Before European Hegemony：The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (1989)

472 Pages·1989·25.015 MB·English

by  Abu-Lughod, Janet

NADMAN BQ
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY AT CLAREMONT
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ee Janet L. Abu-Lughod
The Library
of
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Before European Hegemony
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BEFORE
EUROPEAN
HEGEMONY
The World System A.D. 1250-1350
JANET L. ABU-LUGHOD
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Theclogy Library
CLAREMONT
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY.
Claremont, CA
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
First published in 1989 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1991
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abu-lughod, Janet L.
Before European hegemony: the world system A.D. 1250-1350
Janet L. Abu-lughod.
p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-505886-0
ISBN 0-19-506774-6 (pbk)
1, Economic history—Medieval, 500-1500.
2. International trade—History.
3. Cities and towns, Medieval.
I. Title.
HC41.A28 1989 330.94'017—dcl9 88-25580
6897
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To the memory of my parents
who encouraged in me
an insatiable curiosity
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Preface
In his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn sug-
gests that one of the major ways in which theoretical paradigms
about the world change is through the accumulation of anomalies—
that is, observations and pieces of data that do not ‘“‘fit into” ex-
isting theories and generalizations or cannot be accounted for by
existing paradigms. The Kuhnian position, however, stresses dis-
coveries in the “real world” that force a rethinking of approaches.
This reveals the basic positivism of his assumptions; such a position
can be taken only if one believes in some Platonic ideal of ‘“‘real
truth.”
This book begins from a somewhat different premise. Particu-
larly in the social and cultural sciences, anomalous findings can
arise from what is in the observer, as well as what is to be observed.
This more relativistic view assumes that scientific knowledge is
socially constructed. If knowledge is not some disembodied prod-
uct isomorphic with the world but rather is produced through col-
lective definition, that is, it represents a transient human
“consensus about the world,” then it follows that not only new
pieces of information but new vantage points from which to observe
existing ones can produce paradigmatic revolutions.
Several recent transformations in sociohistorical work have
forced reformulations of prior knowledge. Some have arisen from
new facts, but most have been made possible by changes in the
identities of knowers or have derived from changes in ways of
knowing. Let me single out a few.
viii Preface
First, certainly not unprecedented but always productive are
works that cut across disciplines—combining economics, politics,
sociology, and history. Each discipline has its own traditional per-
spective, which means that observers from various disciplines view
the same “real world” somewhat differently. Original insights are
often possible when scholars risk crossing disciplinary lines: one
thinks, inter alia, of the incursions of anthropologist Eric Wolf and
sociologists such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-
Dunn into history, of historians such as Fernand Braudel and Philip
Curtin into economics, or of the interdisciplinary blending so ev-
ident in the work of Charles Tilly, Perry Anderson, and Eric Hobs-
bawm. Granted, this is perilous, and yet there may be no gain
without risk.
My own background straddles many disciplines, because I have
accumulated disciplines as I found them interesting. I began as an
American urban sociologist/demographer/planner, studied eco-
nomic and ‘‘development” planning, did work that was later de-
fined as geography, was impelled to learn Middle Eastern history
and culture when I lived and worked in Egypt, and, in time, ex-
panded those interests to other parts of the Third World. Each
disciplinary and geographic shift increased my understanding, al-
beit at the cost of becoming marginal to mainstream American
sociology whose parochial boundaries have only recently expanded
to encourage a broader, more historical and comparative
perspective.
A second new way of viewing has come from the revisionist
work being done in many fields of history and social science by
scholars from outside the western world. There is no part of the
so-called “Third World” in which the received wisdom of ethno-
centric western scholarship has not been called into question by
“subalterns” (as they are called in Indian historiography) who find
in their own histories not the stasis of tradition but the dynamics
of orthogenic change, not the backwardness vis-a-vis the west,
assumed so off-handedly in much western scholarship, but the
development of underdevelopment through subordination. It is no
small challenge to cross the battlefields that now lie between re-
ceived wisdom and subaltern challenge, and yet some new “truth”
may come from a perspective that incorporates the interpretations