[P2P-F] Fwd: [gang8] The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.pdf

Sun Sep 11 12:25:41 CEST 2011

this review is really interesting:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 1:50 AM
Subject: Fwd: [gang8] The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.pdf
To: econowmix at googlegroups.com

"Hobson’s book propels the hitherto marginalised
Eastern peoples to the forefront of the story of progress in world
history."

http://www.bandung2.co.uk/books/Files/Education/The%20Eastern%20Origins%20of%20Western%20Civilization.pdf

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arno
Date: Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 7:13 PM
Subject: [gang8] The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.pdf
To: "gang8 at yahoogroups.com" <gang8 at yahoogroups.com>,

**

Mr. Meakin,

This must be a nice teaser - for you especially, not ?
;-)
Here is a link to the whole book.

http://www.bandung2.co.uk/books/Files/Education/The%20Eastern%20Origins%20of%20Western%20Civilization.pdfEnjoy!
Arno

And below is an review.

My premimilary comment would first be that the concluding sections
reference to the
Western scientific reductionism indirectly points to the Western
non-reductionist traditions.

Secondly, the Western "universal values" of freedom, democracy,  rule
of law and free trade seems to me to be more than mythology.
They may well have mascaraded an imperial pursuit, but that does not
preclude their intrinsic values
- both for the individual and as economic forces as such
- for instance regarding anti corruptionary checks and balances, and
as forgers of innovation.

Best wishes!
Arno

http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t243048.html****

http://epublications.bond.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1098&context=cm&sei-redir=1#search=%22eastern%20origins%20western%20civilization%20mandala%22**

Review of John M. Hobson The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,
N.Y., Cambridge University Press, 2004, reviewed by Reg Little.

Are we about to return to a global order similar to that which existed for
most of the past two millennia, when Chinese civilization led the world -
 administratively, economically, technologically and medically? Is it
possible that Confucian-Daoist, rather than Judeo-Christian, cultural
norms will prove best suited to overseeing a global knowledge economy?

In other words, will the period of Western leadership - or, more
accurately of Anglo-American empire - prove to be but a brief 200 year
historical interlude before China returns to a more traditional role? Is
 China likely to be again at the centre of the global trading system?
Will China again produce an array of high quality products that Europe
and America struggle to pay for through the value of their own
production"? Will the West's universal values - democracy, rule of law
and free trade - come to be seen as little more than the opportunistic,
and rather hypocritical, inventions of a past imperial order?

John M. Hobson's The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization offers many
reasons, which are only marginally related to the contemporary rise of
China and East Asia, to ask these questions. Simply put, history as it
has been understood in the West has largely been a political invention.

Andre Gunder Frank's 1998 publication, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian
Age, which preceded Hobson's work by six years, sums up a variety of
evidence, including the path-breaking work of a Japanese researcher, in
the following terms:

Thus, we can and should make an even stronger case than Hama$hita does:
the entire world economic order was -
 literally - Sinocentric. Christopher Colombus and after him many
Europeans up until Adam Smith knew that. It was only the
nineteenth-century Europeans who literally rewrote this history from
their new Eurocentric perspective. As Braudel observed, Europe invented
historians and then put them to good use in their own interests and not
those of historical accuracy or objectivity.

The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization complements and builds on
the insights of Frank,
 Braudel and others to illustrate in great detail both how substantial
China's historical achievement has been and how much the West has
distorted history to serve the purpose of its imperial civilizing
mission:

.....the Enlightenment was 'schizophrenic'. For its
greatest paradox was that while it borrowed and assimilated Eastern
(mainly Chinese) ideas these were then crafted into a body of knowledge
that imagined the East as uncivilized and, in turn, led on to the
imperial civilizing mission and the repression of the East.....

The discourse created (largely unwittingly) a kind of intellectual
apartheid regime in which the West was fundamentally segregated from the
 East by an imaginary borderline that stretched back in time to Ancient
Greece.

John Hobson's work is important because the West's
deliberately distorted understanding of history and civilization may now
 play a role in its own marginalisation. How well placed are Western
nations to adjust to a genuine cultural renaissance in the
Confucian-Daoist world of East Asia?

At almost all times in recent millennia China has had more people
organized in one coherent,
administrative order than any other political entity. Hobson shows how
only in recent centuries has the West produced the wealth necessary to
trade seriously with China. It was the later discovery of precious
metals in the Americas by Europe that provided the West with sufficient
wealth to begin to trade seriously with China. Indeed, without the
formal institutional structures that are now seen as essential to
international commerce, China was central to a global trading system
that serviced large areas of the world until the early decades of the
19th century.

While the European Enlightenment, as well as the
European industrial and agricultural revolutions, learnt much from the
Chinese example prior to the 19th Century, over the past two hundred
years the imperial civilizing mission has ensured that many of the more
profound aspects of Chinese civilization were, and continue to be,
poorly understood in the West. The past two hundred years of vast
material power in the West may come to be seen as a period also of
tragic lost opportunity

Many Chinese innovations and ideas, such
as examinations and bureaucracy, were absorbed and legitimised before
the 19th Century and became a tool for extending empire. What failed to
make it in time was put beyond the reach of self-respecting, mainstream
society and institutions. All recognition of Asia's contribution to
Europe's transformation was constrained by the imperial civilizing
mission's intellectual apartheid, which effectively ruled further
intellectual exploration and discovery attributed to Asian sources to be
 politically incorrect. In a very important sense, this has led to the
failure of the European Enlightenment, condemning it to forms of
knowledge, science, industry and medicine that are beginning to prove
both uncompetitive and unsustainable.

The Eastern Origins of
Western Civilization suggests both the brilliance and limits of the
achievement of the Enlightenment. This work, which could almost be
described as a chronicle of the persuasiveness and perfidy of European,
or more accurately of Anglo-American, historians, clearly identifies
19th Century Britain as a 'newly industrializing country' or a 'late
developer'. A chapter titled: 'The Chinese origins of British
industrialization: Britain as a derivative late developer, 1700-1846'
concludes with the words:

In short, my
global-historical-cumulative perspective of industrialization suggests
that the conventional emphasis on the British industrial revolution as
the place where, to quote Rostow, 'it all began', can now be seen as the
 product of a parochial Eurocentric mindset. We could, therefore, do
little better than close with the words of Eric Jones:

Once upon a
 time it seemed we had a definite event to learn about. Growth began
with an industrial revolution in late eighteenth century Britain. Now we
 know quite surely that the event was really a process, smaller, far
less British (and far more Eastern), infinitely less abrupt, part of a
(world-historical) continuum, taking much more time to run.

The
above passages from Hobson's work more or less sum up his conclusions
and sketch out some of their implications. Hobson has, however, explored
 in considerable detail the past fifteen hundred years. He shows the
East as the early developer in a comparatively benign oriental
globalization from 500 to 1800, the invention of Christendom as a
medieval, reactive European response, and the mythology of the Europe's
civilizing, universal values as little more than a necessary invention
to market the West's determined imperial strategies.

Hobson does
not deny the remarkable character of this achievement but no more does
he pull his punches in describing a British imperial project built on
national protectionism, regressive taxation, interventionism, despotism
and militarism. This leads up to a passage headed 'Racism,
Industrialization and the moral contradiction of the British Imperial
civilizing mission', which is followed by other headings such as 'The
contradictions of imperial free trade: containment verses cultural
conversion' and 'Racism and the commodification of the East: the
Afro-Asian origins of British industrialization'. The latter explains
the critical role of the slave trade and the empire's slave labour
plantations in generating further wealth and capital resources that led
on to advances in Asia.

Of course, it would be naïve to indulge
for a moment the thought that a grand empire could be built through the
enlightenment of other people with democracy, the rule of law and free
trade. Hobson does not make the case that the British empire was
bloodier or more brutal than other empires. He does remind us, however,
that it is the victors who get to write history and that that history is
 valid only so long as they remain victors.

With this in mind the
 timing the work of Hobson, and before him Frank, takes on its true
importance. After only a few years of the third millennium, a growing
body of evidence suggests that the leader of the West, and contemporary
globalism or Anglo-American empire, the United States, is under mounting
 challenge from East Asia in general and from China in particular. An
abstract of an article in the July-August 2004 edition of the
authoritative American policy journal, Foreign Affairs by James F Hoge
and titled "A Global Power Shift in the Making" reads:

The
transfer of power from West to East is gathering pace and will
dramatically change the context for dealing with international
challenges. Many in the West are already aware of Asia's growing
strength. This awareness, however has not yet translated into
preparedness.

Articles in the January-February 2005 Foreign
Policy and the 24 February 2005 British Financial Times and books like
Oded Shenkar's The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and its
Impact on the Global Economy The Balance of Power and Your Job and Ted C
 Fishman's China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges
America and the World, together with many others, have all explored
related themes and reflect a growing preoccupation with this concern and
 an intensifying debate about responses to such a challenge. Moreover,
Joshua Cooper Ramo has written a paper titled The Beijing Consensus,
which highlights the fact that China is taking a path that makes it an
attractive alternative leader for developing economies that have become
disillusioned with the exploitative economic doctrines of the Washington
 Consensus.

Hobson's work is valuable because it provides a
timely reminder that there is nothing exotic or threatening about a
world where China resides in 'inscrutable' authority at the centre.
That, in fact, has been the reality for much of humanity's recorded
history. The inscrutability has largely been a product of Anglo-American
 imperial disinformation and intellectual apartheid. In reality, the
universal values - democracy, the rule of law, free trade - that have
been marketed to the global community in recent decades are simply the
political tools of an Anglo-American empire that is now threatened with
decline after two hundred years of inventive expansion. The viability of
 such universal values remains dependent on the continuing authority of
Anglo-American leadership.

Hobson's concluding passages, titled
'The oriental West verses the Eurocentric myth of the West', poses the
dilemma now confronting the West generally and Anglo-American empire in
particular. The mythologies that are powerful weapons in the
construction of an empire and its foundation beliefs also can become a
source of vulnerability when history moves on and exposes the true
character of those mythologies. Today, every time a serious commentator,
 like James F Hoge, raises questions about a major shift of power from
the West to Asia, it should be understood immediately that this should
also be an exploration of whether this goes beyond a simple shift in
economic and political power. Does it foreshadow also a fundamental
shift in dominant perceptions of mythological constructs, historical
truth, cultural values and even scientific paradigms?

Although
Hobson does not directly address the issue, a return of the centre of
the global trading system to China and East Asia might well involve a
shift from the West's mechanical and reductionist sciences, which have
so ravaged physical and human ecologies, to the East's more organic and
holistic approach to science, which after all led the world prior to the
 19th Century. Hobson's illuminating review of history does, however,
remind the reader that the Anglo-American empire was constructed, like
most earlier empires, on an aggressive spirit of conquest, over both
humanity and nature. It also reminds us of the fact that China preserved
 a position at the centre of a global trading system for a long period,
without the free trade subversions and assertions of the Opium Wars with
 which Britain undermined China's then political order.

Reflections
 of this character are prompted by Hobson's revelations, even though
they go beyond the scope of his book. The true value of The Eastern
Origins of Western Civilization resides in its capacity to reveal the
manner in which politically expedient mythology has distorted Western
understanding of both history and culture. There will be a need for many
 more such exploratory books, if Western peoples and governments are not
 to totally misunderstand processes at work in today's global community
and are not to allow sheer ignorance to disadvantage and harm them in
times of difficult, but perhaps healthy, transition. After all, prior to
 the British use of the opium trade to undermine traditional authority,
Chinese thought and behaviour had been characterised for more than a
thousand years by a profound search for a disciplined, balanced,
peaceful sense of political and human order. Indeed, for more than half
of the past seven hundred years Chinese civilization was able to evolve,
 prosper and grow ever more resilient under foreign rulers - first the
Mongols and then the Manchu.

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