Dialectics in the Longer Durée: The IIPEC Model of Inter-imperial Economy and Culture

Abstract

This essay combines new evidence from world history with postcolonial and materialist theory to develop an interdisciplinary model of dialectics in world politics. The argument is both theoretical and historical. Focused on the global field of empires jockeying in every period, whose material productions accrue over successive periods, the essay models an inter-imperial theory of political economy and culture (IIPEC), with attention to anti-imperial as well as imperial actors. The theory introduces three dialectical concepts (co-formation, co-production, and accretion), which explain the linked emergence of states, capitalist economies, material infrastructures, and cultural institutions. Applied to new historical data on states outside of Europe, including in ‘medieval’ periods, the IIPEC analysis reveals that these processes of linked emergence predate–and prepare–the rise of European nation-states. The IIPEC model thus reframes the Westphalian account of state formation within a transhemispheric dialectics, and in turn it revises Eurocentric narratives of modernity and globalization.

EXTRACTO

Este ensayo combina nueva evidencia de la historia mundial con la teoría post-colonial y materialista para desarrollar un modelo inter-disciplinario de dialéctica en política mundial. El argumento es tanto teórico como histórico. Se enfoca en el campo global de los imperios que maniobran cada período, cuyas producciones materiales se causan a lo largo de períodos sucesivos; el ensayo crea un modelo de teoría económica y de cultura política inter-imperial (IIPEC por sus siglas en inglés) con énfasis en los actores tanto anti-imperiales como imperiales. La teoría presenta tres conceptos dialécticos (co-formación, co-producción y acreción) que explican la ligada aparición de estados, economías capitalistas, infraestructuras materiales e instituciones culturales. El análisis del IIPEC, aplicado a la nueva información histórica sobre los estados fuera de Europa, incluyendo los “períodos medievales”, revela que estos procesos de aparición relacionada, anteceden-y preparan-el despertar de los estados-nación europeos. El modelo IIPEC da así un nuevo marco a la posición Westfaliana de formación de los estados dentro de una dialéctica trans-hemisférica y a la vez revisa la narrativa eurocéntrica de modernidad y globalización.

Keywords:

• dialectic
• empire
• global
• Westphalia
• culture
• infrastructure

Notes

1 Wills uses this phrase (1993). Dozens of historians and social scientists are engaged in this work, but, for a further sample, see important early work on Islam by Maurice Lombard (1975) as well as Hodgson (1963); research on Silk Roads by Sen (2003) and Hansen (2012); Chaudhuri (1990) on Indian Ocean; broad studies of empire such as Burbank & Cooper (2010), which reframes work focused on Europe such as Hobsbawm (1987); and a range of publications by Jerry Bentley and Kees van der Pijl. On studies of very early world-system formations, see Chase-Dunn et al. (2006), Gills and Thompson (2006), and Frank and Gills (1993). Also see rich scholarship in Journal of World History and Journal of Global History.

2 As Davis points out in Periodization and sovereignty (2008), a sharp divide between feudal and modern persists in accounts of capitalism and state formation, perpetuated by thinkers as diverse as J. G. A. Pocock and Antonio Negri. The binary between ‘capitalist modern’ and ‘feudal medieval’ has implicitly been aligned with corollary divisions between west and east, so that west equals capitalist, dynamic, secular, and democratic, and east equals the medieval opposites, lurking within a shadowy past before systems, sovereignty, and rationality.

3 Barkawi (2010, p. 330) uses the term inter-imperial occasionally, but not centrally, and only regarding recent history.

4 For calls for historical IR scholarship, see Buzan and Little (2000), Gills and Thompson (2006), Lacher (2006), Palan (2007); and see Dirlik (2005) and Pieterse (2007) for emphasis on cultural work.

5 Ferguson's inaccurate, revisionist histories of empire purport to tell a balanced world history, but instead continue to proffer fantasies about western inventions of science and law, while celebrating imperial achievements overall and brushing aside postcolonial studies. At the other end of the spectrum, postcolonial scholarship has productively dislodged many Eurocentric habits of perception and theorized about imperial formations, yet it has mostly focused on Anglo-European empires.

6 Palan's description of states as mediating junctures helpfully highlights the dynamics, though it still implicitly treats states as independent a priori entities rather than co-constituted formations.

7 The prefix dia has associations with two because of its roots in the Greek word for that number, but in Greek, dia also has the ancient meanings of across, through, and thoroughly; it functions as a preposition or prefix, indicating relation across difference or separateness, as in the word dialogue. In the early Greek formulation of dialectical practice by Socrates, it entailed exactly this interacting of plural views.

8 As recent global intellectual histories establish (Clarke, 1997; Lach, 1965; Liu, 2008; Schwab, 1984), many streams of ‘western’ thought and culture have roots in ‘eastern’ and southern cultures; and Hegel was certainly engaged in debates about eastern philosophies (Bernasconi, 2003). For studies of other German philosophers influenced by Chinese thought, see Mungello (1977) and Perkins (2004) on Leibniz, and App (2010) on Schopenhauer. His orientation toward dialectics in ancient Greek philosophy might also be explored in light of circulations of philosophical ideas in ancient Afro-Eurasia. In other words, historical dialectics of interaction across hemispheres have included the diffusion of ancient philosophical ideas, and therefore claims about ‘civilizational traditions' or any western philosopher should be considered in this light.

9 For Darwin, see Origin of species (1859/1936, p. 51), Descent (pp. 507–509); for discussion, see Doyle (1994, pp. 64–70). EWP vocabularies unwittingly carry these racial traces. The shadow of racialized thinking appears (predictably coupled with a turn to population studies as it first was in the ‘science’ of eugenics), when Modelski considers the explosion of ‘British stock’ around the world between 1600 and 1960 and suggests that ‘the quality of British institutions' explains this phenomenal population rise. As I have discussed elsewhere, this linking of ‘stock’ and advanced ‘institutions' has an old racialist genealogy (Doyle, 2008), embedded also in the Darwinist vocabulary of selection, innovation, and fitness. Likewise, although Modelski helpfully seeks models outside the nation-state (Thompson, 2001, p. 16), he continues to think within the model of ‘stages of historical development’ (Modelski, p. 17 in Thompson, 2001), asking whether and why global politics ‘is less primitive today than it was for instance, one thousand years ago’ (pp. 16–17 in Thompson, 2001). Whence the model of primitive and advanced? Such strains of thought reveal what lies coiled within the vocabularies of evolution, undercutting EWP efforts to move outside of Eurocentric accounts of state formation.

10 Both traditions sought to describe an underlying element in which all relationality and all living and dying occurred, the Greeks postulating the ‘indefinite’ in which earth fire, water, air interacted, and Buddhists naming dao as both source and driving force behind everything that exists. Both have implicitly influenced the course of western European dialectical philosophy, from Hegel and Marx to the critical theorists of today (see Clarke, Fuch, Liu). Our ignorance of this transhemispheric intellectual history partly reflects the geopolitics of empires which erase the productions of other states/cultures while absorbing those same productions.

11 ‘Microphysics' is Michel Foucault's word (1977/1995). ‘Being-with-and-against’ is a variation on Jean-Luc Nancy's notion (2000) of ‘being-with’.

12 In this light, we might interpret the fetishization of sovereignty, autonomy, and independence in reigning IR theory as convenient fictions that disavow our fraught, difficult interdependence. A dialectical, inter-polity model looks past these operative yet wishful fictions, and highlights the fundamental ways that states and all kinds of other communities have long been co-constituting.

13 In his closing chapters, Wight deems any triangle that would include ‘Third World’ states of the twentieth century, as ‘false triangles' [p. 176]).

14 I thank the reviewer of this essay who pointed me to Mann's work, rarely read by humanists. Mann's trilogy The sources of social power offers rich material and theorizing about dialectics in a longer durée as it analyzes interactions of state, economic, ideological, and military power. This essay refers to Vol. 1 (1986). I do not treat military power in this essay, though it certainly could be integrated into IIPEC. In general, Mann's analysis and mine align.

15 As Hobson (2007) argues, this Eurocentric narrative not only frames institutional, classical, and neorealist IR but also circulates residually in the work of Marxist, feminist, transnational, and other scholars in CIRT. Also, perspectives of world historians range from postcolonial to the persistently Eurocentric, as Pieterse (2011) summarizes, including crippling blind spots and anti-African perspectives in some pioneering scholars (e.g. Goody (2010)—see Pieterse's discussion: pp. 150–151).

16 Much scholarship has addressed world-system formations in in diverse regions from ancient to modern; see Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997), Frank and Gills (1993), Gills and Thompson (2006).

17 The co-formations of religion, states, and economy deserves more attention than I can give them here. See, for instance, Sen (2003).

18 This analysis confirms Pieterse's (1989) insights into the dialectics of ‘empire and emancipation’. Also see Wertheim (1992).

19 See Hobson's (2007, p. 109) discussion of ‘resource portfolios', similar to Burke's account of “technological complexes'.

20 Some have productively postulated multiple modernities or alternative modernities (Gaonkar, 2001; Goody, 2010; Kamali, 2006). But I am increasingly inclined to think in terms of connected, intensifying processes of ‘modernization’ that ramify distinctively in each site.

21 Here, I sharpen Mann's point about ancient states (Vol 1: 175–176), which he says displayed ‘a dialectic between centralizing and decentralizing forces, powerful imperial states and private-property classes'.

22 Although this account may appear comparable to the ‘selective’ processes that EWP models designate as variation, innovation, and learning, an IIPEC model differs sharply in its attention to geopolitics. As Thompson characterizes it, EWP considers the ‘coevolution of different subsystems of action’ (Thompson, 2001, p. 6), which is at one level akin to my discussion of co-production and co-formation. Yet, as hinted in the seemingly neutral term ‘coevolution’, EWP theories tend to smooth out the uneven, violent field of politics (with some exceptions, e.g. Murphy in Thompson, 262, and despite efforts to encompass critical theoretical perspectives). Theorists speak in terms of the ‘management of global problems', and some tap evolutionary psychologists' data about ‘selection processes' among ‘hominids' that eventually yielded ‘psychological traits that enabled individuals to generate stratification’ (Barkow quoted in Falger, p. 39). Also see note #9 for the ways EWP thinkers perpetuate old vocabularies of racial hierarchy and discourses of primitive versus advanced.

23 On the rise of early woodblock printing and of movable type, including Johannes Gutenberg's exposure to this technology, see Needham & Tsuen-Hsuin (1985, pp. 201–222, 313–319).

24 On coffeehouses, see Maclean (2007a, p. 58). For additional recontextualizations of the ‘modern’ values thought to originate wholly from Anglo-European traditions or character, see Liu (2008) and Clarke (1997) on political ethics borrowed from China in eighteenth-century Europe; see Foley (2009) and Weiss (2011) on Mediterranean contests that catalyzed discourses of rights and freedom; see Anderson (2014) on the Arabic discourse of ‘sovereignty’ promoted during periods of imperial fragmentation; and see Aksan and Goffman's edited collection (2007) on ways that European methods of diplomacy formed via interactions with the Ottoman empire (especially essays by Goffman and Agoston).

Additional information

Laura Doyle is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and co-director of the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP: http://wsipworldstudies.wordpress.com/). She specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to culture, with a focus on transnational, cross-racial, and inter-imperial formations. This essay draws from her current book project, Untold returns. Past publications include Freedom's empire: Race and the rise of the novel in Atlantic modernity, 1640–1940; Bordering on the body: The racial matrix of modern fiction and culture (Perkins Prize); and the edited collections, Bodies of resistance: New phenomenologies of politics, agency, and culture and (with Laura Winkiel) Geomodernisms: Race, modernism, modernity.