Can anyone recommend books with similar analysis about other non western societies? Anything from bronze age, Roman empire or its contemporaries in Africa and Asia, for example. I suppose there's not enough written material from America, unfortunately.
What van Bavel proposes seems to be like textbook Statecraftism to me (a bourgeois theory of History which states History is the struggle between the oppressive State against the free Individual; very popular in modern-day Economic History). The only difference I see is the level of sophistication: he mixes Statecraftism (which is a sinoidal, cyclical concept of time) with parallel and comparative History (fragmented concept of time).
It is important to highlight that feudalism initially broke down due to the colonial system, where chattel slavery was the dominant mode of freedom of movement. Wage labor was a much later development in capitalism, some two centuries later. So freedom of movement started only as freedom of movement for the capitalists, not the workers.
History is at the same crossroads as particle Physics: historians are paying too much attention to beautiful and metaphysical models of temporality and creative editing of sources in order to produce a technically correct, but useless, inobservable or even pseudoscientific work of History. In History, it is not enough to produce a beautiful piece of literature; you have to produce a piece of literature that fits and explains all the observations.
My advice to Mr. van Bavel is if he wants to explain the present-day decline of the West, describe it -- don't open huge and random holes in History (and, therefore, temporality), which looks more like divination than History.
Great review, I will definitely check this one out. I'm in the middle of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow right now and it seems like many people (myself included) could benefit from a less Euro-centric view of history. I have had many conversations with friends who didn't believe certain political, economic, or social arrangements were possible, only for me to learn later that those arrangements have been implemented successfully in some societies or circumstances. It really dampens the imagination and limits the possibility of your world to only understand a "Western" view of history and society.
Perhaps if he had chosen China (Tang through Song together cover around the same period he assigns to Iraq) that would suggest a cyclical model that would even extend to 20th and 21st centuries (and point a warning figure at the overconfidence of the current Chinese government)
Can anyone recommend books with similar analysis about other non western societies? Anything from bronze age, Roman empire or its contemporaries in Africa and Asia, for example. I suppose there's not enough written material from America, unfortunately.
A similar thesis was proposed by two Canadian authors some time ago:
Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler - Capital as Power A Study of Order and Creorder
What van Bavel proposes seems to be like textbook Statecraftism to me (a bourgeois theory of History which states History is the struggle between the oppressive State against the free Individual; very popular in modern-day Economic History). The only difference I see is the level of sophistication: he mixes Statecraftism (which is a sinoidal, cyclical concept of time) with parallel and comparative History (fragmented concept of time).
It is important to highlight that feudalism initially broke down due to the colonial system, where chattel slavery was the dominant mode of freedom of movement. Wage labor was a much later development in capitalism, some two centuries later. So freedom of movement started only as freedom of movement for the capitalists, not the workers.
History is at the same crossroads as particle Physics: historians are paying too much attention to beautiful and metaphysical models of temporality and creative editing of sources in order to produce a technically correct, but useless, inobservable or even pseudoscientific work of History. In History, it is not enough to produce a beautiful piece of literature; you have to produce a piece of literature that fits and explains all the observations.
My advice to Mr. van Bavel is if he wants to explain the present-day decline of the West, describe it -- don't open huge and random holes in History (and, therefore, temporality), which looks more like divination than History.
Great review, I will definitely check this one out. I'm in the middle of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow right now and it seems like many people (myself included) could benefit from a less Euro-centric view of history. I have had many conversations with friends who didn't believe certain political, economic, or social arrangements were possible, only for me to learn later that those arrangements have been implemented successfully in some societies or circumstances. It really dampens the imagination and limits the possibility of your world to only understand a "Western" view of history and society.
Great review. Looking forward to reading the book.
Thanks for the tip. I am eager to read it.
Perhaps if he had chosen China (Tang through Song together cover around the same period he assigns to Iraq) that would suggest a cyclical model that would even extend to 20th and 21st centuries (and point a warning figure at the overconfidence of the current Chinese government)