THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#18,DEC/2023-FEB/2024
Historians have always been searching for something they
could label as the essence of the past – the principle that held everything
together in the past (or in a part of it) and on the basis of which,
consequently, everything could be understood. — F. R. Ankersmiti[1]
CAPITALISM AND THE INVENTION OF THE WEST
The triumph of the West as a historical system has constituted a nearly incontestable essentialist envelope surrounding Western literature for the past three centuries. The telos of the narrative of the epistemic West is by now so familiar and its logic so compelling that it can be costumed as natural history: “the West” is conceived in a genealogy of civic virtue and moral progress from ancient Athens to twentieth-century America.[2] With the forbearance and confidence of modernists, we have even foresworn malice against those, like Hegel or Marx or Adam Smith in earlier times, who might have presumed to conclude a recitation of the triumph of Western civilization with the flowering of Germany or England. Though a bit shortsighted, they, too, have their place in the West’s chain of being, their honored seats in the pantheon of ontologists.
Of late, however, the once faint and (by consensus) ingrate cries of the detractors of the myth have gained in volume and sophistication. The time when an Ishi might be installed by a proud, benevolent anthropology as a living diorama, a museum factor in some expansive San Francisco warehouse – no doubt in his interior being experiencing the last years of his life in some dreadful nostalgia – is mercifully ending.[3] A naive humanism has been displaced by conscious oppositions. An insurgency has arisen against domination and silence, and it has struck at every cultural and ideological manifestation of the hegemonic myth of the West. To indicate the broad diversity and vigorous authority of the present challenge we need merely to reference Hayden White’s Metahistory, Edward Said’s Orientalism, Michael Taussig’s Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, Gayatri Spivak’s In Other Worlds, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
And when we reflect on the meaning of these “deterritorializations,” critiques, and defections from the Western enterprise of history and its major discursive structures (as Eric Wolf, for one, has done in his Europe and the People Without History), it is difficult to dismiss F. R. Ankersmit’s recent observation that: “For various reasons, we can presume that autumn has come to Western historiography … The history of this appendage of the Eurasian continent is no longer world history … The meta-recits we would like to tell ourselves about our history, the triumph of Reason, the glorious struggle for emancipation of the seventeenth-century workers’ proletariat, are only of local importance and for that reason can no longer be suitable metanarratives.”[4] And with the disintegration of a grand, essentialist tradition of Western perfectibility, it becomes possible to join the practical excavation of subjugated histories to the urgencies they always possessed.
“Capitalist democracy” is one of the most powerful and enduring metanarratives of modern Western historiography. As an ideological formation it has inscribed discursive domains as distinctive as politics and science, policy, and literature.[5] As icon, its aura hovers over our institutions of knowledge and power, suffusing inquiry and decision making with the counterfeit certainties of predestination. Paradoxically, the iconic properties of capitalist democracy remain largely intact despite its disparate hybrid character-grafting discourses of commerce and property to those of moral philosophy, and in contradiction to its empirical inconsistencies. For generations, this condition of overdetermination has been due to the capacity of power to manufacture ideological negations of a more critical representation of the real.[6] More recently this achievement has prospered through technique: the seductions of information and scientific language (methodology). But consistently one of the principal domains of capitalist democracy has been the production of history, the genealogy of the West, its ideological conduit.
However, in the narratives of its victims, namely, those who inhabited the marginalized and not always remote sites of the British Empire or the French or American republics, capitalist democracy often assumed a more problematic and terrifying mien. To cite just a few select paradigmatic instances from a vast assortment of oppositional traditions which have emanated along converging fault lines of historical domination, the horrors of capitalist democracy have been rehearsed in Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. As impressive as has been David Brion Davis’s apologetic trilogy of representations to establish that slavery was some anomalous alien force in the Western experience, its power to dispense comfort is largely a function of the fugitive circumstance of this oppositional literature.[7]
The subjugation of this sustained negation of “the West” was not, however, entirely complete. Because the direct representations of opposition were easily quarantined through the agencies of authorized knowledge,[8] a more subtle subterranean strategy evolved. C. L. R. James, for example, in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and Beyond the Boundary, infiltrated the narrative codes of American and British hegemonic discourse through critiques of Melville’s Moby-Dick and the game of cricket, respectively.[9] A second Black radical intellect who employed this approach (and with greater success) was Oliver Cox. Indeed, Cox was so adept at writing counterfeit Western discourse that it may be most helpful to explore his work in consort with that of a more obvious “outsider,” the Chinese historian Ray Huang.
THE MEANING OF CAPITALISM
Oliver Cromwell Cox and Ray Huang, the principal and secondary exemplars of this paper, would appear at first glance to be a peculiar pairing for the purpose of discussing Western historiography. Cox, a historical sociologist and economist, was born in Trinidad and spent most of his active academic career in America at Black universities.[10] His most familiar work is Caste, Class, and Race, published more than forty years ago (1948). Huang, a professor of history, served for ten years as an officer in the Chinese Nationalist army before being trained and eventually teaching in American universities. Huang collaborated with Joseph Needham on Science and Civilization in China and is himself the author of such works as Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (1972), 1587, A Year of No Significance (1981), and, most recently, China: A Macro History (1988).
Nevertheless, the social experiences and intellectual endeavors of Cox and Huang display several attributes of specific significance for the task of deconstructing Western historiography: uppermost of these are the social, cultural, and ideological actualities that neither Cox nor Huang are Europeans and that both were eventually drawn into metanarratives of the West as framing devices in consequence of their professional and existential pursuits of historical originality. Perhaps of even more direct importance is that they both arrived at a moment in their intellectual development when it became necessary to reconfigure radically the episteme of the West. For our purposes here, it is particularly opportune that, in both instances, they conceptualized this task, in part, as a reconstruction of the origins of modern Western civilization and that independently they imagined that the birth of the West could be traced to the appearance of Venice as the first capitalist empire.
Neither Cox nor Huang had any illusions concerning the paradoxical nature of their chosen mission. For Cox, capitalism, the core of Western identity, had effected a most perverse consequence: Since the age of the discoveries, the world view of all other peoples has been progressively subordinated to the dominant, sophisticated view of Europeans. Hence, to know has generally come to mean knowledge from the European point of view.[11] Huang, recounting the agitated state in which he shared with Needham his own discovery of the relationship between capitalism and the stagnation of technology and science in China, put his dilemma more succinctly: There was no preconceived idea as to whether capitalism is good or bad. Taking a Chinese position, we were on the side on [sic] “nonexistence” to review something that existed.[12] There is a certain irony in Huang’s humility before the West. For at this very moment, concurrent to his research on capitalism, he was embroidering the exquisitely descriptive and proprietary detail which characterizes his treatment of the imperial administration of Wan-li, the late sixteenth-century Ming emperor. An analogous aversion to a Europe-centered organization of knowledge is no less apparent in Cox, whose prodigious erudition propelled him into repeated confrontations with the most influential American and European scholars of his day.
Cox first publicly antagonized the fraternity of authorized knowledge when, in Caste, Class, and Race, he sought to expose the ideological constructs with which “scientific sociology” had inscribed and mystified race discourse. Between the world wars, at Chicago and then Fisk, Robert E. Park, a former publicist and confidant of Booker T. Washington, had established the “caste school of race relations.”[13] Subsidized by foundations such as the Julius Rosenwald Fund, Park’s taxonomy and methodology acquired professional and intellectual authority and political influence. By the mid-1930s, Park, in association with colleagues and former students (Louis Wirth, Lloyd Warner, Charles Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier), dominated the domain of race studies.[14]
In Caste, Class, and Race, Cox challenges Park’s assertion that, in a reiteration of the “immemorial” experience of other societies (from ancient Greece to modern India), American racism resulted from the conflict (“fundamental color antipathies”) between two castes determined by “visible” differences and articulated by custom, mores, and etiquette.[15] Cox, to the contrary, argues that racism was a historically unique phenomenon linked to a “materialistic social fact”: the appearance of capitalism, that is, a social organization dominated by commerce.[16] Cox maintained, for one, that capitalism was “different from any other contemporary or previously existing society”; for another, that it had “developed in Europe exclusively”; and that, finally, “In order that capitalism might exist it must proletarianize the masses of workers.” Racism, Cox insisted, was an inevitable construct of the “ideology and world view” necessary for the desensitizing of the capitalist class: “As far as ideology is concerned, the capitalists proceed in a normal way; that is to say, they develop and exploit ethnocentrism and show by any irrational or logical means available that the working class of their own race or whole peoples of other races, whose labor they are bent upon exploiting, are something apart: a) not human at all, b) only part human, c) inferior humans, and so on … The rationalizations of the exploitative purpose which we know as race prejudice are always couched in terms of the ideology of the age. At first it was mainly religious, then historico-anthropological, then Darwinian-anthropometrical, and today it is sexual, laissez faire, and mystical. The intent of these rationalizations, of course, must always be to elicit a collective feeling of more or less ruthless antagonism against and contempt for the exploited race or class.”[17]
Capitalism and racism were historical concomitants. As the executors of an expansionist world system, capitalists required racism in order to police and rationalize the exploitation of workers.[18] Cox insists that, by ignoring this relationship, those social scientists engaged in the study and eradication of racism could be of little value. They could never comprehend that “the white man’s ideas about his racial superiority … can be corrected only by changing the system itself.”[19] Not surprisingly the book was ignored, or as Herbert Blumer, one of Park’s students, put it: “it was kind of downgraded … sort of minimized.”[20]
There was much in Cox’s treatment of capitalism which drew on Marx. And in an era marked by the appearance of the Cold War, Cox was subjected to a great deal of criticism. For Cox, however, Marx was another dead end in the assault on racism. Eventually, in Capitalism as a System, he expresses his dissatisfaction with Marx by distinguishing his own approach to capitalism on several crucial points. At one point he would declare that Marx “begins his analysis of the nature of capitalism almost where he might have ended it … he relegates as subsidiary the very things which should have been the center of his study.”[21] And emblematic of Marx’s theoretical flaws were his “rigid ideas concerning the role of industrial workers in modern revolutionary movements, and … [his] giving precedence to the more advanced capitalist nations in the succession of socialist revolutions. …”[22]
Cox rejects the “national economy” methodology Marx employed in Capital which presumed an analysis of capitalism could proceed on the premise of “an essentially closed society,” that is, Britain: “… [H]is approach and the particular object of study limited his chances of seeing the capitalist system, as distinguished from the national society, as the crucial entity.”[23] Cox also questioned Marx’s argument that capitalism was founded on “modern technology and industrialism” and that capitalism was the negation of feudalism: “[Marx’s] ‘primitive accumulation’ is none other than fundamentally capitalist accumulation; and, to assume that feudal society dissolved before capitalist society began is to overemphasize the fragility of feudalism and to discount its uses to the development of capitalism.”[24] But perhaps the most profound of Cox’s differences with Marx was the former’s belief that the appearance of capitalism was fortuitous.[25] It was thus in an attempt to comprehend the nature of the “simultaneous” appearances of capitalism and racism that Cox turned to the study of Venetian history.
Cox’s construction of the history of Venice was substantially conceived through a literature inscribed by what is now referred to as “the myth of Venice.” And his account of Venice in The Foundations of Capitalism, largely drawn from many of the most eminent progenitors of that myth, differs little from James Grubb’s recapitulation of that narrative: “[T]he prevailing vision of Venice has been remarkably consistent and persuasive and has been transmitted substantially unaltered in guidebooks and histories since its full articulation in the sixteenth century: a city founded in liberty and never thereafter subjected to foreign domination; a maritime, commercial economy; a unified and civic-minded patriciate, guardian of the common good; a society intensely pious yet ecclesiastically independent; a loyal and contented populace; a constitution constraining disruptive forces in a thousand-year harmony and constancy of purpose; a republic of wisdom and benevolence, provider of fair justice and a high degree of toleration.”[26] This is a Venice which approaches a caricature of history when set against the corruptions detailed in Donald Queller’s The Venetian Patriciate and Robert Finlay’s Politics in Renaissance Venice, or the grasping, tyrannical, and often incompetent and unlucky oligarchy described in John Norwich’s A History of Venice.[27] Venice was an aristocratic state in which (after half a millennium) political instruments were finally incorporated that secured its ruling class from self-destruction.[28]
In contrast to later revisionists, Cox immersed himself in the myth. But his purpose was equally subversive: he employed the narrative of the Venetian miracle to reconstruct a prototype of the capitalist social order from which America acquired its ideological nature and to discover the origins of the capitalist world system whose potentialities were now, he believed, near exhaustion. Cox’s conception of the demise of capitalism involved the occurrence of a radical transformation. This, he felt, was capitalism’s distinctive, characterological mode of historical existence. For unlike the previous great civilizations that had “tended to moulder away,” capitalism would depart from this world as it had entered: “[T]his great cultural development did not begin by adopting the features of ancient Mediterranean civilization. It was something essentially new, worthy of being called an invention-in fact, an innovation in contravention to existing models”.[29]
Cox understood that the social and cultural origins of Venice in the fifth century a.d. were to be traced to the fugitives displaced from the Italian mainland by the successive invasions of Huns, Goths, Lombards, and Franks. Among the refugees was “an extraordinary proportion from the upper classes” as well as the educated and skilled classes.[30] Alienated from their native lands and feudal traditions (“she had no traditionally established form of social organization”), and installed in “an interstitial power zone” between the Eastern Roman Empire and the feudal powers of Lombardy, this exceptional community proceeded to construct a new social order and a new culture and to place them under the charge of a political system consistent with a trade economy.[31]
Dependent upon foreign commerce, with the sea as their only resource, over the generations the Venetian settlers transformed the production and trade of salt into a vast capitalist empire extending from Constantinople to the northern Atlantic. And as Cox painstakingly recounts their cultural and ideological achievements – the republic’s displacement of the tyranny of doges, the renunciation of the hereditary principle, the establishment of elected, accountable leadership, the domination by a capitalist oligarchy of the Great Council, the legislative and administrative bodies, the confluence of free commerce and religious tolerance, the migration of foreign capital and laborers to the metropole – he deliberately draws attention to the inheritance that links Venetian and American history. Early on he postulates that “these two societies are generically related to each other as the infant is to the mature man”.[32] And later, he observes: “Here, then, was presented a situation which later has confronted virtually every leading capitalist nation-even down to the U.S. with its factious liberated colonies and then states’ rights. The Venetian solution has been uniformly followed”.[33]
Cox declares that Venice’s supersession of the Eastern Empire in the thirteenth century signaled that historical moment when the capitalist “culture had become irreversible”.[34] Capitalist culture and the imperialist system that sustained it would subsequently be diffused throughout western Europe. But Cox is just as resolute in suggesting that the certainty which marked the future of capitalism in the thirteenth century was no more real than the contingency that enveloped its birth during the preceding centuries: “As we have attempted to show, there were many chance occurrences leading to the rise of the new form of social organization in Venice. This type of society was not derived logically from conditions following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West … Venice was anomalous. It started with a relatively clean slate-new people, new area, new opportunities for innovation … The Republic did not start by wresting rights from an established ruling power; she had no charter, no merchant guild, no bourgeois revolution, no tyrant.”[35] From the thirteenth century, Venice provided the model of future capitalist societies. And from the fifteenth century, the myth of Venice would occupy a place of privilege in capitalist discourse. And that is what is precisely demonstrated in Huang’s work.
THE VIEW FROM CHINA
Huang, “the outsider,” retrieves the myth of Venice so that he may have a standard by which to dissect the failures of China’s several ruling classes and their dynastic administrations. Approaching the capitalist system from the vantage point of an alternative world system (“Our view of the formation of capitalism in Europe is developed from the standpoint of China”),[36] Huang uses Venice as a model of imperial administration but not merely to expose the incompetencies of China’s dynastic rulers and the malfeasance of their imperial bureaucracies. Much more importantly, Venice was a corroboration, an actual existing social order, that substantiated the cosmological (ideological) structure of Chinese imperial discourse: “All boiled down, capitalism was championed in the West with a degree of sweeping thoroughness akin to what the ancient Chinese writers put down as reaching a state of sincerity from a rectification of the mind, through which one’s self can be cultivated and one’s household unified, and ultimately what is under the heavens put in good order.”[37] Venice was “mathematically manageable,” and its success, the success of capitalism at its earliest stage, stemmed from “the constitutional simplicity of the state, not from its complexities.”[38] This was precisely the contrary to what Huang encounters in his reconstruction of the late Ming dynasty. In Wan-li’s court, ceremony and “pomp and grandeur” had fatally delimited “the number of practical problems that could be perceived, understood, analyzed, and discharged by our literary bureaucracy that governed many millions of peasants.”[39] This devotion to ritual and obsession with form had been China’s legacy for millennia.[40]
But Huang’s own discursive loyalties are revealed in juxtapositions that in Western moral discourse would amount to conceptual dissonance. From the vantage point of Chinese imperialist discourse – which for instance might have to accommodate the recurrence of emperors dominated by eunuch “secretaries” or their own secret services.[41] Huang apparently experienced no discomfort in characterizing Venice as a democracy and a police state: “Venice’s kind of democracy had not been installed to effect democracy for its own sake. It only happened that by maintaining a monolithic order, everything was mathematically manageable.”[42] Even Frederic Lane, the “doge” of American historians of Venice and a principal proponent of the myth of Venice, took pains to distinguish the aristocratic republicanism of the city-state from the more democratic Florence.[43]
Huang is drawn to Venice “as an essential clue to our understanding of contemporary China”[44] because of his own ideological location in an imperialist world-system discourse. For Huang, as the histories of Venice, the Dutch Republic, and England demonstrated, “the West” had achieved a different “organizational order” characterized by a linear progression grounded on the nature of capitalism (wide extension of credit, impersonal management, the pooling of service facilities, the inviolability of property rights, and the domination of public life by private capital).[45] And those nations that had assimilated the “organizational principle of commerce” were destined to expose the superfluous mathematics that had informed Chinese administrative and political thought.[46] That confrontation of the two organizational orders was initiated during the nineteenth century.
CONCLUSION
Huang was persuaded that commerce was the most perfect principle upon which to base the rational administration of a massive social formation. The “organizational principle of commerce” could bring mathematical manageability to any nation, whether capitalist or socialist. On that score, Huang had every reason to be confident of an accord with Marx.[47] Huang believed that capitalism was a device for state management; Cox, on the other hand, comprehended that the state had been in the service of capitalism. Finally, Cox perceived in capitalism a world system incapable of overcoming its ideological needs; for him the principle of commerce logically led not to order but to exploitation and racism.[48] The important differences between Cox and Huang are not in respect to their reconstructions of Venice nor the formative development of capitalism, but in interpretation. They differ because Huang was embedded in a world system discourse – albeit an alternative world system – and pursued its corrective in a more rational domain.
Cox struggled against such a discourse, confident of its repressive historical consequences (“the leadership of the system … is still able to inflict appalling punishment upon any backward nation seeking to withdraw from the system”).[49] and its seductive ideological tropes (“We may eliminate, as a matter of primary consideration, discontent among workers in the advanced countries. By and large, organized labor in the leading capitalist nations has been pro-capitalist; according to its continuous preachments, the ‘slaves’ reside in socialist countries”.[50]) The critical dialectic was the world-systemic character of capitalism. The transformation would proceed from the system’s periphery, the “satellite” nations, not from its stagnant metropoles. Ironically, then, it is Cox rather than Huang (or critics of capitalism like Marx or Wallerstein[51]) who may be more properly characterized as the “outsider.”
*originally published as “Oliver Cromwell Cox and the Historiography of the West”, excerpted from Cedric J. Robinson, Racial Capitalism, Black Internationalism and Cultures of Resistance, (London: Pluto Press, 2019) pp.75-86.
[1] F. R. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” History and Theory, XXVIII, No. 2 (1989) p.148.
[2] The most recent casting of this mythical system has been conveniently abbreviated by Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) p.5: We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there 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 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 U.S., embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
[3] See Theodora Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
[4] Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” pp.149–150.
[5] See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
[6] Eric Cheyfitz, “Tarzan of the Apes: US Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century,” American Literary History, I, No. 2 (Summer 1989) pp. 339–360.
[7] In his most recent work, Davis has completed his exoneration of “the West” (begun with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966] and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975]) from responsibility for slavery by the transfer of the origins of white racism to Islam: “Ironically, by enslaving or converting so many blacks and by imposing a barrier to Europe’s direct knowledge of sub-Saharan Africa, Muslims contributed to Christian ignorance, mythology, and the tendency to identify blacks with Christianity’s mortal and ‘infidel’ enemy” (David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], p.39). This in no way accounts for intra-European racism; cf. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983), and Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (Berkeley: University of California, 1975).
[8] As an example, I refer you to the treatment of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); see Cedric J. Robinson, “Capitalism, Slavery and Bourgeois Historiography,” History Workshop 23 (Spring 1987) pp.122–140.
[9] Earlier, and in his first subversion, James’s target had been the Eurocentrism of Marxism; see his Black Jacobins (New York: Dial Press, 1938).
[10] After obtaining his doctorate (University of Chicago, 1938), Cox received appointments at Wiley (1938–1944), Tuskegee (1944–1949), Lincoln (1949–1970), and Wayne State (1970–1974). See the excellent introduction in Race, Class, and the World System: The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox, ed. Herbert H. Hunter and Sameer Y. Abraham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).
[11] Oliver C. Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959) p.19.
[12] . Ray Huang, “The Rise of Capitalism in Venice, the Dutch Republic, and England: A Chronological Sketch,” Chinese Studies in History, XX, No. I (Fall 1986) p.10.
[13] Hunter and Abraham, Race, Class, and the World System, xxxiv; and Louis Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp.290–291.
[14] Butler Jones, “The Tradition of Sociology Teaching in Black Colleges: The Unheralded Professionals,” in Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, James Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, eds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) pp.121–163.
[15] Robert E. Park, “The Nature of Race Relations,” in Race Relations and the Race Problem, A Definition and an Analysis, ed. Edgar T. Thompson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1939).
[16] Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism, p.15: As a form of social organization, capitalism is constituted elementally by a peculiar economic order, government, and religious structure; and these, although mutually indispensable, are yet related to each other in descending order of importance. Economically, capitalism tends to form a system or network of national and territorial units bound together by commercial and exploitative relationships in such a way that a capitalist nation is inconceivable outside this capitalist system.
[17] Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970) pp.485–488.
[18] Hunter and Abraham give Cox the credit for the development of the world-system perspective: “… in arguing that for a capitalist nation to dominate in the world capitalist system it had to maintain uneven patterns of development, Cox was introducing a world-system perspective that predated by at least a decade the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers” (“Introduction,” Race, Class, and the World System, xxviii). Cox seems to have formed the idea from his readings of Paul Sweezy and Leon Trotsky; see Caste, Class, and Race, pp.197, 201.
[19] Cox, Caste, Class, and Race, p.462.
[20] Hunter and Abraham, “Introduction,” Race, Class, and the World System, XXXV.
[21] Cox, Capitalism as a System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), pp.213–214.
[22] Ibid., p.218.
[23] Ibid., p.214.
[24] Ibid.
[25] For a treatment of Cox and Marxism, see Hunter and Abraham, “Introduction,” Race, Class, and the World System, pp. xxxix–xlv.
[26] James Grubb, “When Myths Lose Power: Four Decades of Venetian Historiography,” Journal of Modern History 58 (March 1986) pp.43–44.
[27] Queller concludes: “We are burdened with the myth of the Venetian patriciate, in part, because sycophantic fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists, for whom, in any case, style was more important than truth, sought to win by flattery rewards that they professed could be gained in Venice only by virtue” (The Venetian Patriciate: Reality Versus Myth) [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986], p.249).
[28] I refer to the dosing (the Serrata) of the Great Council in 1297, “the most crucial event in Venetian political history,” according to Robert Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980) p.41. See also Stanley Chojnacki, “In Search of the Venetian Patriciate: Families and Factions in the Fourteenth Century,” in Renaissance Venice, J. R. Hale, ed. (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973) pp.47–90.
[29] Cox, The Foundations of Capitalism, p.14.
[30] Cox, p.31.
[31] Ibid., p.32-42.
[32] Ibid., p.16.
[33] Ibid., p.39.
[34] Ibid., p.126.
[35] Cox, pp.122-123.
[36] Huang, “Rise of Capitalism in Venice,” p.17.
[37] Ibid., pp.16–17.
[38] Ibid., p.25.
[39] Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p.3.
[40] Huang, China: A Macro History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), p.16.
[41] Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance, p.21ff.
[42] Huang, “Rise of Capitalism in Venice,” p.23.
[43] Frederic C. Lane, “The Roots of Republicanism,” in Venice and History: The Collected Papers of Frederic Lane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p.530. Lane, it might be noted, was well aware of Cox’s work, viz. his “Recent Studies on the Economic History of Venice,” Journal of Economic History XXIII, No. 3 (September 1963): p.312, n. 23, where he comments: “As the birthplace of capitalism, Venice has been assigned a leading role in a semi-Marxist scheme of world history.”
[44] Huang, China, p.243.
[45] Huang, “Rise of Capitalism in Venice,” p.32.
[46] Ibid., p.3, “When we turn to the pages of the ‘Food and Money Monographs’ of the Twenty-four Dynastic Histories, we shall run into accounts that the empire builders initiated schematic designs reminiscent of the Rituals of the Zhou to bring a civilian population in the hundreds of millions as well as military personnel in line. The device started from a mathematic formula with ideal perfection, which, of course, in no way corresponded to the actual conditions in the field.”
[47] Cf. Alvin Gouldner, chapter 5, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1980).
[48] Marxists continue to dispute this: “The first point about capitalism is that it is uniquely indifferent to the social identities of the people it exploits … There is a positive tendency in capitalism to undermine such differences, and even to dilute identities like gender or race” (Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism and Human Emancipation,” New Left Review 167 January– February 1988, pp.5–6).
[49] Cox, Capitalism as a System, pp.240–241.
[50] Ibid., p.239.
[51] . Cf. Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93, No. 4 (October 1988) pp.829–872.
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