The general crisis of 1917-1919 launched the 'short 20th century', an epoch of international civil war and generalised, intertwined revolution and counter-revolution. The specific forms and modalities of capitalist recuperation and the drive to contain the revolutionary wave which burst into the open after 1917, determined the entire trajectory of 20th century capitalism and created the preconditions for the greater convulsions to come. The baleful landscapes of late capitalism, with its inhuman logics and exterminist teleologies, obscure the necessity and inevitability of historical convulsions whose causes and stimuli are rooted in the history we have lived through, a history which is determinate, entailed by historical processes of great depth and of very long duration. These processes fill the temporal niches of the present Interglacial, and date back at least 8,000 years to the neolithic revolution, agriculture, settled communities, long-distance trade and emergent divisions of labour. The period of protocapitalism is sometimes referred to as the "early modern" world. But did this era even exist? This is partly an empirical question of history: but it is also a matter of theory. Some world-system thinkers such as Jack Goldstone, Ken Pomeranz and Andre Gunder Frank now argue that the whole industrial era is, if not exactly an aberration, probably a temporary phase in much longer historical sweeps. What Jack Goldstone, professor of Sociology and International Relations at the University of California, calls "Advanced Organic Societies" covered parts Europe, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, China, India, Japan, and the New World, and existed for centuries and even millennia. They depended on human and animal power and biomass fuel for energy . These societies either had their own "early modern" periods, or were part of an "early modern" world. They were capable of development. But until the Industrial Revolution which began in England in the 1750s, AOS's never escaped that critical dependency. According to Goldstone, '"we have fallen into error when we use the term "early modern" to describe a period which was not in any way modern and which could easily have developed in wholly different directions. Somewhat as the Holy Roman Empire, in a famous aphorism, was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire ... the "early modern" world was neither "early," nor "modern."' Modernity began in Europe in the late eighteenth century and from the first it was identified with notions of progress, industry science, cultural freedom and democracy. Within a century, the ideas of the French Enlightenment had become core values accepted by most people as the unquestioned foundations of modern civil society. It took imagination to re-enter the world of medieval obscurantism, patrimonialism and lack of freedom - unless you travelled outside Europe, when you found little else in the seemingly-stagnant non-european societies still trapped in the premodern past. Modernism was not just the the defining European idea, it shaped the emergent Eurocentric world order and seemed the destination of all societies and peoples. In practice it was a synonym for Europeanisation, whose real meaning was colonial oppression and plunder. European triumphalism and racism still lurks just below the surface. It coexists in uneasy stasis with the seemingly contradictory values of humanism and of equality regardless of gender, race or creed. These are also Enlightenment products. They served to create large pools of undifferentiated wage labour, and large and easily-manipulable groups of consumers. These values fostered and legitimised democracy, without which capitalism could not survive. They were more than mere hypocrisy or tools of mass repressive desublimation. Nevertheless what these values actually entrench and support are precisely European exceptionalism, chauvinism, racism, and the deepening inequality of wealth and privilege. They do this by above all legitimating the rights of property. It is these rights, in capitalist society and where property owenrship also includes the means of production, which create greater polarities of welath and poverty. Globalism and neoliberalism are only more recent expressions of this old theme, where capitalism's untramelled power and reach creates not just private splendour amid public squalor, but also creates tremendous social crisies. These crises always result in conflicts that can only be resolved either by wars or by socialist revolutions. And war always unleashes fantastic and virulent new forms of racism, chauvinism and dreams of European or Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Thus racism and the liberal credo of equality and democracy are like siamese twins, the yin and yang of the fractured Englightenment consciousness. Nothing has changed. Even today the peculiar notion that Europe is unique, is taken for granted. When the USSR collapsed this was an occasion for celebrating not just victory in the Cold War, but the final triumph of the Enlightenment. Francis Fukuyama likened civilisation to a wagon train . The Anglo-Saxons in the lead wagon are guiding leading humankind to the golden future. Every other society is doomed to follow on behind. There are no alternatives. This idea is not only insulting. It is positively stupid (or stupidly positivist). That didn't stop Fukuyama being hailed as a guru. Not one of the world civilisations which the Europeans encountered from the time of Columbus, ever successfully made the transition to modernity; even Japan is today in crisis. But none of them hung on to what they already had, either. Contact with Europeans was almost always disastrous. The mutation of modernity proved fatal to all the Advanced Organic Societies without exception. It therefore did not take an Einstein to predict in 1991 that Russia would be destroyed by its final surrender to the West. However, those of us who did predict such a thing were ignored. In the hubristic euphoria of the fall of communism even to utter such thoughts was certifiable. But Russia has indeed been destroyed. Protocapitalism learnt with childish hands to plunder arsenals of ore and energy in the earth's mantle, and capitalism reared up through the expropriation and plunder of premodern social formations. This process of plunder has not stopped; it is relentless and ongoing. No-one and nothing is immune or exempt. Even the Europeans themselves, as we shall see. The twisting, stretching and shearing of the fabric of world civilisation is speeding up, not slowing down. 150 years ago the theme of modernity proved so bracing that it was shared by reactionaries and revolutionaries alike. Karl Marx could write in the Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West." [fn] All seemed agreed, even its worst enemy: Capitalism meant progress. From right to left across the political spectrum, socialists found it easy to unite with bourgeois thinkers about another thing: European superiority was more than a cultural or historical thing. It was racial. Thus, racism was also part of modernity, although a very contradictory part. Feelings of superiority about the colonial peoples were almost universal and quite unchallengeable. From the beginning, class war was overlaid by strong bonds of chauvinism which went beyond national self-indentification and straight to the heart of what it was to be human. It wasn't just European civilisation which was more evolved. It was Europeans themselves, who were distinct from and superior to all other races. Europe's superiority over everyone else is quite absolute. The matter was stated baldly at the beginning of Max Weber's famous essay, written just after the First World War, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism": [One who is] a product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value. Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid...[The] full development of a systematic theology must be credited to Christianity...since there were only fragments in Islam and in a few Indian sects...Indian geometry had no rational proof; that was another product of the Greek intellect, also the creator of mechanics and physics...The highly developed historical scholarship of China did not have the method of Thucydides...[All] Indian political thought was lacking in...rational concepts...[Rational] harmonious music, both counterpoint and harmony...our orchestra...our sonatas, symphonies, operas...all these things are known only in the Occident...In architecture...the rational use of the Gothic vault...does not occur elsewhere...[The] Orient lacked...that type of classic rationalization of all art...which the Renaissance created for us. There was printing in China. But a printed literature...and, above all, the Press and periodicals, have appeared only in the Occident...[The] feudal state...has only been known to our culture...In fact the State itself...is known [in the full sense] only in the Occident.And the same is true of the most fateful force in our modern life, capitalism...[The] concept of the citizen has not existed outside the Occident. The uniqueness of the West (according to Weber) requires first of all an explanation of the unique rise of capitalism in the West. And this in its turn, calls for an analysis of the sociology of religion, or more precisely the sociological basis for the "economic ethics" of the world's religions. Weber suspects that "the most important reason" for the uniqueness of the West's rationality lies in "differences of heredity." This is self-evident and Weber does not need to argue it further. As Marxist geographer James Blaut has pointed out, Weber's misjudgment about non-European civilisations is not just offensive. It is also wrong on all counts: 'European science, mathematics, and technology were in no way higher than Chinese and Indian science prior to early-modern times -- prior to about 1492. After the rise of Europe, and particularly after the industrial revolution, you can expect both a flowering of science and an awesome increase in the scale and opulence of all other accomplishments -- for instance, huge orchestras. But if comparisons are made for the period before 1492, when many of the world's civilizations were truly medieval, then Europe in no way stands out. Not in science, not in art, not in law, not in the development of capitalism... Weber was just projecting the rather standard prejudice of the European bourgeois gentleman of c.1920 in his negative judgment about the art and culture of non-Europeans. He sneers at their theology. Their music is not "harmonious." He doesn't appreciate or understand their architecture. Their art is not "rational." Part of this prejudice of course is ignorance...' In fact, European science was behind Chinese and Indian science in many respects until the 18th century: some thinkers (Andre Gunder Frank in ReOrient for example) do not think there ever was a Scientific Revolution. Not that it would make much difference to the outcome of the Industrial Revolution anyway, because science and technology played a marginal role until the 1870s; things happened m,ater and mroe slowly than people commonly assume. Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848. Later he drastically revised his ideas about the beneficence and universality of capitalism. But even earlier, by 1750, many leading intellectuals of Europe were convinced that there was an ideal of "modern" man -- a man (not yet a woman) who saw himself as an intellectual and moral individual, believing in the findings of experimental science, and in the desirability of theological and political freedom. A century later, with industrial expositions and railroads spreading across Europe and its colonies, most of the populations of these countries accepted that they were living in a new, modern age. At the time, industrial machinery still did not exist. The loudest human-made noises were church bells -- or cannons. It was still a world of craft production in households powered and lit by muscle, water, wind, wood, dung, or tallow. Detail work and a large-scale division of labour was equally uncommon: there were more large manufactories producing pottery, metalware and other goods in Roman Gaul, than there were in early 18th century France. Nevertheless powerful forces were at work to create a unified world market, to smash up the ossified structures of rural European feudalism and to trigger intense new demand for products which could not be brought to market in the old ways. The high point of European feudalism, with largely independent knights and manor-lords binding their loyalties to superiors through oaths, a mainly local non-market economy, and serfs wholly bound to the land, disappeared well before 1500, in the century-and-a half that followed the slow recovery from the Black Death. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, market economies, state-like political structures dominated by a central government under a King, and abolition of serfdom had spread across most of Europe west of the Elbe. Yet it was not until well after 1850 that a truly "modern society," with a work force dominated by an industrial proletariat, and governments dominated by bourgeois politicians rather than by titled nobles and aristocrats, was the norm even in Western Europe. The period from 1500 to 1850 (or perhaps to 1832 in England, 1848 in France and Germany, and perhaps a bit later in Italy and Spain was thus neither clearly feudal, nor clearly modern, but an age of transition, or of revolutions. Although some scholars, noting the consolidation of power by monarchical central governments, called this the "Age of Absolutism," insofar as it was a period of rising bourgeois power, of laying the foundations for the "modern" world to come, it could with justification be labelled the "early modern" period, and so it was. Now the essence of "modernity" in this view lies in the mode of production of modern society, namely "capitalism." But since industrial capitalism and the proletariat were not evident on a significant scale before 1850, what was the mode of production that prevailed from 1500 to 1850, since classical feudalism, with its local non-market economy, had also passed from the scene? The answer was that a form of capitalism was growing from 1500 to 1850, namely "merchant capitalism," or "proto-industrial" production, in which goods were produced for markets, and in which profits were made by market trading of commodities, and accrued mainly to non-members of the dominant class, as the latter were still feudal (e.g. mainly rentier) in their economic outlook and practices. What was defined as characteristically "early modern, " then, was a form of society in which markets were an active source of profits to merchants, who ordered their affairs rationally in order to pursue profits, in a manner different than the still "feudal" (e.g. concerned with rank and honour) nobility. Moreover, governance was neither "modern" (e.g. dominated by bourgeois politicians) nor "feudal," (e.g. decentralised and dominated by independent lords), but centralised and partly bureaucratised, albeit under the direction of traditionally-sanctified monarchies and their noble ministers and officers. We thus come to one crucial problem in the use of the term "early modern" and its application to world history. "Early Modern" derives from a particular sociological theory of history that privileges modes of production in characterising and powering history, not from any "natural" historical periodisation, such as the rise and fall of major political units, or changes in styles of cultures, which are commonly used to periodicize history for other periods and societies than post-1500 Europe. Moreover, there is a second problem that arises because this particular sociological theory defines "early modern" primarily through contradistinction from a "feudal" mode of production that had no exact analogue (or even close analogue except perhaps in Japan outside of Europe. Thus if we apply the term "early modern" to regions outside of Europe, we are doing one of two things: (1) We are simply using the term -- without regard to meaning or content -- to label a particular span of years, roughly 1500 to 1850. Thus we could say the "EM" period in world history is just shorthand for a particular segment in historical time of 3.5 centuries, like "Eocene" denotes a period in geological time. However, when we do this, what is the justification for cutting world history, or the histories of various world nations and regions, at 1500 and 1850? This use of the term would ignore all of the usual markers taken for historical periodisation in history, such as changes in regimes or dominant cultures, for all global societies except that of Western Europe. For example, in Chinese history some of the major turning points in this millennia were the expulsion of the Mongols in 1368, the overthrow of the native Ming dynasty by the Manchus in 1644, and the overthrow of the Manchus in 1911. The date 1500 in Chinese history is, as Ray Huang says of the year 1587, "A Year of No Significance." And while the years around 1850 see the opium wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the intrusion of the Western powers, none of these events has anywhere near the significance of the overturning of millennia of Confucian patterns of rule and culture in 1911 and the following decades. What portion, if any, of the five and a half centuries of Ming and Qing rule should be singled out as "early modern?" Similarly, in the Middle East the key turning point in control is the Ottoman conquest of Byzantine Constantinople in 1453, and the end of Ottoman power occurs only after WWI, with the secularising Kemalist Revolution of 1923. Again, of over five centuries of Ottoman rule, what part is "early modern?" Russia too offers problems in dating its key transitions. Where does its "early modern" period begin? In 1547, when Ivan the Terrible suppresses the boyars and becomes the first Czar of Russia? In 1682, when Peter the Great turns Russia toward Europe and begins its enforced modernisation? Or is Russia still "feudal" until its abolition of serfdom in 1861. Certainly Russia does not become fully modern until after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. So how do we date the "early modern" period in Russia? We have at least three possibilities: 1547-1917, 1682-1917, and 1861-1917, none of which corresponds well with the canonical "early modern" period in Europe. That is not to say the years 1500-1850 do not have some resonance with global history. These years roughly embrace the period of Latin American colonial rule by Spain and Portugal, from Cortis' conquest of the Aztecs in 1521 to Brazil's independence in 1822. In India, they nicely bracket the years from the onset of Mughal rule in 1526 to the final victory of the British Raj in the Mutiny of 1857. In Japan, although the initial turning point lies at the end of the sixteenth century, not the beginning, historians increasingly are using the term "early modern" as an English code for what Japanese historians call the kinsei period, from the unification wars begun in the 1560s by Nobunaga Oda to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868. Indeed, trying to find a common causal element behind these temporal configurations, some historians have pointed to the rise of firearms c. 1500 and considered the rise of the Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, and Mughal empires and the Tokugawa Shogunate as marking an era of "gunpowder empires." Still, the problem with using "early modern" simply as a code to denote the period 1500-1850 is that China, Korea, Southeast Asia, Russia, the Middle East, and Africa are, in effect, left out of the account. For these regions, the years 1500-1850 do not denote a particular regime or cultural era. Defining early modernity according to a 'western model' of periodisation leads to common problems in Japan, China, and all of Asia. Thus, at very best, "early modern" is a code that has some, but certainly not global, application to world history. (2) Far worse, however, and more dangerously misleading, is what happens when we attach meaning to the words "early modern" and apply them broadly in world history. If we take the words in terms of their intended meaning, to demarcate a stage in economic and political development, then speaking of a society as "early modern" is to say that that society had clear elements of "modern" society beginning to emerge. A fortiori, if we speak of an "early modern world," that suggests that over large portions of the world different societies shared some key elements of "modern" society, and were actively in transition to modernity. Is there, then, such a thing as an "early modern" stage of economic and technical development that at some point was widely shared among the societies of the globe; and how closely tied is it to the emergence of fully modern societies? It is interesting that among most current scholars of the major European revolutions, the Marxist approach which privileges relations of production and conflict among economic classes has been largely discarded. Recent work on the English Revolution and on the French Revolution does not discount economic factors in motivating social protest, but presents the major cleavages that led to revolution as cultural and political, and presents the transition to "modernity" in terms of political culture (Baker) or relations between people and their government (Kishlansky). Nonetheless, many scholars continue to use the term "early modern" in terms of its Marxist criteria, rather than in terms of some other viewpoint, such as one based on the more functionalist account of "modern" given above. This has remarkably powerful implications, for searching for an "early modern" stage of development based on Marxist criteria often gives diametrically opposite results from using a more functionalist view. If modern society is marked by the combination of consciously constructed authority in lieu of traditionally-sanctified rule, modest or minimal religious authority, and the extensive application of factory mass-production powered by fossil fuels and electricity, then we shall look in vain for truly "modern" societies prior to 1850 in England, and prior to 1900 or later elsewhere in the world. Certain elements of this combination do appear elsewhere. Consciously designed constitutional authority among landed citizens is evident in ancient Greece, although it coexisted with slavery. Elements of constitutional authority also existed in medieval townships and the Swiss cantons of the twelfth century, and in the later Venetian Republic. Nonetheless, we do not consider the constitutional governments of 2500 years ago, or of 500-700 years ago, to be "modern," or even "early modern," because these societies showed no other signs of progress toward full "modernity" in the following centuries. Religious freedom and minimal or modest religious authority appears sporadically in the late Roman Empire, and again in Muslim Spain, but remained rare until the late seventeenth century, when the Netherlands and England and certain American colonies enshrined freedom of religious practice. Still, despite its religious freedom for individuals, no historians consider late Rome or Muslim Spain to be "modern," or "early modern." It is even difficult to consider early Colonial America to be "early modern," in the sense of being clearly on the road to "modernity," for at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials religious authority and the power of the King still remained paramount, and notions that the American colonists should write republican constitutions and declare themselves free citizens were almost a century away. Finally, Song China made extensive use of coal in a variety of factory processes, to the degree that Hartwell speaks of an eleventh century "Industrial Revolution" in China. And some scholars would push the origins of "early modern" China back to 960 A.D. Yet here we would have an entire millennium between the onset of "early modernity" and the beginning of fully "modern" China c. 1911. We can also note that although modern factory production powered by steam and railroad transportation appear in substantial degree in late Tsarist Russia, yet the grip of religion and traditional authority (as shown by the government's dependence on the personal whims of the Czar, and the Tsar's dependence on the religious charlatan Rasputin void any efforts to call pre-WWI Russia a truly "modern" country. In addition, the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia offers an interesting example of a country that clearly is technologically "modern," yet remains ruled by wholly traditionally-sanctified modes of governance. Also in the Middle East we find the Islamic Republic of Iran -- again, a technologically advanced society, and with a recently created constitutional government that arose through a revolution against monarchical rule. Yet the dominant position of religious law and of the clergy in Iran has moved some scholars to declare that this was not a modernising revolution, and that Iran is neither fully modern nor, as long as the clergy and Islamic law remain so dominant, on its way to becoming so. In short we have in Saudi Arabia and Iran two countries that exploit advanced technology, yet are rarely considered to be fully modernised. In sum, individual elements of "modernity" may appear in a scattering of places, but such individual elements in isolation do not necessarily make a society "modern," or even "early modern." If by "early modern" we seek to denote a society that was simultaneously progressing toward fossil-fuelled powered economies, constitutional government, and religious freedom and secularisation of daily life, we do not find such societies until eighteenth century England and nineteenth century Europe and America; in other words when the modern world is already upon us. It is true that England is something of an exception; because of its succession settlement of 1689, England had already started in the direction of religious tolerance and constitutional government. And England had been using coal for home and industrial heating since the sixteenth century. But even in England, prior to 1689 the potential still existed for the domestication of Parliament and the establishment of an authoritative state Church; indeed that is what incited the 1689 revolt against James II. Elsewhere in the world, we simply do not find steady progress toward the combination of fossil-fuel technology, constitutional governance, and religious freedom in the two centuries 1500-1700 that are so often taken to be a substantial part of the "early modern" world. The belief that "early modern" is a sensible adjective for the period 1500 to 1850 rests on the belief that no other term captures the period of transition between feudalism and capitalism, an era marked by the emergence of markets dominated by merchant capital and proto-industry. Perhaps then, the best way to check for the existence of "early modern" societies outside of Europe is to simply seek for markets, merchant capital, and proto-industrial (e.g. household market-oriented) production. This, in fact, has been the most common mode of extending the term "early modern" to non-European societies. Scholars of all parts of the world have been remarkably successful in demonstrating that Europe had no monopoly on markets, merchants, and market-oriented households. Unfortunately, such scholars have perhaps been too successful. We now have evidence of "early modern" practices in 18th century Japan, 13th century China, 11th century Java, and even of an entire capitalist "world system" in the Indian Ocean basin in the 13th century. Perhaps most startling of all is the study of "early modern" business practices in land-leasing among Egyptian landlords at least from Graeco-Roman times, and even more, among Assyrian merchants operating in Anatolia not in this era, but c. 1900 B.C.! In eighteenth century Japan, the activities, indeed the increasing economic and social dominance, of the major urban merchants of Edo and Osaka is well known. But commercial interests also penetrated deeply into the countryside. In 1780, a commentary on an uprising in Fukuyama han, where poor samurai had supported peasant demands to be allowed freely to pursue rural crafts, lamented the fading of the civil and military arts, and that "nowadays they are both abandoned and profits are pursued (emphasis added)." Much earlier, in thirteenth century China, the Southern Song enjoyed a golden age of commerce and economic dynamism -- although many scholars would date the growth of commercial expansion even further back, to the T'ang-Song divide in the tenth century, and its rapid expansion of iron and coal technology. In Indonesia, Jan Christie details the activities of "highly capitalised merchants and merchant associations (banigrama)" during the Javanese trade boom of the tenth and eleventh centuries. During this period, Java's overseas trade expansion led to dramatic changes in consumption and in the domestic ceramics and textile industries, oriented to increasing profits. Indeed, Janet Abu-Lughod has documented the activity of active trade networks of international and domestic merchants throughout the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia in the thirteenth century. While finding such extensive profit-oriented activity by merchants and producers in the tenth to thirteenth centuries AD in east Asia may not be surprising, what is startling is the recent uncovering of similar practices stretching back to the ancient world. The trade "boom" of the sixteenth century proclaimed as the onset of capitalism by Wallerstein and other early modernists is actually just one of a series of booms in international trade -- earlier ones include the 10th-13th century boom noted above in Java and China and associated with the Chinese commercial expansion of the Song and the Mongol unification of central Asia; the 7th-8th century boom associated with spread of Islam; and the 2nd C. BC- 2nd C. AD boom associated with the peaceful eras of the Roman and Han empires. Indeed, some scholars have argued that similar pulses can be traced back to the Bronze Age. Aside from the question of whether international trade can be traced back this far, it is certain that profit-seeking by merchants and peasants, and the use of market-oriented credit and leasing strategies, can be identified in documents regarding ancient Egyptian land-leases, and the partnerships of Assyrian traders operating in Anatolia. Christopher Eyre finds letters dating back to the Pharaonic Middle Kingdom, as well as lease documents from the Graeco-Roman period, that show a fine balancing of lease terms, access to capital and water, and paid labour arranged to produce maximum gains for the land-owners. Klaas Veenhof similarly finds that Old Assyrian traders, when operating out of trading posts in Anatolia, and thus out of the normal "jurisdiction" of the Assyrian ruler, developed sets of rules for a variety of commercial transactions, including credit, "bearer notes," transfer of commercial debts, and methods to deal with insolvent creditors. Norman Yoffee similarly notes recent archaeological findings from the early Old Babylonian Period (c. 2000-1600 BC) that show "profound economic changes that were wrought in the aftermath of the Ur III empire. Land was rented, bought, and sold in the north and property was accumulated, inherited, and disputed in both north and south. Although palace and temple-estates managed great plots of land ... the newest investigations show the extensive degree to which entrepreneurial middlemen supplied them. For example, temples leased fishing rights to businessmen who then sold fish for their own profit. While this scholarship has been stunningly successful in overturning the idea that the world outside Europe somehow remained stuck in a "feudal" mode of production, or an unchanging "Asiatic mode," these studies also raise the question -- how can merchant practices in isolation, or in networks of long-distance trade, which are found as far back as 4000 years ago, and are so widespread as to be found throughout Asia from the 10th century onward, be meaningfully "early modern?" After all, the evidence from the 10th-13th centuries would mean that Asia was "early modern" for centuries while Europe was still mainly feudal. Thus the "early modern" world would be something centred in Asia, which Europe joined as a latecomer, not as a leader or pioneer. Yet the discovery of such practices in ancient Assyrian outposts, in Egypt and Babylon, as well as in 10th century China and 11th century Java makes one ask -- what sense does it make to talk of an "early modern" era that reaches back one thousand to four thousand years? Can it meaningfully be argued that ancient Assyria, Graeco-Roman Egypt, 10th century China, or eleventh century Java, were in "transition" to full modernity? Can it be argued that these societies had much in common with, say, eighteenth century England or early nineteenth century France? It increasingly appears that if the definition of "early modern" is simply pegged on the existence of production and trade for profits in markets, the "early modern" period will cover all of history from the onset of urban civilisation and written records, and lose any meaningful connection to what is distinctive about the "modern" world. Historians thus seem, in searching for "early modern" history, to be caught between the Scylla of finding it nowhere and the Charybdis of finding it everywhere. If we define "early modern" societies as those clearly transitioning toward the fully "modern" in respect to government, religion, and technology, they are almost nowhere to be found. Even in Europe, it took major revolutions that simultaneously disestablished religious authority and formally replaced monarchy with constitutional regimes, along with a transformation of the basic structure of production, to create "modern" societies. Similar wrenching transitions were required in Russia (1917) and China (1911 and after). Elsewhere, particularly in the third world, modern societies developed only in the wake of throwing off colonial authority. Although modernity emerged in some cases without such major transformations (e.g., Canada, Switzerland), the transition from non-modern to modern-societies typically occurred in a dramatic and short-term change, not in a 350-year period of "transition." On the other hand, if we define "early modern" societies in the Marxist fashion of societies with market-oriented production and profit-oriented merchants, then we find such societies almost everywhere, from ancient Assyria and ancient Egypt to Song China to the early Muslim Middle East, to 16th century Europe. There was, by this definition, certainly an "early modern world," but it had little or no necessary connection to the "modern" world, and began very early indeed! In other words, "early modern" can mean almost nothing, or almost everything, and as such, is a wholly meaningless term. It developed out of the need to fill in a space in the Marxist theory of stages of history, where it fills the gap between feudalism and industrial capitalism in Europe by interpolating commercial practices that have been widespread from the earliest days of commerce, while erroneously concluding that those practices represent something new, something essentially Western, and something closely tied to the emergence of "modern" societies. In fact, none of these latter propositions are valid. Thus the term "early modern" is founded on a series of errors, and has no useful application to world history. Mark Jones _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
