Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350

Citation

Abu-Lughod, J. L. (1991). Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book has fourteen chapters and runs to about 370 pages of text (443 pages in all, with a bibliography and index, in the first printing of 1989). It is a reinterpretation of global economic history. According to the publisher, Abu-Lughod argues that the modern world economy has its roots in the thirteenth century rather than the sixteenth, in a system quite unlike the European one that later emerged from it; she uses the city as her unit of analysis, traces a system that at its peak in the early fourteenth century stretched from north-west Europe to China, and explains its decay and the rise of European hegemony. The chapters move geographically from Europe, across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, to China, and then back to the system as a whole.

Chapters 1–2: Studying a System in Formation; Emergence from Old Empires

The first chapter (pages 3–40) sets out the problem and the approach, and includes a map of the system. The review by Scott Bailey in World History Connected notes that it divides the system into eight overlapping circuits of trade, grouped into three larger units: Western Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. Chapter 2 (pages 43–49) is a short chapter on the emergence of the system from the older empires.

Chapters 3–5: The European Subsystem

"The Cities of the Champagne Fairs", "Bruges and Ghent: Commercial and Industrial Cities of Flanders" and "The Merchant Mariners of Genoa and Venice" cover the western end of the system through its fairs, its textile cities and its Mediterranean sea powers.

Chapters 6–7: The Routes East

"The Three Routes to the East" (pages 137–151) and "The Mongols and the Northeast Passage" (153–184) turn to the connections between Europe and Asia. Bailey notes that the book devotes a lot of attention to the Mongols' contribution to this world system.

Chapters 8–9: The Middle East

"Sindbad's Way: Baghdad and the Persian Gulf" and "Cairo's Monopoly under the Slave Sultanate" treat the Middle East, which Bailey describes as the crucial conduit linking the two ends of the system.

Chapters 10–13: The Indian Ocean and China

"The Indian Ocean System: Divided Into Three Parts", "The Indian Subcontinent: On the Way to Everywhere", "The Strait and Narrow" and "All the Silks of China" carry the account through India, the Strait of Malacca and China.

Chapter 14: Restructuring the Thirteenth-Century World System

The last chapter (pages 352–373) returns to the system as a whole. In Bailey's summary, the decline of the system is tied to the drop in Eurasian population from plague and other epidemics and to the Mongol loss of China in 1368, and Abu-Lughod finds no "inherent historical necessity" that Europe would later achieve hegemony.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2: The System

• World system: a set of interlinked trading regions treated as one economy; Abu-Lughod offers a thirteenth-century example earlier than the sixteenth-century one associated with Immanuel Wallerstein.
• Cities as units of analysis: the publisher's description names the city as the working unit.

Chapters 3–13: The Circuits

• Subsystems and circuits: the European, Middle Eastern and Asian parts of the system and the overlapping circuits within them.
• Strategic locations: Bailey reports Abu-Lughod's finding that external geopolitical factors decide whether a location is strategic for world trade, as with Flanders, Cairo and the Strait of Malacca.

Chapter 14: Decline

• Hegemony without necessity: the argument that European dominance was not inevitable and followed the breakdown of the earlier system.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A different starting point for world history. The publisher calls it a groundbreaking reinterpretation. Bailey writes that the book has earned a place in the canon of world history and is eminently readable and intellectually provocative.
• A corrective to Eurocentrism. Bailey says it answers the charge that world-systems analysis is Eurocentric, by stressing European backwardness and the relative scientific, cultural and financial sophistication of non-Christian and Asian populations.
• Chapters organised by place. The contents move step by step across the system, from the Champagne fairs to the silk of China, so a reader can study one region on its own.

Limitations

• Gaps in coverage. Bailey observes that the East African Swahili coast and the West African state of Mali are absent from the system as drawn.
• Evidence and emphasis. Bailey notes criticism of the lack of statistical evidence on trade, which he thinks the extensive bibliography of secondary sources answers in part, and that, as in most world-systems work, economics carries much of the explanatory weight.
• Date. The book was first published in 1989, and later work on Eurasian and Indian Ocean history is not included.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the world and global history list, Abu-Lughod is a graduate-level monograph on a specific system, whereas most other titles are surveys. Sebastian Conrad's What Is Global History? is a short introduction to the approach and is the place to start for the method. David Christian's Maps of Time is a big-history survey, and the textbooks (The Earth and Its Peoples, Traditions & Encounters, Ways of the World and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart) give chronological context for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Jürgen Osterhammel's The Transformation of the World is another large, comparative, thematic work, set in the nineteenth century. Read together, they give a pre-modern and a nineteenth-century view of global integration. James Gelvin's The Modern Middle East starts several centuries after Abu-Lughod's period.

How to Use This Book

The book is for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in history, sociology or economics who know the outline of medieval world history and the idea of a world system. Familiarity with Wallerstein helps, though Bailey's review shows that the book can be read as a challenge to him.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapter 1 for the argument and the map, and Chapter 14 for the conclusion.
• Regional chapters: read chapters 3–5 (Europe), 8–9 (Middle East) and 10–13 (Indian Ocean and China) according to the course's emphasis, with the Mongol chapter (7) for the link between them.
• Reading actively: for each region, note what makes its cities strategic, then compare with the next.

Keep a map of the circuits beside you, and compare the book with a more recent account of Eurasian trade.