To borrow Saskia Sassen of Columbia University, What was particularly important for Janet (Abu-Lughod's) analysis was that Europe became part of that world system: one dominated by the Moguls, not by Europe! The interconnections among various parts of Asia had been in some cases stronger a century or so before 1250. And while it had included some parts of Europe, notably Spain, the core elements of that world system were far from Europe.
In Janet 's world system, it was the rise of the Moguls in the 13th century and onwards that were the dominant glue.
Further, what mattered in her analysis was that they supported trans-Asian caravan trading, which in tum led to networks that enabled Europe's incorporation into a larger space of Eurasian commerce.
This analysis both brought Europe into a vast Asian geography dominated by the Moguls and sought to show that, whatever the conditions explaining the rise of the later European world-system of the 16th century onwards, these conditions were not the only ones that could lead to a world-system.
Victor Lieberman [3]
According to Victor Lieberman of the University of Michgan, Abu-Lughod seeks to show that within the medieval world system, Europe, the Mideast, India and China demonstrated as essential equality of commercial development. That is to say, Europe enjoyed no institutional or cultural superiority, no monopoly on technological or economic inventiveness, over other major centers. The West's eventual triumph resulted less from internal structural advantages than from the post-1400 disarray of the Orient; and without this contingent, unpredictable abdication, Asia rather than Europe well might have generated an autonomous, world-transforming capitalism. In her opposition to the venerable tradition of Eurocentric historiography in her spirited attack on European exceptionalism, Abu-Lughod therefore attempts to remap a large and oft-visited territory.
Her analysis is organized geographically, starting with Western Europe and moving through the Mideast and Asia. Each part discusses with insight and admirable clarity and the principal commodities, the systems of production, the mechanisms of domestic exchange and credit, maritime and overland ties with external zones, and the chronology of commercial florescence and decline.
What Wallestein says about Abu-Lughod? [4]
Immanuel Wallestein says Janet Abu-Lughod was a remarkable scholar and bequeathed a significant legacy to the historical social sciences. In Journal of World-Systems Research (August 2015) Wallestein wrote about her book Before European Hegemony:
"The book was not intended to be an exposition of world history over 5000 or 10,000 years. It focused on what she thought was a key period of prelude to the "rise of the west." Her method essentially was to demonstrate that there was a world system composed of a number of overlapping circles, somewhat equivalent in their political economies. Precisely because these circles overlapped, she could demonstrate the practical links between them, both of economic and political interconnections and of cultural diffusions."
Gaps in Abu-Lughod's analysis [5]
For Berry K. Gills no work of such ambitious scope could be fully holistic and comprehensive.
Thus, there are gaps in Abu-Lughod's analysis. She omits the Baltic from her eight-circuit schema. The Baltic circuit was existing during the so-called "Viking" era, and continued during the Hanseatic league of cities.
She omits the Baltic/Dnieper-Volga/Black & Caspian Seas circuit, which is recorded by Arab and Islamic travelers' accounts from the medieval period.
She also omits the West African- trans-Saharan-Mediterranean circuit, though this exchange nexus played a key role in formation of West African cities and states of the medieval period. Her Indian Ocean circuit (VI) could have been extended on the African coast to include Kilwa, Sofala, and Mauritius. Her circuit VIII, East and Southeast Asia, could have been extended to encompass the Korean peninsula and Japan. The inclusion of these circuits would have provided a more comprehensive analysis of the "Afro-Eurasian world system" of the medieval period, Gills concludes.
References
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