Review by Alberto Esquit
Eric R. Wolf. 1982 . Europe and The People Without History. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Eric Wolf was born in 1923 and wrote Europe and The People Without History based on investigations at the end of the 1960s and in the first half of the 1970s, and completed it in 1981. Before him, Andre Gunder Frank wrote (1960s) The Development of Underdevelopment as interdependent phenomena and latter Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) wrote The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Both, Frank and Wallerstein focused on the development of capitalism and its impact on the periphery without studying the reaction of the population of the periphery. In the Wolf study, he criticized the atomization of the world in the study of the process of economic development. His idea can be summarized in the following quote:
If there are connections everywhere, why do we persist in turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things? Some of this is owing, perhaps, to the way we have learned our own history. We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there are exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Wolf
1982:5).
For the support of his criticism he divided his study into three parts: 1) Connections, 2) In search of Wealth and 3) Capitalism.
PART ONE: CONNECTIONS
Wolf criticizes the division of the world into East and West, and the pyramidal classification of developed, developing countries and the third world in the second half of the twentieth century. He argued the interconnected relation of a world system. In this issue, social sciences such as political economy worked in the production and distribution of the wealth of the nations and sociology as antidote against the poison of social disintegration in the theory of social order. The division of history into history and ethnohistory, our history and their history had ideological interest. There can be no Black history apart from White history, only a component of a common history suppressed or omitted from conventional studies for economic, political, or ideological reasons.
In his analysis uses principally Marxist categories such as production, social class and the state, although Wolf warned that these categories are before Marx. The nature of production of the human being, the rise of social class in the process of production, and the allocation of resources, and the exercise of power by the state. He assumes also that in social sciences is avoided these categories, but in fact scholars are in constant dialogue with them. The last but not the least is the concept of modes of production dispersed throughout his writing.
Since social sciences emerged as an antidote to revolution and disorder, social scientist must have instruments for the analysis of the world system. Wolf points out three main aspects:
First, we shall not understand the present world unless we trace the growth of the world market and the course of capitalist development. Second, we must have a theory of the growth and development. Third, we must be able to relate both the history and theory of that unfolding development to process that affect and change the lives of local populations.
Wolf begins studying the political geography of the Old World around 1400: 1) trade throughout the water routes of the Mediterranean rounding the European peninsula, 2) the silk road to China, the Persian Gulf, India, South Asia; the Caravan routes which crossed the Sahara. Between 1300 and1590, the Ottoman expansion blocked the direct access of Europe (Venice, Genoa, and Florence) to the East. Regions such as North and West Africa, East Africa, South and East Asia (India, China), Southeast Asia, South America, Mesoamerica and North America, each developed interconnected trade relations.
Wolf understood mode of production as the major way in which human beings organize their production, which also implies the relation of nature and human being. The capitalist mode of production came to being when monetary wealth was enabled to buy labor power, in a social relation. In this process of production, the product of the labor is alienated from the laborer. The three characteristics of the capitalist mode of production are: 1) control of means of production, 2) buy and sell labor, without access to the means of production of the laborer, and 3) a process of ceaseless accumulation of capital.
In 1400, the tributary mode of production was dominant in the rest of the world. Here the laborer has access to the means of production with the obligation of tribute to a lord or a ruling elite, the owner of the land (Asiatic mode of production and feudal mode of production). Civilizations on the other hand are defined as cultural interaction zones pivoted upon a hegemonic tributary society and replicated by other elites in a wider political-economic orbit of interactions. Among other modes of production he identified the Kin-Ordered mode of production in which he states that kinship can operate at two levels, that of the family or the domestic group and that of the political order. The combination of biological reproduction and cultural construction lead to an operational view: Kinship thus involves (a) symbolic constructs (filiation/marriage; consanguinity/affinity) that (b) continually place actors, born and recruited, (c) into social relations with one another. These social relations (d) permit people in variable ways to call on the share of social labor carried by each, in order to (e) effect the necessary transformations of nature. The problem of chiefdoms is in the potential development of the chiefly lineage as an incipient class surplus taker in the tributary mode (p. 97) and redistribution as strategies of class formation.
And the mercantile wealth was extracted in three ways: a) buying stocks of surplus from tributary overlords and providing goods in return, b) open exchange with primary gatherers and producers, and c) trading slaves. In the process of European expansion, mercantile wealth pioneered routes of circulation and opened up channels of exchange.
After 1,000 A.D. Europe began its political consolidation through 1) war abroad for the extraction of tribute, 2) commerce through the discovery of source internally and externally either by trade or war, and 3) enlarging the royal domain from where the king draw direct support without intermediaries. With the formation of states and the expansion of Portugal, Castile-Aragon (Spain), the international circuits of mercantile wealth and the united provinces of France and England helped the consolidation of Europe after the sixteenth century.
PART TWO: IN SEARCH OF WEALTH
After the expansion of Europe in 1415 by the Portuguese in the North African coast to Asia, followed by Castile-Aragon in 1492 to America, they broke in conflict in the colonization and exploitation of the latter one. The impact of the European expansion on the native population was the destruction of their economic system, submission, control and exploitation. Around 1520 the population had declined significantly because of intense exploitation, and pathogenic organisms to which native population were not immune. Among the wealth of Spanish America was the silver and gold found in Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico extracted by the natives, and sent to Spain. Other secondary products were cochineal, indigo, and cacao, also sent to Spain as export products and tribute. The exchange of commodities were restricted and without the free working principles of demand and supply. The new systems of supply were based in new forms of economic institutions and exploitation of row material and laborers: ecomiendas, repartimientos, haciendas and indian communities. In Brazil and the Caribbean islands began to be exploited with the sugar production. At the end of the seventeenth century others European countries started to trade with Spanish possessions. Contraband, slave raiding, and pirates were also part of the economic activities.
In North America fur trade was the dominant economic activity in the early contact. In the expansion westward, native population became part of the conflict between French and British. The European traders with the goal of a direct trade with the hunters became colonizers and a Pontiacs revolt rose up. Horse began to be part of the life of natives as well as guns supplied by the European companies. In the Northwest Coast white and native population started to share eventually the same slavery system.
Slave trade by Portuguese and latter by the Dutch, French, and English from Africa to America was part of the European expansion. Spanish, Portuguese and British colonies used slave labor in the production of sugar cane and in mines. Slavery and servitude were already part of the European economic system, not only in the Mediterranean but also in Scotland and Ireland. African slaves were preferred since them could not escape as the native American, and also the latter eventually helped to control and return runaway slaves.
The beginning of state formation in the regions of Kongo, Benin and the Gold Coast facilitate the formation of a dominant class and the domination of other sector of the population as potential slaves. The introduction of firearm by the Turkish of the Ottoman Empire and latter by the Europeans, became important in the acquisition of captives, helping the trade of slaves. Areas of slave supply were: 1) West Africa: The Gold Coast, Oyo and Dahomey, Benin, The Niger Delta; 2) Central Africa: The Kingdom of Kongo, Imbangala, Luba-Lunda, Ivory and Slaving in Eastern Africa, The Bemba.
During the sixteenth century Europeans began to expand trade in Asia, and at the end of eighteenth century British moved to take over a land-based empire. The Portuguese found an Islam domain first as imperial and religious enterprise, latter by the Dutch as a strong political private company and the English in India as private economic enterprise. The British accepted eventually the sovereignty of the local rulers as an elite alliance. This form of commercial relation made possible the expansion of local production, recollection of commodities and a monopoly of export and trade. English rule took place latter on tax and land distribution. The English formed a new army, a bureaucracy and a rural oligarchy. The destruction of the Indian economy by the British economy was in conflict, but tallow made from cow and pig fat break up the rebellion of Hindus and Muslims.
After the consolidation of the British in India, they moved to China, where only silver was accepted as currency flowing it from America, Europe to China until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The British began to trade opium for tea in China and by the end of the nineteenth century one out of every then Chinese was addict. Opium did more than undermine the health of Chinese addicts; it began to subvert the social order in the countryside. In the Pacific islands sandalwood for incense, sea cucumber, firearms and guns were traded.
In India the casts were maintained and also intensified, opium opened Chine to foreign trade and British sold Indian textile in Europe, Africa and Indonesia as in a global system of free trade.
PART THREE: CAPITALISM.
The industrial revolution changed the mercantile production of textile into capital with purchasing machines and row material on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other hand. The industrial production moved England to a capitalist mode of production. The Dutch and Indian competition in the textile production could not compete with the English, with a rural cheap labor and mechanized production.
The new entrepreneurs began to compete with control of finishing, the production of improved yarn and new machine. Concentration of labor in factories came to take place but conflict between Irish and English workers intensified. India and England imported cotton from the United States and South America, in plantation with slaves labor. Egypt also supplied cotton for the production of English textile. The English and Indian textile industry in Bombay was the vehicle to the capitalist mode of production.
Now capitalism created two zones: the core and the periphery. It brought the entire world under its dominance in a hierarchical system with the use of capital as stock of wealth and strategic financial element combined with machinery, raw materials, and labor power. Regional specialization in the world took place in the production of row material, food crop, or stimulant, demanding a mechanism of social articulation. Different faces of acceleration and deceleration of capitalism produced a great depression in the USA, in the nineteenth century, with direct and indirect effect in the specialized regions.
The history of capitalism in the social science had been the history of the elite. Until recently historians moved toward the writing of processual and relational history of the working classes as well as the history of people contacted by the European expansion.