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Ruan Wei, Shenzhen University (China)
China or India, rather than in West Europe. In other words,
the advantages enjoyed so far by the West are accidental,
having nothing to do with ‘culture’, let alone race.
Frank’s approach is complementary to Pomeranz’s but is
even more macro-historical. He argues from the assumption
that Europe's success was nothing unique; it had been the
lesser compared with the other players in economy,
technology, and industry until about 1800. To Frank, from
1500 BC to 1800, China, India, South-East Asia, and the
Middle East were the main players of the global trade; these
regions had better infrastructure in roads, bridges, canals,
river and ocean transportation, greater industrial and
commercial enterprises, more advanced technology, more
efficient government, more sophisticated arts, literatures,
philosophies and music styles than Europe. Of great
importance is the fact that silver the Europeans obtained
from the New World (and the wealth accumulated from the
slave trade) played a key role in helping Europe develop
industrial capitalism so as to become a major player in the
global trade. Because silver gave it the purchasing power to
buy Chinese silks, tea, porcelain and other products, and to
buy Indian cotton textiles and South-East Asian spices and
gems. Silver was in fact an important contributor in West
Europe’s industrialization.
Yet the question still remains: why has that parallelism,
which threatens the very validity of the modernity discourse,
been possible?
To answer it we should remember that, initially, there was
no equivalent development whatsoever between Europe and
the other regions. In fact, when the Egyptian and Sumerian
civilizations emerged around 3000 BC, its European
counterpart was nowhere to be seen. Europe at the time was
miserably confined to the periphery. It had to wait for
twenty-five hundred years before finally coming up with
something comparable: the Classical Greek Civilization. This
civilization coincided in time with the Syriac Civilization in
the Levant, and Sinic and Indic Civilizations in East and
South Asia. Only from now on could we talk about parallel
progresses of the civilizations (In so doing, we skip the
Neolithic and Bronze Ages, historical periods which feature
uneven development between the various regions, yet all
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