|
Showing 1 - 15 of
15 matches in All Departments
Andre Gunder Frank was a path-breaking scholar in several
disciplines over an illustrious and contentious 50-year career.
First amongst his many important works is the book ReORIENT: Global
Economy in the Asian Age, which sought to correct a Euro-centric
world view of the development of the global political economy.
Frank passed away in April 2005 while working on this new book, a
sequel to ReORIENT. In this book Frank shows many of the myths of
European industrialisation, hegemony and capitalism which have
hidden the fact that Asia remained a serious power not just into
the 18th century, as Frank himself argued in 1998, but well into
the 19th century as well. When Frank passed away his colleagues
rallied to finish this book and it is presented here as his final
major statement.
Andre Gunder Frank was a path-breaking scholar in several
disciplines over an illustrious and contentious 50-year career.
Premier among his many important works is the book, "ReORIENT:
Global Economy in the Asian Age," which sought to correct a
Eurocentric worldview of the development of the global political
economy. As Gunder Frank continued his research, he realized that
many of the myths of European industrialization, hegemony, and
capitalism hid the fact that Asia remained a serious power not just
into the 18th century, as he argued in 1998, but well into the 19th
century as well. Gunder Frank passed away in April 2005 while
working on this new book, a sequel to "ReORIENT." His colleagues
rallied to finish it and it is presented here as Andre Gunder Frank
s final major statement. His prescience is remarkable today as we
see the continuation of Asian influences and ascendancy."
The historic long-term economic interconnections of the world are now universally accepted. The idea of the 'world system' advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in the early modern period. But some academics think this date is much too late and denies a much longer interconnection going back as much as five thousand years. Reframing the chronology of the world system exercises powerful influences on the writing of history. It integrates the areas of Asia and the East which were marginalized by Wallerstein into the heart of the debate and provides a much more convincing account of developments which cannot otherwise be explained. It undermines the primacy claimed for Europe as the major agent of economic change, an issue with implications far beyond the realm of history.
The historic long term economic interconnections of the world are
now universally accepted. The idea of the economic "world system"
advanced by Immanual Wallerstein has set the period of linkage in
the early modern period, but Andre Gunder Frank thinks that this
date is much too late and denies the much longer run of
interconnection going back as much as 5000 years. In "The World
System", the authors argue through this issue, in a debate
contributed to by William McNeill and Immanuel Wallerstein, among
others.
The conquerors wanted Indian labour, the crown Indian subjects, the
friars Indian souls.' Thus the importance of the natives of Mexico
to their Spanish conquerors has been described. In this book Andre
Gunder Frank examines the dramatic impact of Spanish rule on
Mexican society and agriculture, in terms of the demands of world
capitalist development. Mr Frank traces the rapid transformation of
the dominant institutions of Mexican labour organization which
occurred after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521:
from a form of slavery, which lasted until 1533, through various
forms of forced labour (the encomienda and the catequil or mica),
to the establishment, after 1575, of the hacienda, with large-scale
latifundia lands worked by serf-like ganan labour.
Andre Gunder Frank asks us to re-orient our views away from
Eurocentrism - to see the rise of the West as a mere blip in what
was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world. In a bold
challenge to received historiography and social theory he turns on
its head the world according to Marx, Weber, and other theorists,
including Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel, and Wallerstein. Frank explains
the Rise of the West in world economic and demographic terms that
relate it in a single historical sweep to the decline of the East
around 1800. European states, he says, used the silver extracted
from the American colonies to buy entry into an expanding Asian
market that already flourished in the global economy. Resorting to
import substitution and export promotion in the world market, they
became Newly Industrializing Economies and tipped the global
economic balance to the West. That is precisely what East Asia is
doing today, Frank points out, to recover its traditional
dominance. As a result, the 'center' of the world economy is once
again moving to the 'Middle Kingdom' of China. Anyone interested in
Asia, in world systems and world economic and social history, in
international relations, and in comparative area studies, will have
to take into account Frank's exciting reassessment of our global
economic past and future.
Most of Andre Gunder Frank's early work on the nature of
underdevelopment focused on one continent: Latin America. Here he
broadened his canvas and traced the world-wide effects of the
process of capital accumulation from the period just prior to the
discovery of America to the industrial and French revolutions. It
is Frank's thesis that "the world has experienced a single
all-embracing, albeit unequal and uneven, process of capital
accumulation centered in Western Europe," which has been capitalist
for at least two centuries.
In the quarter century since Wallerstein first developed world
systems theory (WST), scholars in a variety of disciplines have
adopted the approach to explain intersocietal interaction on a
grand scale. These essays bring to light archaeological data and
analysis to show that many historic and prehistoric states lacked
the mechanisms to dominate the distant (and in some cases, nearby)
societies with which they interacted. Core/periphery exploitation
needs to be demonstrated, not simply assumed, as the
interdisciplinary dialogue which occurs in this volume
demonstrates. World-Systems Theory in Practice will appeal to
individuals with an interest in the application of WST in both the
Old World and the New World. The papers in this volume reflect the
vitality of the debate concerning the use of such generalizing
theories and will be of interest to archeologists, anthropologists,
historians, sociologists, and those involved in the study of
civilizations.
Why, while Europe, North America, and Australia have developed,
have Africa, much of Asia, and Latin America remained
underdeveloped? Andre Gunder Frank sets out to answer this basic
question by showing how world capital accumulation has led to the
differentiation of these regions within the single world-embracing
economic system. Unequal exchange between regions, combined with
the differential transformation of productive, social, and
political relations within regions, has led to the capitalist
development of some areas and to the underdevelopment of others.
In his second book, Andre Gunder Frank expands on the theme
presented in his influential study Capitalism and Underdevelopment
in Latin America. It is the colonial structure of world capitalism,
in his view, which produced and maintains the underdevelopment
characteristic of Latin America and the rest of the Third World.
This colonial structure penetrates everywhere in Latin America,
forming and transforming all its features in obedience to its own
imperatives and thereby imposing upon the region those
characteristic features of poverty and backwardness which are not
primarily the remnants of an ancient "feudal" past but the direct
products of capitalism. This development of underdevelopment will
persist, Frank argues, until the people of Latin America free
themselves from world capitalism by means of revolution.
The four essays in this book offer a sweeping reinterpretation of
Latin American history as an aspect of the world-wide spread of
capitalism in its commercial and industrial phases. Dr. Frank lays
to rest the myth of Latin American feudalism, demonstrating in the
process the impossibility of a bourgeois revolution in a part of
the world which is already part and parcel of the capitalist
system.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
The Car
Arctic Monkeys
CD
R238
R215
Discovery Miles 2 150
|