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Ruan Wei, Shenzhen University (China)
much the product of a series of other types of capitalisms
and industrializations that had been happening in the worldsystem
for hundreds of years. As is discussed above, due to
parallel access to the latest innovations, the ancient
civilizations shared the technology of iron before and during
the Axial Age. From this follows that the agricultural
surpluses, infrastructures including roads, canals, and
terraced and irrigated fields, handicraft industries,
commerce, credit and overall capital accumulation in the
different regions of the world would for a long time remain at
an equivalent level; and that because of parallel access to the
latest inventions, the different regions far apart from each
other would acquire gun powder, paper, compass, printing
techniques, Arabic numerals, silk, windmill, etc in a
relatively synchronized manner. Most of these inventions
would prove essential elements for the industrial ‘modernity’
we know today.
All in all, before 1800, all the civilizations remained at
roughly the same development level. Given that West Europe
had for hundreds of years progressed in parallel with the
other regions but was the sole place to enjoy proximity with
the Americas, and given that when England was about to
trigger off the Industrial Revolution, coal was luckily located
on the island (Compare the proto-capitalism of China’s Jiang
Nan, which failed to launch its energy-intensive industries in
the 16 th and the 17 th centuries to a great extent because of
unavailability of coal), it is natural that industrial capitalism
could only have occurred first in West Europe rather than
anywhere else, even though for thousands of years there had
been equivalent development and convergences between the
ideas and technologies of the different regions. As we know,
this energy-intensive, labor-saving type of industrial
capitalism or ‘modern’ capitalism released tremendous
productive forces mankind had never seen before. This and
the related developments, like constitutionalism, liberal
democracy and the related ideologies, have long been
regarded as ‘modern’. But these have undoubtedly been built
upon the other regions’ economic and technological
achievements made in the world-system before 1800, as
have been called ‘early modernities’ by academics. Only by
partaking of the capital, technology and knowledge of Asia,
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