The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of Modernity

Abstract

The ascent of the western European powers to global hegemony in the early modern period remains a central problematic in social scientific inquiry. In seeking to comprehend the causes that facilitated the European passage to colonial domination and capitalist modernity, scholars have looked to a series of interdependent institutional and cultural developments that unfolded cumulatively over the long-term, and which issued in greatly enhanced capacities in coercive and productive power. Revisionist scholarship is now challenging this understanding. Dismissing the consensus view as a mirage of "Eurocentric" and "Orientalist" mythologizing, revisionists are insistent that the major societies across Eurasia were all progressing along a comparable course of modernizing development, and that the West's surge to global supremacy was a late and contingent historical outcome. It will be argued here that the revisionist position is both empirically suspect and analytically incoherent. Affirmed in counterpoint are the explanatory principles of path-dependent historical trajectories and the pervasive structural integration of social formations.