Anticipating and Confronting Resist

Anticipating and Confronting Resistance and Obstacles
To begin with, we are badly equipped to confront our global reality when we are misguided into thinking that our world is only just now undergoing a belated process of "globalization." Our very language and its categories reflect and in turn misguide our thinking when they lead us to suppose that the parts came first and then only combined to make a whole: examples are our society, my country, the German word Nationaloekonomie, or international relations with or without international trade. They all sound as though we long lived and some of us would still like to livein some social, political, economic "units" which have had some allegedly pristine existence ever since (their) Creation. It is simply not true that they only became inter-related later or even now. That allegation and terminology is just about the most literally nonsensical "perspective of the world" and rendition of its reality imaginable. But short of inventing an entirely new vocabulary that would be unfamiliar to the reader, I am obliged to make do with received terminology and try to stretch it to encompass a more global reality. However, we need more than global terminology. We also need global analysis and theory.
Yet even proposing global analysis, let alone theory, of and for the world is a hazardous task. It meets with strong resistance and can evoke ferocious counterattacks. We may anticipate and address, if not remove, at least the iceberg tips of some of the obstacles that we may encounter in the stormy analytic seas ahead. Since the present proposal is only now being launched, I will base my anticipations on some of the previous experience of both Immanuel Wallerstein and myself. His experience is relevant because the scope of my present proposal is at the same time broader, if more superficial, than his was.
The most numerous obstacles are likely to be picayune nitpickings.
Other, more theoretical objections may be fewer, but larger. Wallerstein himself poses a particularly big obstacle.
One nitpicking objection is that I do not use (or even have the ability to use) primary sources. I reject that objection for several reasons. In 1966, I sent the manuscript of an innovative critique of received theses about Mexican history to one of the authors of the same. He kindly wrote back but said my manuscript was not worth publishing, because it was not based on primary sources. So I left it in my desk drawer until, thirteen years later, Wallerstein invited me to publish it in a series he was editing at Cambridge University Press (Frank 1979). Then the same author wrote a review, saying my book should not have been published because by now what I was saying was old hat, further research and analysis by others having converted my earlier, outlandish-seeming world economic thesis into accepted received theory.
This experience illustrates what kinds of sources are necessary and legitimate to make a historical statement, particularly a paradigmatic one. One of the problems of using a microscope to do archival research is, of course, that it affords historians no wider view, unless they bring one with them from outside the archives. Moreover, if historians wish to exit from the received paradigm and/or even to challenge the one based on microscopic analysis, they all the more require a wider perspective. Of course if historians take too big a step back to examine the material with a telescope, they are bound to miss some of the details. That leads us on to the next objection.
It might be objected that, especially for lack of sufficient or even any primary sources, I do not know enough to tackle the whole world, or even several parts of it. Even Braudel (1992: 468) doubted that it is "wise for one historian to try to bring together in a single analysis fragments of a history still insufficiently explored by research." Others will say, "Oh, but what you suggest was not quite that way in my back yard in the one-, ten-, or hundred- year period to whose study I have devoted twenty years of my life." Yet as the world historian William McNeill pointed out in his foreword to a previous book of mine (Frank and Gills 1993), it is impossible to know everything, or even "enough," about anything, no matter how narrowly the topic may be defined. Elsewhere, he argues that
Macrohistorians ruthlessly by-pass most details of the available literary record This does not make macrohistory less exact or well attested Each scale of inquiry creates its own landscape of significant meanings. Smaller is not closer to realityas minutely specialized historians sometimes assume. It is just different. ... Good history results from a process of selection and criticism, picking out information from available sources that is relevant to whatever questions the historian asksno more, no less. (McNeill 1996: 21)
Therefore, dearth of knowledge, to which I readily admit, is not really a function of the narrowness or breadth of the topic selected for study. On the contrary as chapter 5 will argue citing Joseph Fletcher, it is the all-too-common failure to do "horizontally integrative macrohistory" that results in the narrowness if not the very dearth of historical knowledge.
Some readers may object that I am looking at only one "economic" part or feature. At a combined 1996 meeting of the World History Association and the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, one member told me privately "you are doing good economic history; that is why I am not interested"; another said publicly "you are culturally blind." Advocates of political, social, cultural, religious, national, ethnic, and other kinds of analysis will complain that mine does not favor, appreciate, or kowtow to their particularistic desires. Partisans will lament that this analysis is of little or no use to the struggle of ''my people." They seek support instead from this or that ethnocentrism or from the new Afrocentrism, the old Islamocentrism, the even older Sinocentrism, Russian exceptionalism, and so on, none of which receive their oft-demanded support from the present analysis. My perspective also combats the Eurocentric Western exceptionalism now peddled in new garb by that old cold-warrior Samuel Huntington (1993,1996) as "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Credit where credit is due, the author also put a question mark behind the title of his 1993 Foreign Affairs article, but his all too eager public has already left it off. However by 1996, there was no more question mark in the title of his book.) Instead, as chapter 7 emphasizes, this book develops a perspective to support "unity in diversity."
Feminists may charge, and rightly so, that this perspective and analysis does not sufficiently rattle at the cage of the patriarchal gender structure of society, which disadvantages women to say the least. That is true, although this approach is no less amenable to genderization than received theory is; except that it does not deal with women per se, nor with men for that matter. Indeed, this structural analysis does not seem to deal with any people at all. Chapter 2 on the division of labor and trade, chapter 3 on how money goes around the world and makes the world go round, and chapters 5 and 6 on the world economic system's structure and dynamic just inquire into the political economic and social relations among people. In a sense in my book, history makes people more than people make history.
That will be enough to make many rails against some economic and/ or other structural "determinism" that allegedly negates any and all voluntarist free-will political "agency." Of course, it is useless to point out to them that whatever constraints there are in the real world were not put there by any systematic observers. Moreover, no systematic observer I know has ever alleged that the objectively studied "system" leaves no room for individual, community, cultural, political, or other "bottom up" (indeed also ''top down") subjective action and reactions. Yet good or even bad intentions are often not realized; and which intentions are and are not realized is subject to systemically generated opportunities and constraints, as examined in chapters 5 and 6.
However, there will also be more "concrete" complaints and demands by social theorists similar to the complaints Wallerstein has already encountered in response to his "modern world-system." A special Eurocentric charge is that the evidence does not support his, much less my, contention that Europeans benefited from something other than their own good efforts. Years ago, Paul Bairoch (1969, 1974), Patrick O'Brien (1982) and others explicitly countered the earlier theses of Frank (1967, 1978a, b) and Wallerstein (1974) that colonial and neocolonial trade contributed to European investment and development. Bairoch (1969) denied that commercial capital made any significant contribution thereto. O'Brien (1982, 1990) has on several occasions dismissed overseas trade and colonial exploitation as contributors to capital accumulation and industrialization in Europe, since by his calculations this trade, not to mention profits therefrom, amounted to no more than 2 percent of European gross national product (GNP) in the late eighteenth century. O'Brien (1982: 18) contends that "for the economic growth of the core, the periphery was peripheral." Now O'Brien goes even further and categorically contends, under the head "The Formation of a Global Economy, 1846-1914.," that interconnections across continents and countries down to the middle of the nineteenth century seem limited.... Producers and traders the world over remained not merely insulated from foreign rivals but also protected ... from competition even within national boundaries.... Integration occurred first on a local and regional, then on a national, basis, and increasingly as the [nineteenth] century went on, it took place on a global scale.