Red Sea ports that led toward the African Horn and to the Indian Ocean and beyond. 7. The port homes of the great Persian/Arab traders: Siraf, Hormuz, Oman, Hadramaut, Kish and, by mid-thirteenth century, especially Aden. 8. The port cities along the western coast of India, including Cambay, Quilon, and Calicut. 9. The region along the Straits of Malacca which, while not “urbanized” in the conventional sense of the term, contained a shifting series of specialized trading posts controlled by Hindu rulers; these played a central role in mediating the exchange with China. 10. The city of Hangchou, perhaps the largest city in the world in the thirteenth century, which was the capital city of the southern Sung dynasty, served by an international port. THE METHOD OF PAIRED AND MOVING COMPARISONS The statement that the world was balanced on a fulcrum is more than a metaphor. If one were to describe the world system in 1250 one would have to say that it consisted of a series of interlinked and overlap- ping subsystems which at that moment were in rough balance. The chief research question being posed is: What happened to disturb this system? One thing that is certain is that given the complexities and the numerous subsystems, no single factor could have been responsible for the change. Rather, one suspects that the overall shift can best be ac- counted for as the resultant vector created when the smaller subsystems underwent reorganization. Therefore, one can approach the larger question by studying what was happening to the subsystems and to their relationships with one another. My current assumption is that the world system in the thirteenth century consisted of some seven or eight interlocking subsystems, roughly sketched on the map. The kingpin of the entire system lay at the land bridge between the eastern Mediterranean and the outlets to the Indian Ocean on the south and between the Mediterranean and Central Asia (subsystem III). This area had been a heartland during earlier periods of imperial expansion (viz. from the origin of man’s first “urban” societies down to Hellenic and Roman times) but it took on renewed significance in the early centuries of Islamic hegemony. By the tenth century, the sea links from the Persian Gulf all the way to east Africa, west India, and then on to the Indian archipelago, and even China were fully established, as is evidenced by the works of the ArabAbu-Lughod Buy geographers and the travel accounts of Arab sailors and traders (see inter alia, the texts translated and reproduced in Gabriel Ferrand, 1913; Tibbets, 1981; see also Hourani, 1951). By the end of the elev- enth century the Crusades intensified the contacts between Western Europe and the Arab world, which stimulated demand in Europe for Eastern products. The twelfth century saw the Fertile Crescent and Egypt reunited under the Ayyubids, always a good sign for the political and economic strength of that region. By mid-thirteenth century, with the defeat of the seventh Crusade under St. Louis, the Arab world had regained much of its autonomy, although further incursions from the east (the so-called Mongols) were already “compensating” for the re- duced Western pressures. From this core region, the world system linked outwards in two directions. To the west (subsystem II), the central “hinge” on which the world system balanced was the link between Italy (and especially Ven- ice) and the eastern Mediterranean. There were two paths westward: one from the Arab world which controlled the sea passages to the east, the other from the shrunken Byzantine state which controlled access to significant land routes across Asia. (In the mid-thirteenth century Ven- ice itself ruled Constantinople.) From Italy, especially Venice but also Genoa, the linkage also went to (peripheral) northern Europe which, in the early thirteenth century, was fully dependent upon Italian traders for its trade with the Orient (subsystem 1). To the east, the central “hinge” on which the world system balanced was the Indian Ocean where Arab traders controlled access to India (subsystem IV) and then to the Hinduized Straits of Malacca (sub- system V) which, in turn, acted as an intermediary for China (sub- system VI). (See, among other sources, the classic, albeit highly prejudiced, work of W. Heyd, 1885-1886, as well as the new and re- markable book by Chaudhuri, 1985.) Finally, there was at least one but perhaps two subsystems that organized overland traffic between Tur- key/Iraq/Iran and northern China, passing through the territories of the various Tartar/Mongol empires (subsystem VII), finally reaching Constantinople. When the large system tipped, it was because the Mediterranean- northwestern European links deepened and diversified while the link between the eastern Mediterranean and the Orient began to fray in places and was rudely torn in others. That change, which began to occur by the end of the thirteenth century with the fall of the “Crusader” enclaves on the Syro-Palestinian coast, intensified by the mid-fourteenth century (Ashtor, 1983). Precipitating factors included:122 Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 (1) the Black Death, beginning 1347-51, which decimated city popula- tions in the Levant-Egypt-Italy core system more harshly than in any of the other subsystems; and (2) the fierce rivalry among the various Mongol khanates in Central Asia which, in the latter part of the four- teenth century, clearly interfered with the overland connection from Constantinople. This was the link that had strengthened during the preceding century due to the earlier Pax Mongolica. While these events caused a decline in the heartland, they did not immediately break up the system. Indeed, it appears that both periph- eries grew stronger, despite or perhaps even because the central links were fraying. The fifteenth century was a period of renewed growth and expansion in certain parts of Europe, in Ottoman Turkey and the Orient. And yet, by the first decade of the sixteenth century the Mediterra- nean was being bypassed. Portuguese successes in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, the immobilization of both Hindu and Muslim trade intermediaries, and the withdrawal of the Ming dynasty from the exter- nal trade that had characterized the Sung and Yuan periods (Lo, 1954-55; 1958), all served to interrupt a system that had operated for more than five hundred years. It was this geopolitical shift, more than either religious or cultural changes later in that century, that sealed the fate of the Orient. Therefore, most of the reasons for the “rise of the West” were already in place by the opening of the sixteenth century, before the defeat of the Ottoman fleet and before the appearance of Weber's “Protestant Ethic.” The term “fulcrum” or balance can be applied not only to the system as a whole but also to the various subsystems of cities whose fates often bore an inverse relationship to each other. The remainder of this arti- cle, then, will lay out the main lines of these reorganizations, In the middle of the thirteenth century one of the obvious facts was that the European subsystem was undergoing an important transfor- mation—one which would affect developments in the larger one. The periodic fairs that were being held in the towns of Troyes, Provins, Lagny, and Bar-sur-Aube, the so-called Champagne Fairs which oper- ated under the protection of the Counts of Champagne and Brie (see the five-volume chronicle of Troyes by T. Boutiot, 1870-80; the Gies’ 1969 popularized but fascinating book on life in Troyes in 1250 A.D.; Mesqui on Provins, 1979; and the works of Chapin, 1937; Bautier, 1953; Bourquelot, 1865-67; and Alengry, 1915, on the fairs themselves) were among the key links between northwestern European cities and the Italian trading states. There were, at that time, no direct linksAbu-Lughod 13 between northern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, much less any direct contacts with the Orient. Thus, producers from the Flemish textile towns had to journey to the Champagne Fairs to exchange their wares for the wines of France or the silks and spices of the East. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, Bruges had become a world market port, when the Genoese made their direct sea connection with the North Sea via the Atlantic. This bypass of the Champagne Fairs, to which merchants from Italy had to come laboriously over the Alps or up the rivers against the flow and from which the Flemish merchants had been banned for political reasons, led eventually to an irreversible decline in the towns which had hosted the fairs. While the fairs continued into the early fourteenth century, by the middle of that century the Italian merchants had ceased entirely to frequent them.'> By then, the North Sea route had become the major one. Similarly, the cities of Venice and Genoa were continually in compe- tition with one another for markets, both on the European continent and the East. In this competition, control over Constantinople, which guarded access to the northern overland route, was absolutely crucial. In general, Venice maintained the advantage, thanks to the affiliation it had from earliest days with the Eastern Roman Empire (Lane, 1974; Norwich, 1982; Cessi, 1981). This, plus her location on the east coast of Italy, ensured her dominance over the eastern Mediterranean. As Re- nouard notes in his classic work (1969: I, 131): From its origin, Venice played the role of intermediary between the Orient and the West. In the East, the Venetians bought the products of the Northern coun- tries: the furs and the products of the Russian steppes, cereals and slaves; the products of central and tropical Asia: spices, jewels, precious stones, silk and luxury cloth; the products of the Byzantine and of anterior Asia: fruits, alum, silken stuffs, all luxury items. They exchanged the items they brought to Europe for the woolen and linen cloths manufactured in Flanders and France, for metals and ore from Germany and England, for woods and slaves from Dalmatia, and the like. Indeed, when Constantinople threatened to reduce the mo- nopolistic position Venice had over the inland route, Venice reacted promptly and decisively. In connection with the fourth crusade, boats and men were collected at Venice, from which they set sail for the Fertile Crescent. At the last minute, however, they were deflected for a surprise attack on Constantinople. The result was that, between 1204 and 1261, the Republic of Venice actually ruled Constantinople, and it is said that the Venetian colony in Constantinople “rivalled in size the settlements around the Rialto” (Lane, 1974: 69).14 Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 Even after Constantinople’s autonomy was restored, Venice re- mained the hegemonic power over the eastern trade through that city until the Genoese destroyed the Venetian quarter in Constantinople, thereby gaining control over commerce in the Black Sea, in the Crimea, and in the Caspian. The rivalry was to swing power back and forth between the two throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- turies,'® Genoa’s true power, however, came from her efforts to develop alternate routes via the Atlantic, first to reach the North Sea and the Baltic and, eventually, to reach India and China. That Columbus hailed from Genoa was scarcely accidental; his was the obsession of the cen- tury. The Middle East subsystem was also undergoing a radical change during the second half of the thirteenth century, a shift which turned on the rivalry between Baghdad and Cairo. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the dominant route to the Orient still passed through Antioch, Aleppo, and overland to Baghdad, before moving either eastward on the overland route or southward to Basra, the gateway to the Persian-Arab Gulf and thence to the Indian Ocean. Baghdad's hegemony was unquestioned and was validated by the fact that the Caliph himself was located there. While the Kurdish followers of Saladin had turned back the Crusaders and controlled virtually all of the Fertile Crescent as well as Egypt, they were still not considered supreme, nor was the trade route via the Red Sea the dominant one. The fulcrum image fits this situation well, for between 1250 and 1260 the balance tipped. The transition in Egypt from the Ayyubids to the rule of the Bahri Mamluks was begun in 1250; the interim period was completed by 1260 with the consolidation of their rule. During the same period, Baghdad experienced a precipitous decline. The Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 and, to protect Islam, the Abbasid Caliph was hastily removed to Cairo. The symbolic presence of the Caliphate in Cairo during subsequent centuries certainly contributed to the relative importance of that city to the Arab world. Significantly, it was at this time that the Red Sea route to the Indies and beyond took on greater importance. The Red Sea, while not as easily navigated as the Perisan Gulf, was always an alternative route to the Indian Ocean when the Gulf was closed or in hostile hands.!” The Mamluk state and its merchant class, together with their trading part- ners, the Venetians, gained an increased monopoly over the all-impor- tant spice trade (Richards, ed., 1970; Abu-Lughod, 1971; Ashtor, 1956, 1983; Labib, 1965; Cahen, 1964; Wiet, 1955). Key figures in the interchange between the Middle Eastern heartlandAbu-Lughod 15 cities and the Indian Ocean were the Arab/Persian seafaring traders who worked out of a succession of small ports on the coasts of the Persian Gulf or at key strategic points at the base of the Arabian Penin- sula guarding access to either the Gulf or the Red Sea (Tibbets, 1981). Exactly which of these ports/strategic points were important at which time was dependent on the shape of the larger system of transit. As we have already noted, in the earlier period the Persian Gulf was the dominant passage to the Indian Ocean. When this was so, Siraf (on the Persian littoral of the Gulf) and later the island of Kish and the port of Muscat on the southeastern tip of the Peninsula, where the Gulf and the Indian Ocean meet, were indispensable anchorage (and tribute) points on the way to India and China (Heyd, 1885). But when Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols, Basra’s access to its northern hinterland was truncated. The port of Aden then took over as the chief entrepot mediating the trade between Cairo-Alexandria and points northwest and the Indian Ocean and points east.'® The shift from Baghdad to Cairo “caused” the shift from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea which, in turn, affected the seafaring principalities that carried trade to Asia. Furthermore, which of the cities on the Indian subcontinent waxed or waned was the result, in part at least, of whether the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea was the major path from the Middle East. Cambay to the north flourished when such traffic exited and entered primarily through the Persian Gulf; ports of the Malabar coast farther south, especially Quilon and Calicut, became more im- portant when ships used the Red Sea. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Chola traders on the southeast coast of India were also impor- tant intermediaries between the south Asian mainland and the Arab traders who controlled the routes in the western Indian Ocean. From India the sea transit connected with China through the Straits of Malacca. While the route never deviated (no alternative pathway has ever been discovered), the site and relative importance of the particular entrepot along the straits which controlled passage and exchange tended to vary. On occasion, the key entrepot was on the east coast of Sumatra (e.g., Palembang and other capitals of the kingdom of Srivi- jaya) while at other times it was on the west coast of the Malay Penin- sula, e.g., Kalah and then, after 1400, at the newly founded town of Malacca itself (Wolters, 1967; 1970; Sandu and Wheatley, 1983; Rock- hill, 1914). There seems to have been no “necessity” causing these shifts which responded more to local power than to either strategic or com- mercial reasons. On the contrary, whether the Hinduized princedoms along the Straits (Coedes, 1964) handled trade or not depended mostly16 ‘Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 upon the Chinese. The states of the Malaccan Straits played important roles as intermediaries whenever the Chinese expelled foreign (Arab) traders or drew back into their borders. When the Chinese merchants and navy were more outgoing and aggressive, the area of the Straits became less significant as a necessary port of interchange.'° There is an historical anomaly in this region. The thirteenth century is a lacuna in our knowledge of the Straits of Malacca; either trade through the Straits had temporarily declined or the needed documents have not yet been recovered. In any case, documentation and apparent trade both pick up by 1400. One possible explanation for why the region of Srivijaya seems to have undergone an eclipse just when the pace of international sea trade quickened in the thirteenth century is that China itself took over the commercial functions formerly per- formed by the Malay chiefdoms. As yet, this author knows little about central Asia (subsystems VII and VIII) to make a similar analysis, and yet major shifts were occur- ring there due to the activities of the nomadic groups loosely classified as “Mongols.” The breakup, during the fourteenth century, of the Pax Mongolica established by Ghengis Khan. in the thirteenth century (Boyle, 1958; 1971; 1977) was certainly the factor that deflected more and more trade to the sea route whose gateway was Egypt. Certainly, the shift of the center of gravity in China from the interior (near Xian) to the southern coastal region, while begun considerably earlier than the thirteenth century, was the beginning of a phase in Chinese civilization that led eventually to Mongol rule in the north, centered at Karakorum and Khan-Balik (Peking), while the southern Sung took to the sea. Until it too fell to Mongol rule, Hangchou was perhaps the largest city in the world (see Gernet, 1962, which describes life in Hang-Chou “on the eve” of the Mongol conquest), and may have remained so even after its conquest. The thirteenth century is acknowledged to be a time of important economic developments in China: the breakup of estates, the rise of capitalistic-cum-state commerce (Shiba, 1970), significant tech- nological and social inventions that mark the beginning of a new indus- trial phase with highly developed metallurgy (Hartwell, 1967; Needham, 1970: 107-112), and a new phase of long distance trade complete with banking, instruments of credit, and even paper money (Shiba, 1970; Elvin, 1973; Chou, 1974:104-5; Yang, 1952). It was at this time that the Sung became a true naval power not only in trade but in sea warfare; canons powered by gun powder were mounted on their ships (Lo, 1954-55), belying the Western position that China used herAbu-Lughod 7 gunpowder only to produce fireworks. In short, during the second half of the thirteenth century it was far more likely that China would be- come the first nation to industrialize along capitalist lines than that Europe would assume that role.”° THE DILEMMA Toward 1300 Europe was a mere upstart and living at a standard far inferior to that enjoyed in the regions to her east. China had long developed metallurgy and industrialized production as well as signifi- cant military might. Throughout the next century she was to behave quite aggressively, sending forays as far as the east coast of Africa and in general flexing her muscles in the Indian Ocean arena. The Middle East, despite its periodic eruptions, was also enjoying a period of pros- perity and power, once the Crusader incursions ceased. The early four- teenth century was one of efflorescence in the region, with most cities growing beyond the walls that had previously contained them. The unification of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent under the Mamluks led to significant strength—sufficient to hold the Mongol invaders at bay. (In 1400 Ibn Khaldun was present when a stand-off “peace treaty” was signed with Timurlane.) And yet, something happened to reverse this situation. At this point I cannot say with certainty what it was. But as noted earlier, some of the answer is to be found in the Black Death epidemic and its differential effects on “core” and “peripheral” regions (Got- tfried, 1985; McNeill, 1976); part of the answer is possibly to be found in Central Asia. And certainly the coup de grace came from the mar- itime achievements of Spain and especially Portugal at the turn of the fifteenth/sixteenth century. But why the latter were so successful re- mains to be explained. What weaknesses in the old balance allowed the interlopers to destroy a pattern which had persisted for many cen- turies? The answer to that question remains the ultimate aim of my Tesearch. NOTES 1p Sunmort received from Northwestern University and the Cente for Urban Afsirs and Policy is gratefully acknowledged here. The author is indebted to Jack Goldstone, Immanuel Wallen and William McNeill for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. jon is crucial, since empires governing regions date back to the foundation of in the fourth millennium, and a claim for an imperial, if partial, “world system” could actually be made several earir times eg the Grecks under Alerander and, of course, Rome which at its peak held under its sway virtually all of the world known to it. A world18 ‘Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 system is not incompatible with the fact that it tied together subsystems of loosely-related “empires,” nor is the idea incompatible with the fact that it was core cities, not whole regions or “countries,” that constituted the somewhat disembodied nodes of the system. By the thirteenth century in Flanders, for example, the importers of wool and the owners of looms on the one hand, and the fullers and weavers on the other, were separating into two classes, a fact not unrelated to expanding production (Nicholas, 1971, inter alia). English ‘woo! was being imported, and finished cloth was being exported to the Fairs of Champagne, and to Italian cities such as Florence, Pisa, Genoa, and Venice. The same was evidently happening in China where mass or at Jeast “masser” production for the market (including the export market) was supplementing the strong internal market, particularly for silk cloth and porcelain but for other items as well. But then, one must also acknowledge that the type of feudalism found outside Europe (in the ‘Middle East and China) was quite different from that which Marx posited as universal. It strikes me as particularly futile to search for ancient analogues to the Protestant Ethic and thus to assume that there was only one possible path to “modern capitalism.” Weber rou- tinely made a clear distinction between “pre-modern capitalism” and “modern capitalism.” While in his essays on the Protestant Ethic (1904-5; 1958 trans.) he seemed to base this distinction exclusively on psychic qualities, in Economy and Society the distinction is clearly based more on institutional and cultural criteria. . In no way is this comment intended to detract from the enormous contribution that world system's theory has made to our understanding. Wallerstein’s seminal work was, indeed, a direct stimulus to my study. I should note here that Wallerstein’ criteria for the existence of “modern capitalism” are somewhat different from those of either Marx or Weber. 6. In more scholarly fashion the same point is made, inter alia, by Sidney Packard (1962), and even more cogently by the Dutch scholar, J.C. van Leur. See the compilation and translation of his earlier writings (1955), especially Chapter 1, in which he stresses how Eurocentric history distorts and deforms other histories. . Tawney’s critique of the Weberian thesis in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) is merely the first in a series of studies that have addressed this debate. Whereas Tawney places the origin of capitalism in fourteenth century Italy, we must note that a large body of literature exists to demonstrate that the instruments of credit used by the Italians were actually borrowed from the East. See, for example, the collection of documents in Lopez and Raymond, eds. (circa 1960). See also Rodinson (1974) and A. Udovitch (1967; 1970). . That term is a favorite of American scholars, being the title both of McNeill’ carly famous text (1963) and of a recent article by Daniel Chirot (1985). The latter, following Max Weber, claims that the unique qualities of the West were largely responsible for its “rise.” But he does so on the basis of Western secondary sources, not not recognizing the effects of the meth- p a ° ‘were coalescing in the thirteenth century (McNeill, 1963: especially 479, 485, 525-26) and is aware of many of the exogenous factors that eventually undermined them. Indeed, in his The Pursuit of Power (1972) be says unequivocaly that unt 1300 China was definitely the world’s foremost power. Another exception to western ethnocentrism is Philip Curtain'’s Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984). Much of the literature on “modernization” produced by the last generation of theorists operated on a similar self-other comparison in which the failures of the Third World were conveniently blamed on their lack of the achievement motive (McClelland, 1967); or even ‘worse, exceptions to the rule were explained by the presence of a “Protestant-like Ethic” (Bellah, 1957). 10. Viz. even the title of European Expansion and the Counter-Example of Asia, 1300-1600, edited by J. Levenson (1967). The remarkable contributions of Joseph Needham who has detailed the technological and scientific advances of China have proven the latter's superi- ority, At the same time, however, Necdham ‘that some “flaw” in Chinese character or peg hae court gelemnetetiete being translated into industrial strength (see his 1970; 1954-1985). Recently, however, scholars have begun to question this easy answer. See, for example, the revisionist article by N. Sivin (1982). Sivin argues that Needham was wrong in stating that China, despite her sophisticated knowledge and tech- nological advances, did not have a scientific revolution like the West (especially 105-106). Chinese scholars have always taken this position (e.g., Chou, 1974: 99-100). 2Abu-Lughod 19 1 . The “shocking” ability of Japanese culture to permit that nation to reach the industrial ‘See Perry Anderson (1974), inter alia. But there is clear historical evidence of the use of the state even earlier to protect the interests of the merchant class in almost all “city states” of thirteenth century Europe. The work of Lestocquoy (1945; 1952) on the urban patriciates of French, Flemish, and Italian towns of the time gives ample evidence of the use of the state to protect and Enhance bourgeois interests. On the connections in Ghent, see Nicholas (1971) of today is sufficient to disprove the “single path to industrial progress” that s implicit in much of the old literature on /development. modernization/< . Wolf boldly acknowledges that history written from a Western point of view leaves most of ‘the world’s people “without a history,” like the “anthropologist’s ‘primitive contempo- raries,"” and that the Eastern accomplishments in empire building and long-distance trade “shaped a world that Europe would soon reorganize to answer requirements of its own” (quoted 1982: 25). This view comes closest to my own assumptions. ‘Two of the cases selected are not even “cities” in the conventional sense. Rather, they are almost exclusively ports connected to long distance trade: the seafaring ports at the exits from the Red Sea and Persian/Arab Gulf, and the moving entrepots along the Straits of Malacca. Not accidentally, both sets of places are characterized by unstable location in contrast to the remaining more conventional cities. I am grateful to Paul Wheatley (personal communication) who helped me recognize this point. ». One cannot but wonder whether the Black Death which struck the Italian city states so hard around the middle of the century was not really responsible for the disappearance of Italian merchants from the Champagne Fairs at that time. This is not the explanation given by the scholars of the Champagne Fairs, which may merely be a symptom of the fact that specialists tend to stay too close to their objects of study. More and more I am finding that taking a world view helps me to notice items which regional scholars seem to miss or confuse. For example, objects identified by origin in the oiriginal sources of the time often refer 10 intermediary points (Chao Ju-Kua, 1911). I suspect that foreign merchants often gave misleading information about the provenance of items in order to protect their monopolies over suppliers. Only by piecing together documents from different regions can one identify ‘these “errors.” . Without this rivalry iis possible that we could have missed one ofthe major sources on the thirteenth century, namely, the Travels of Marco Polo. A Venetian captured and in Genoa, to pase the time Marco Polo recounted his travels toa cel-mate who transcribed them. Significantly, the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa reduced the importance of both alternative routes until the mid-nineteenth century when, with the building of the Suez Canal, the route that had dominated the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries once again came into use. . Heyd (1885) is very explicit about the key role of Aden from the second half of the thirteenth century on and about the growing significance of the Red Sea-Jiddah-Qalzum-Cairo-Alex- andria route to the Mediterranean but he does not seem to see the cause for its rise. See Vol. 1 (165, 378-79) in which he notes the rise of Aden but attributes the decline in the Persian Gulf traffic explicitly to the “fearsome” behavior of the Sultan of the island of Kish. My theory is that there were far more basic causes for this shift. ). The best sources I have found thus far are Chaudhuri’ masterly study of the Indian Ocean (1985); the first four chapters of van Leur’s Indonesian Trade and Society (1955); the works of Paul Wheatley (1983, which unfortunately focuses on an earlier period; 1961, more relevant; and Sandu and Wheatley, 1983, which begins with the founding of Malacca in 1400); those of O.W. Wolters (1967 which ends circa 7th century; 1970, which carries the story to the founding of Malacca in 1400); Mookerjii history of Indian Shipping (1962); Toussaint’s History of the Indian Ocean (1966); and Coedes' Les états hindouises d'Indo- chine et d'Indonésie (1948), A good summary of the role of trade in Asia can be found in chapter 6 of Curtin (1984: 109-135). The control by the Mongols was not to reverse this. Indeed, McNeill claims (1963: 525-26) that “the comparatively high status enjoyed by merchants in the Mongol scheme of things ‘encouraged the shipowners of South China to develop a flourishing trade.” REFERENCES For technical reasons, accents and diacritical marks have been omitted. (Ed.)20 ‘Studies in Comparative International Developments / Winter 1987-88 ABU-LUGHOD, JANET 1971 Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ALENGRY, CHARLES 1915 Les foires de Champagne (Etude d'histoire économique) Paris: Librairie Arthur Rousseau. 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