ReORIENT: FROM THE CENTRALITY OF CENTRAL ASIA

TO MIDDLE KINGDOM CHINA'S

by

ANDRE GUNDER FRANK

University of Toronto

96 Asquith Ave. Toronto, Ont. Canada M4W 1J8

Tel:416-972 0616 Fax:416-972 0071

e-mail: agfrank@chass.utoronto.ca

Sino - "barbarian" relations ... constitute a central	historical theme....Never try to begin at the	beginning. Historical research progresses backward, not	forward.... Let the problems lead you back

- John King Fairbank (1969:x,ix)

However beautiful the mosaic of specific studies that	make up the "discipline" of history may be, without a	marcohistory, a tentative general schema of the	continuities, or at least, parallelisms in history, the	full significance of the historical peculiarities of a	given society cannot be seen.... Integrative	history is the search for and description and	explanation of such interrelated historical phenomena.	Its methodology is conceptually simple, if not easy to	put into practice: first one searches for historical	parallelisms (roughly contemporaneous similar	developments in the world's various societies), and	then one determines whether they are causally	interrelated.... If we do this, it may appear	that in the seventeenth century for example, Japan,	Tibet, Iran, Asia Minor, and the Iberian peninsula, all	seemingly cut off from one another, were responding to	some of the same, interrelated, or at least similar	demographic, economic and even social forces.... "[Was]	there a general economic recession in the seventeenth	century or not?

- Joseph Fletcher (1985:39,38,54)

INTRODUCTION

One contemporary "problem" is the "Rise" of East Asia and particularly of China. The author's ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Frank 1998) re-orients our prespective by letting historical research take us backward to the world economic centrality of Middle Kingdom China until 1800. Thereby it also shows that contemporary developments in East Asia only re-orient the center of world history itself. A related problem is the resurgence of "The Great Game" in Central Asia. Its millenarian past was explored in the author's The Centrality of Central Asia (Frank 1992) and back through the Bronze Age in Frank (1993). The present essay relates these two themes and especially how Central Asia's centrality continued into early modern times but then gave way to that of Middle Kingdom China before 1800.

Asia's rightful and historically documented place has been denied by the dominance of excessively Eurocentric perspectives on early modern and recent world economic history - and social science! As the master [European/ist] historian Fernand Braudel (1979:134) astutely observed "Europe invented historians and then made good use of them." My critique of Braudel's and his student Wallerstein's still excessive Eurocentrism is in Frank (1994,1995,1996). It is time to help right these Euro- [or Western] centric mis-interpretations by historians, social scientists and the general public by offering an interpretation of modern and economic world history, which again allots Asia its due. That can show that all parts of Afro-Eurasia from Spain to Japan and indeed also the Americas and of course Central Asia were were responding to and interrelated by the same global demographic, economic and even social forces, as Fletcher supposed. Contributing thereto is the goal of the author's ReOrient.

The present essay offers some indications of where and how Central Asians fit - that is, continued to fit - into the mostly Asian scheme of things. I say "continued" to fit, for two main reasons: The first reason is that as I already argued in The Centrality of Central Asia, this region has beren central to Afro-eurasian history for several thousand years, at least for over a millennium and a half before, and still after, the beginning of the Christian era (also see Frank 1993). The second reason is that this centrality, and even the relevance, of Inner and Central Asia has not only been overly neglected but is even denied outright. Consider for instance the following glaring example in which the history of largely Islamic Central Asia during this period is largely dismissed by the Cambridge History of Islam:

Central Asia was thus isolated from the early sixteenth century ... and therefore led an existence at the margin of world history.... The discovery of the sea-route to East Asia rendered the Silk Road increasingly superfluous.... From the threshold of modern times Central Asian history becomes provincial history. This justifies us in giving no more than a rapid sketch of the following centuries (Holt, Lambton, Lewis 1970:471,483).

This dismissal is unacceptable, both in principle and on factual grounds. To begin with, the peoples of Islamic Central and Inner Asia certainly were not 'at the margin of world history,' if only because of the Timurid dynasty decended from Tamerlane, who had made his capital in Samarkand. Also the major Muslim states and regimes of the Ottomans in Turkey, the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in India were formed by people who had arrived from Central Asia. Indeed, the Mughals considered themselves - and continued to import many high level administrators and other member of the intelligencia - from Central Asia (Foltz 1996,1997). Moreover, Inner Asian Mongols gave rise to the 'Chinese' Yuan dynasty, much of whose administrative structure was inherited by the Ming, which were then displaced by the Manchus, also from Inner Asia.

The alleged "Decline of Central Asia" has been much proclaimed but little examined. In particular as Fletecher asked [see epigrapoh above], did it suffer from "a general economic recession in the seventeenth	century or not?" We will examine below how even insofar as there was any such small "decline," it was primarily cyclical and how that was again replaced by a renwed eighteenth century recovery. But first, it is well to place both the Eurocentric ideological dismissal and the real economic record of Central Asia in the broader world political-economic and cultural history of which it was and remains an important part.

EUROCENTRISM

The above-cited Eurocentric distortion of the real historical record has its roots in Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776:

The discovery of America, and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest events recorded in the history of mankind (Smith 1776/1937:557).

Marx and Engels followed in their Communist Manifesto in 1848:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.... (Marx and Engels 1848).

Alas however, Smith - writing still before the industrial revolution in Europe - was the last major [Western] social scientist to appreciate that Europe was a johnny come lately in the development of the wealth of nations. Smith still recognized Asia as being economically far more advanced and richer than anything in Europe. "The improvements in agriculture and manufactures seem likewise to have been of very great antiquity in the provinces of Bengal in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces of China.... Even those three countries [China, Egypt and Indostan], the wealthiest, according to all accounts, that ever were in the world, are chiefly renowned for their superiority in agriculture and manufactures.... [Now in 1776] China is a much richer country than any part of Europe" (Smith 1937: 20,348,169).

However already by the mid-nineteenth century, Marx saw things from a new [European] perspective: England was allegedly showing India the mirror of its future and the United States was bringing progress to Mexico thanks to its 1846 war against that country. But whats more, Marx alleged that the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" and the "rising bourgeoisie" in Europe had transformed the world, supposedly since the genesis of capital [if not capitalism] in the sixteenth century - also in Europe! Then with the spread of European colonialism in the second half of the thy century, world history was re-written wholesale - and social science was [new] born, not only as a European, but as a Eurocentric invention. Other social "scientists" may have risen to dispute against Marx [and supposedly to agree with Smith], but they all agreed with each other and with Marx not only that 1492 and 1498 were the two greatest events in the history of mankind, but that ever since that history had been marked by the alleged uniqueness of [West] Europeans, which supposedly generated "The Rise of the West" and gave rise to "the development and spread of capitalism" in the world.

Foremost among these fathers [whatever happened to the mothers?] of modern social "science" was of course Max Weber. He alleged that the European "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" made "General Economic History," and he assiduously studied "The Religions" of various parts of Asia to show that - and supposedly why! - the poor Asians were incapable of doing as well. Weber even wrote a book to deny that the Chinese had, or were capable of managing, real cities; even though Song China had already had cities of several million population, while [Western] Europe's largest city had barely 100,000 in Venice - and Europe's really largest city was Constantinople/Istanbul in the east, which was not "western" or even very "European" [rational?]! Marx's invention of a supposed "Asiatic Mode of Production," and later Wittfogel's [anti-Marxist] ideas about Asian "hydraulic/ bureaucratic" societies were all fashioned to this same Eurocentric end. Tawney turned Weber on his head [as Marx had done to Hegel] and argued that in fact capitalism came first, and then its spirit. No matter, for both agreed on the fundamentals with each other and with Marx:the Rise of Capitalism in Europe due to European exceptionalism. And so of course, did Sombart who stressed European rationalism in the rise of capitalism,as well as Hilferding, and you name him! [all German white men?].

Thus, for the past century and a half, modern world and economic history has been [mis]read and social science theory has been written from the vantage point of the ascendance of the West. That in turn has also been interpreted in almost exclusively Eurocentric terms. This Western-centric bias in modern and economic world history is so well nigh universal as to make its documentation hardly necessary or even possible. At least since the nineteenth century, almost all modern and economic world history has been written as though it began in Europe around 1500 and then spread out from there to "incorporate" and "modernize" first the Americas and then Africa and "traditional" Asia. This view has recently been termed The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History by Jim Blaut (1993). Moreover, the ancient roots of this "modernizing" process of recent "capitalist" economic development and "enlightened" cultural/civilizational progress are also sought first within [Western] Europe itself and earlier on in Rome and Greece. The "orientalising" influence of Egypt and Mesopotamia upon Greece and Rome is too often ignored, as Bernal (1987) has argued in Black Athena. Even their ancient history is "Europeanized" as a supposed direct descendant of modern European developments. They drop out of sight and out of mind again after their momentary "contributions" to European history have been extracted from a Eurocentric perspective. Afro-Asians' history is not regarded in their own right. Their place in world and economic history, as well as their far-reaching contributions to Europe itself, are almost completely disregarded. The major concessions are to note in passing the Asian origins of such "items" as numbers, compass, gun powder, etc. -- but omitting even printing, which originated in China - and was also used by the Arabs - many centuries before Gutenberg was born!

Yet, Asian economic growth and intra-Asian trade continued on vastly greater scales than European trade and its incursions in Asia until the nineteenth century. India did not switch from being a net exporter of textiles to being a net importer until 1816. Moreland's (1936:201) now classic History of India already argued that "the immediate effects produced by the Portuguese in India were not great." Van Leur (1955) then challenged the then dominant excessively Eurocentric interpretation of events also elsewhere in Asia, that

the general course of Asian international trade remained essentially unchanged (193).... The Portuguese colonial regime, then, did not introduce a single new economic element into the commerce of southern Asia (118)....In quantity Portuguese trade was exceeded many times by the trade carried on by Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Javanese, Indians... and Arabs (165).... Trade continued inviolate everywhere (164).... The great intra-Asian trade route retained its full significance (165)....Any talk of a European Asia in the eighteenth century [a forteriori earlier!] is out of the question (Van Leur 1955:274).

Now, more and more especially Asian scholarship [eg. Chaudhuri (1978), Das Gupta and Pearson, eds. (1987), Arasaratnam (1986), and the Cambridge Economic History of India edited by Raychaudhuri and Habib (1982)] has confirmed van Leur's message that Asian trade was a flourishing and on-going enterprise into which the Europeans only entered as an added, and relatively minor player. Indeed, "the change comes only late in the eighteenth century, and in a way it is an endogamous game. Europeans finally burst out, and changed this structure,but they exploded from within an Asian context (Das Gupta and Pearson 1987:20).

In political terms, the hegemonic influence of China, India, and the Ottomans was considerably greater than that of the Europeans. Asian hegemony was not seriously threatened before the second half of the eighteenth century. Islam's geographic expansion continued through the sixteenth century. Hodgson (1974, 1993) and Djait (1985) are emphatic that Islam was still decidedly dominant [hegemonic?] in the world at the end of that century or even later and that any contemporary observer had good grounds for anticipating more of the same.

Thus, as Abu-Lughod (1989:388) put it succinctly "the decline of the East preceded the rise of the West." But the question comes: When did this happen, and why? Even the Europeanist Braudel points out that this change did not occur in the sixteenth century, as is so widely claimed and as even Wallerstein (1974) argues in this examination of the rise of the "modern world-system."

A more Asian-based alternative reading of modern and economic world history gives Asia more of its historical due. Two recent pioneering departures stand out: Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) described a h century Eurasian world system Before European Hegemony, and Chaudhuri (1990) analyzed Asia Before Europe [also see Chaudhuri (1978, 1985)]. As their titles imply, these writers recognize the significance of Asia before European Hegemony. However, Abu-Lughod limits her purview to the thirteenth century and does not pursue Eurasian economic history into more modern times. Only Chaudhuri recognizes that Asian economic life continued to prosper long after the supposed sixteenth century "rise of the West." Paradoxically however, as we will note below, so does Braudel (1992) when he is not blinded by fixation on "the European world-economy." Although he was not a close "relative" of this group, another important precursor in this recognition was Marshall Hodgson (1974). His magistral three volume Venture of Islam not only claimed the central place in world history for Islam from the seventh through the ninth centuries, he also argued that Islam still or again merited this place through its expansion (again) in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Similarly, Hichem Djait (1985:110) observes that in 1600 the greater part of the human race was in Islamic lands ruled by the Turkish Ottomans, Persian Safavids, Indian Mughals and other Muslims ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia. Hodgson (1993: 100) finds Muslims at both their political and cultural peak in the sixteenth and still in the seventeenth centuries.

The preponderance of Asia in the world economy has been masked not only by the attention devoted to "the rise of the West" in the world, but also by the undue focus on European economic and political penetration of Asia. The Europeans did not in any sense "create" either the world economic system itself nor "capitalism." Europe itself was not a first rank power nor an economic core region during these three centuries.

The historical evidence shows rather unequivocally that this "Great Transformation" (Polanyi 1957) or "transmutation" as Hodgson calls it, was not completed or even far advanced until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth. Until then there was still the "Perspective of the World in Asia Before European Hegemony in the Modern World-System" to combine the titles of Braudel, Chaudhuri, Abu-Lughod and Wallerstein.

EURASIA IN THE WORLD ECONOMY

AfroEurasian history had long since been cyclical, or at least pulsating. The present millennium began with a period of system-wide political economic expansion. It was apparently centered at its far "eastern" end in Song China, but it also accelerated an accentuated re-insertion of its "western" end in Europe, which responded by going on several Crusades to plug its marginal economy more effectively into the new Afro-Eurasian dynamic. A period of pan-AfroEurasian political economic decline and even crisis followed in the late thirteenth and especially in the fourteenth century. Another long period of expansion began in the early fifteenth century, again in East and Southeast Asia. It soon included Central-, South- and West- Asia, and after the mid fifteenth century also Africa and Europe. The "discovery" and then conquest of the Americas and the subsequent "Columbian exchange" were a direct result, and part and parcel, of this world economy/system wide expansion.

So, the "long sixteenth century" expansion in fact began in the early fifteenth century; and it continued through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries. This expansion also continued to be primarily Asian based, although it was also fuelled by the new supplies of silver and golden money now brought by the Europeans from the Americas.

Reflecting the macroeconomic imbalances and also responding to corresponding microeconomic opportunities to make and take profit, the silver moved around the world in a predominantly eastward direction across the Atlantic and - via Europe - across the Indian Ocean, and westward across the Pacific from the Americas and Japan. Ultimately, the largest silver "sink" was in China, whose relatively greatest productivity and competitiveness acted like a magnet for the largest quantity of silver. However there as elsewhere, the incoming money generated increased effective demand and stimulated increased production and consumption and thereby supported population growth. The new supply of money failed to do so where the political economy was insufficiently flexible and expandable to permit growth of production to keep pace with the increase in the supply of money. In that case rising effective demand drove up prices in inflation, which is what happened in Europe.

In Asia, this expansion took the form of rapid growth of population, production, trade including imports and exports, and presumably income and consumption in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, India, Persia, and the Ottoman lands. Politically, the expansion was manifested and/or managed by the flourishing Chinese Ming/Qing, Japanese Tokugawa, Indian Mughal, Persian Safavid, and Turkish Ottoman and Central Asian Tumorid regimes. The European populations and economies grew more slowly than all but the last of the above, and they did so rather differentially among each other. So did some "national" and other quite multi-ethnic European states, all of which were however much smaller than the large ones in Asia. The increased supply of money and/or population generated more inflation in Europe than in most of Asia, where increased production was more able to keep pace, including during the seventeenth century. In much of Europe however, economic and political growth were constrained and regionally even reversed in a major "seventeenth century crisis," which left most of Asia unscathed. Therefore also, population growth was faster and greater in Asia than in Europe, and so continued into the eighteenth century before inflecting after 1750.

The so-called "European hegemony" in the modern world system was very late in developing and was quite incomplete and never unipolar. In reality, during the period 1400-1800, sometimes regarded as the period of "European expansion" and "primitive accumulation" of capital leading to full capitalism, the world system was still very predominantly under Asian influences. The Chinese Ming/Qing, Turkish Ottoman, Indian Mughal, and Persian Safavid empires were economically and politically very powerful and only waned vis a vis the Europeans toward the end of this period and thereafter. Therefore, if anything, the modern world system was under Asian Hegemony, not European. Likewise, much of the real dynamism of the world economy also still lay in Asia throughout this period, not in Europe. Asians were preponderant in the world economy/system in production, capital formation, trade, and hegemonic power until circa 1750. One indication is Asia's share of world population grew from 60 percent in 1600 to 66 percent in 1750. However, this Asian population then still produced about 80 percent of world production. The absolute growth of production and population in and the relative shares of China and India were even greater. Meanwhile, over the several centuries "growth" Europe's, its share of world population remained stable at 20 percent and its share of world production was less than that [since Africa and the Americas also contributed to the 20 percent of world production that did not come from Asia] (Frank 1998).

The core regions, especially of industrial production, were in China and India; and West Asia and Southeast Asia also remained economically more important than Europe. Likewise, China and India were the primary centres of the accumulation of capital in the world system, and China was in overall balance of trade surplus throughout most of this period. Indeed, Europe was in deficit with all regions to the East. West Asia was in surplus with Europe, but in deficit with India. India was in surplus westward but in deficit eastward to Southeast Asia and China, whence India re-exported bullion received from the West.

In world economic terms not even India, but China was the frontrunner, exporting huge quantities of valuable commodities and importing vast quantities of silver. India, however, does not seem to have been far "behind" China in this regard, being the seat of very significant industrial centres, particularly in cotton textiles, and importing huge quantities of bullion, being a "sink" for gold in particular. West Asia too seems to have continued to prosper both from its own industrial base, in cotton and silk textiles for instance, and from trans-shipments of commodities between Europe and the rest of Asia. Both Southeast Asia and Central Asia appear to have prospered, largely on the trans-shipments of bullion and goods between regions, but in the case of Southeast Asia also in terms of silk exports of its local production, especially to Japan. One thing is very clear: Europe was not a major industrial center in terms of exports to the rest of the world economy, and in fact it had a chronic balance of payments deficit due to the bullion drain to Asia. Only its colonial sphere in the Americas explains its viability in the world economy, without which it could not have made good its huge deficits in the commodities trade with Asia. Even so it never had enough money to do so as the poor Europeans wished, for as a Dutch trader reported home in 1632, "we have not failed to find goods ... but we have failed to produce the money to pay for them" (Braudel 1979: 221). This problem was not overcome until the end of the eighteenth century, and especially the nineteenth century when the flow of money was finally reversed to go from East to West.

Thus, long before the birth of the "European world-economy" and still long after its advent, the world economy had a far-flung division of labor and intricate trade system, which was preponderantly Asian. The introduction of American silver [and to a lesser extent gold] and with it of Europeans into this Afro-Eurasian economy only increased and accelerated quantitative economic growth in an otherwise qualitatively ongoing system.

So from the beginning and still throughout this early modern period until at least 1800, productivity, production, and accumulation was greater in Asia than elsewhere in the world. Indeed it was greater in each of two or more "regional" parts of Asia than in any other "region" of the world. Mooreover, the increase in European [participation in] accumulation was possible only thanks to its use of American silver to gain access to the process of accumulation in Asia, which included Inner and Central Asia. In the absence of that economy or its dynamic in Asia, Europe would not have gone or gotten anywhere! That is, Europe would have remained where it already was: in world economic terms, just about nowhere; or it would have made its way only through the Atlantic triangle, which was much smaller and poorer than the Asian economies. For instance as Dennis Flynn (1996) has aptly observed, without China's world economic demand for silver there would have been no rise or decline of the Spanish [Habsburg] Empire. Also without Japan's competitive supply of silver to the Chinese market, world and European economic history would have been altogether different.

A SIN0-CENTRIC WORLD ECONOMY

Thus, there indeed was a globe encircling world-wide trading system and division of labor. It bound agricultural "hinterlands" and peripheries to their respective provincial and regional metropolitan centers and maritime port and/or inland emporia cities. These in turn developed and maintained dense and far-reaching inter-provincial, inter-regional, and world systemic inter-"national" economic relations. These were most visible through traders and trade, and in their resultant imbalances of trade. However, the former also reflected widespread and deepgoing inter-regional and inter-sectoral complementarities and competition in the global division of labor. All of these in turn also reflect the relative - and indeed absolute - weight and dominance of the Asian economies, and of China in particular. This global multilateral trade, also in Asia, was expanded through the infusion into of American money by the Europeans. Indeed, that is what permitted Europeans to increase their participation in the global economy, which until and even through the eighteenth century remained dominated by Asian production, competitiveness, and trade.

The "thirteenth century world system" and ity major "regional" patterns analyzed by Abu-Lughod (1989) persisted in the world economy through the eighteenth century. She identified three major - and within each of these some minor - regions, in eight mutually overlapping regional ellipses that covered Afro-Eurasia in her account of the world economy. These included regions centered - going from west to east - on Europe, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, as well as Inner and Central Asia. All of these regions continued to play more or less major, but not equal, roles in the world economic division of labor and system of "international" trade, despite the addition of an Atlantic ellipse in the sixteenth century.

However, some of these regions were certainly more equal than others; and their relative positions also underwent some cyclical or other temporal changes. Although the Atlantic Ocean displaced the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas as the preponderant locus of European trade in the eighteenth century, it still did not begin to match the importance of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea regions in the world economy and its trade. A number of works by mostly Asian historians, cited above and also in the chapters that follow, are helping to put the Indian Ocean economy on the map, as its important place and role in history well merits. The work of Hamashita (1988,1994) on the centrality of China in the "East Asian Tribute/Tade System" and the proposed research by him and Arrighi and Selden (1996), are designed to help remedy the serious neglect of China. The present account can also contribute to the elucidation of the structure and transformation of this East Asian "regional" economy by stressing the longstanding bilateral relations of China with Central Asia.

Thus another "regionalization" of the world economy may emerge, which could be visualized in the form of concentric circles. Among these, China [and within that the Yangze valley and/or South China] would form the innermost circle. The "East Asian Tribute Trade System" studied by Hamashita (1988,1994) would form the next circle, which beyond China included at the very least parts of Central Asia, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia. However, we have seen that the boundaries of this circle as well were porous and uncertain, and Hamashita himself recognizes its extension to South Asia. That in turn of course had millenarian old close relations with West Asia and East Africa, as well as with Central Asia, which in turn became increasingly enmeshed with Russia and that with China. These regions could be said to form a next outer band, which we can then perhaps identify as an Asian, or Afro-Asian, regional circle. So, within this global economic circle, we can then successively view the smaller concentric pan-Asian, West -, Central-, South-, East- Asian, and Chinese economic circles in ascending order of "centrality." Europe and across the Atlantic the Americas would then occupy their rightful places in the outer band of the concentric circles, since Asia also had economic relations with Europe and through its mediation with the Americas, which included the trade from Asia directly across the Pacific on the "Manila Galleons."

Apart from focusing on China, East Asia, and Asia respectively as major world economic regions, such a concentric circle mapping of the global economy also puts Europe and even the Atlantic economy in their marginal place.

The international division of labor and relative sectoral productivity and regional competitiveness in this world economy were reflected in the global pattern of trade balances and money flows. These regional patterns may be summarized in several not mutually exclusive ways. None of them, however, correspond to the received image of a "capitalist world-economy" that began in Europe and only then expanded to "incorporate" one region after another elsewhere in the world until the West dominated them all.

In the structure of the world economy, four major regions maintained built-in deficits of commodity trade: The Americas, Japan, Africa and Europe. The first two balanced their deficit by producing silver money for export. Africa exported gold money and slaves. That is in economic terms, these three regions also produced "commodities" for which there was a demand elsewhere in the world economy. The fourth deficitary region, Europe, was hardly able to produce anything of its own for export with which to balance its perpetual trade deficit. Europe managed to do so primarily by "managing" the exports of the three other deficitary regions, from Africa to the Americas, from the Americas to Asia, and from Asia to Africa and the Americas. The Europeans also participated to some extent in trade within Asia, especially between Japan and elsewhere. This is intra-Asian "country" trade was marginal for Asia but nonetheless vital for Europe, which earned more from it than from its own trade with Asia.

Southeast Asia and West Asia also produced some silver and gold money, which contributed to balance their trade. Unlike Europe however, they were able also to produce some other commodities for which there also was an export demand. Both Southeast- and West- Asia also realized "export" earnings from their respective locations at the south eastern and south western trade turntables of the central Asian economies. To some extent, so did Central Asia.

The major importer and re-exporter of both silver and gold bullion was Western and Southern Europe, to cover its own perpetual massive structural balance of trade [b/t] deficit with all other regions, except [perhaps] with the Americas and Africa, although the Europeans received African and especially American bullion without giving much in return. Western Europe, had a b/t deficit with and therefore re-exported much silver and some gold to the Baltics and Eastern Europe, to West Asia, to India directly and via West Asia, to Southeast Asia directly and via India, and to China via all of the above as well as from Japan.

West Asia had a b/t surplus with Europe, but a b/t deficit with South-, Southeast-, and East Asia [and with Central Asia?]. West Asia covered its b/t deficits to the East with the re-export of bullion derived from its b/t surplus with Europe, the Maghreb and via it with West Africa, and gold from East Africa, as well as some of its own production of both gold and silver, especially in Persia. India had a massive b/t surplus with Europe and some with West Asia, based mostly on its more efficient low cost cotton textile production and export. These went westwards to Africa, West Asia, Europe, and from there on Across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas. In return, India received massive amounts of silver and some gold from the West, directly around the Cape or via West Asia. India also exported cotton textiles to and imported spices from Southeast Asia, and also via the same exchanged cotton textiles for silk and porcelain and other ceramics from China. However, India had a b/t deficit with Southeast Asia and especially with China. Therefore, India was obliged also to re-export especially silver both to Southeast Asia and to China. Southeast Asia exported spices and tin of its own production to Europe, West Asia, India and re-exported imports from India to China, which were its major customers, some eight times more than Europe. Additionally, Southeast Asia exported gold from its own production to India, China, and Japan, although it received silver from India, some of which it also was re-exported to China via Malacca. So, Southeast Asia seems to have had a b/t surplus with India [and of course with West Asia and Europe] but still a b/t deficit with China.

China had a b/t surplus with everybody, based on its unrivalled manufacturing production and export of silks and porcelain and other ceramics. Therefore, China, which like India had a perpetual silver shortage, was the major net importer of silver and met much of its need for coinage out of imports of American silver which arrived via Europe, West Asia, India, Southeast Asia and with the Manilla galleons directly from Acapulco. China also received massive amounts of silver and copper from Japan and some through the overland caravan trade across Central Asia.

So the two major regions that were most "central" to the world economy were India and China. That centrality rested primarily on their outstanding absolute and relative productivity in manufactures. In India, these were primarily its cotton textiles that dominated the world market, and to a lesser extent its silk textiles, especially in India's most productive Bengali region. Of course, this competitiveness in manufacturing also rested on productivity on the land and in transport and commerce. They supplied the inputs necessary to supply raw materials to industry, food to workers, and transport and trade for both, as well as for export and import.

The other, and even more "central" economy was China. Its even greater centrality was based on its even greater absolute and relative productivity in industry, agriculture, [water] transport, and trade. China's even greater, indeed the world economy's greatest, productivity, competitiveness and centrality was reflected in its most favorable balance of trade. That was based primarily on its world economic export leadership in silks and ceramics and its exports also of gold and copper coin and later of tea. These exports in turn made China the "ultimate sink" of the world's silver, which flowed there to balance China's almost perpetual export surplus. Of course, China was only able to satisfy its insatiable "demand" for silver; because it also had an inexhaustible supply of exports, which were in perpetual demand elsewhere in the world economy.

The complexity of the international division of labor and the network of world trade was of course vastly greater than this simplified summary. However, even this mere summary statement should suffice to indicate that and how all of these world regions were integral parts of a single world economic system between about 1400 and 1800 AD. And so was Central Asia!

CENTRAL ASIAN DECLINE OR CONTINUED CENTRALITY OF CENTRAL ASIA?

There has been much debate about the "decline" of Central Asia.

Alas, some of it simply repeats suppositions, such as the alledged replacement of trans-Asian overland by circum-Asian maritime trade, without even checking the historical evidence.

We will review that below. Historical accuracy been the criterion even less regarding other terms of the debate. Thus during Soviet times, Russians and Central Asians used and misused quite a lot of "evidence" in their back and forth over debates, which fluctuated over time in accord with changing Soviet political interests and ideological lines as surveyed by Weinerman (1993). To legitimize Soviet power in Central Asia, it was first convenient to contrast it favorably with Czarist contributions to the "decline of Central Asia." When Central Asian nationalism challenged Moscow's rule and the latter wanted to defuse the former, it became convenient instead even for the Soviets to argue that Russian rule under the Czars had not been so bad after all. Then the evidence was marshalled to show that the seventeenth century "decline" in Central Asia was already overcome and again reversed in the eighteenth century. Related debates pitted Russians and Central Asians against each other on the question of whether the former or the latter themselves deserved the credit for the "recovery" and/or whether the earlier "decline" was only a Russian myth in the first place.

Additionally, the debates about decline and/or progress in Central Asia was also a function of the perennial dispute about "modes of production" and whether "capitalism." Did it germinate and flourish indigenously in Central Asia? Was it strangled or promoted there by Russian colonialism? How does Soviet power and/or ideology serve anti-colonialism and the "non-capitalist" and then "socialist" path in the Third World - and in Central Asia? Here is yet another illustration of how literally mis-leading these "mode of production" categories are. They distract our attention from what really went on, as I have argued in Frank (1991/93, 1998). The political/ ideological motivation and underpinning of this still ongoing debate renders the "evidence" marshalled by all sides rather suspect for our more "innocent" use, although readers of Russian may be able to separate some grain out from all that chaff. I, alas, am obliged to return to other sources.

In his discussion of the supposed "decline" [his quotation marks] of the Central Asian caravan trade over the Silk Roads, Rossabi (1990:352) stresses "the paucity of precise information about this commerce." Nonetheless, he makes several observations, some more and others less acceptable. To begin with, Rossabi observes that Chinese records from the Ming dynasty suggest that this commerce did not decline after 1400, but continued into the sixteenth century, and indeed even into the early seventeenth century. Moreover, like Steensgard (1972) also, he observes that trans-continental caravan trade was not replaced by circum-Asian maritime trade. The latter had already estimated that European consumption of Asian goods coming by caravan was still double that brought around the Cape by ship (Steensgard 1972:168). Both authors do observe declining trans-Central Asian trade in the seventeenth century. Certainly there was no "decline" of CentralIt is easier to accept Rossabi's empirically based observation that "the common assumption that seaborne commerce superseded caravan trade needs qualification" (Rossabi 1990:367). Asia before 1600. Sixteen times more spices were transported overland by Asians through West and parts of Central Asia than went around the Cape on Portuguese ships in 1503, and still almost four times as many took the Red Sea route as the Cape route in 1585 (Das Gupta 1978: 257).

Rossabi attributes decline in and of Central Asia to two main factors: severe draught [the little ice age] and political upheaval, including especially that which ended the Ming Dynasty in 1644 and replaced it by the Manchus, the fall of the Timurid Empire in western Central Asia, and problems with Mughal rule in northern India. Chinese tribute/trade missions to the Tarim Basin oases did decline at the end of the sixteenth century, and even moreso before 1640 during the last decades of Ming rule, when Turfan also sought to assert control over the northern Tarim basin trade routes. Mongol-Ming relations also deteriorated again (Rossabi 1975 and 1990). However, one student attributes at least some of the decline also to more distant problems among the Safavids along the other end of the line in Persia (Adshead 1988: 196-7).

Even more doubtful Rosssabi's claim that the seventeenth century decline must be due to "the political disruptions that afflicted most of the Asian regions through which caravans travelled were major causes for the decline.... In sum, the decline of central Asian caravan trade cannot be attributed solely to economic considerations" (Rossabi 1990: 367). Perhaps, but why could the cause-effect relation not have been the other way around: that drought and economic decline generated political conflict? That has generally been [more] true elsewhere and also at other times, and could more plausibly explain why "commerce via northwest China declined considerably" (Rossabi 1975: 264). In East and South Asia however, climatic problems were especially severe only in the decade of the 1630s. The early and later seventeenth century was a period of marked economic expansion in both China and India. That renders the thesis of such "decline" doubtful also in Central Asia. This is all the moreso the case, inasmuch as trans-Central Asian trade revived again along with the eighteenth century trade expansion and "commercial revolution" elsewhere, which had already started in the seventeenth century. Steensgard (1972) observed that then trade shifted to a more northerly route between Russia and China. Peter the Great and his followers certainly promoted and benefited from this Russian trade.

Similarly, Fletcher (1985/1995) also rejects the argument [or rather the assumption] that trans-continental trade was replaced by maritime trade, but he does notice "nomadic economic decline" beginning in 1660 in Outer Mongolia. Like Steensgard also, he remarks on the establishment of more northerly trade routes by Russian traders also serving a growing population in Siberia. Since 1670 already, the Russians increasingly displace "Bukhariot" traders [who were not only from Bukharia] who previously had a corner on the more southerly long-distance routes across Central Asia. Fletcher stresses three additional factors: one is the seventeenth century demographic decline, which was common to much of Eurasia [and plays the key role in Goldstone's (1991) demographic/structural analysis of crisis after 1640]. Another were the advances in military [gun] technology, which made warfare much more expensive and put nomad bands at a -since then permanent - competitive disadvantage with larger/richer states/empires, as proposed by Hess (1973).

A third observation by Fletcher is that intra-regional trade expanded in various parts of Eurasia. This regionalism may have diminished the market for trans-Central Asian trade. However, that did not deprive particular parts or regions of Central Asia of economic functions as suppliers and markets for regions contiguous to them, which were growing economically and commercially. Thus, we have already observed above that both the spice and the silk trades actually made increasing use of caravan trade routes through parts of Central Asia, contiguous and complimentary to the Persian Gulf and Read Sea trade routes between Asia and Europe. Similarly, the Moghul expansion southward through the Indian subcontinent generated a large demand for horses, for military and other purposes, for which

various regions in Central Asia were the "natural" suppliers, both in the west along with Persia and farther east in Tibet and Yunnan. Travellers like Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta had already remarked on these Central Asian regions' very profitable sale of horses southward into India as analyzed by Richards (1993) for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The horse trade continued, however, in later times as well. Reportedly, 100,000 horses a year were exported from Central Asia in the early seventeenth century, of which 12,000 alone for the Mughal's stables (Burton 1993:28).

Similarly, regional trade persisted - in its age-old fluctuating fashion - between the Mongols and China, although the formers' last serious military threat [but not yet competition, see below] to the latter seems to have been repelled by the Ming. To do so however, they had to turn their attention northward- and even move their capital northward to Bejing - and sacrifice many commercial maritime opportunities in the South after they halted further trade missions, such as Chen Ho's in 1433. This same regionalization and the new methods and costs of warfare that Fletcher stressed may be the explanation for the events, which Togan analyzes when she writes

the aim of this paper is to bring a further qualification to the decline of the Silk Routes by demonstrating that trade and traders did not cease to function [in the seventeenth century], and that, instead, state formations that were playing the role of intermediaries along the Silk routes were eliminated. Their elimination was due to the expansion of the sedentary empires of the early modern age. It was the moment [1698] when two of these empires, the Chinese and the Russian, came to direct contact with each other ... that the intermediaries lost their function. As a result, the merchants, in this case the [Bukharan] Muslim merchants of the Silk routes, became merchants of the empires who were involved much more with internal trade within these empires than with transcontinental trade, as was the case earlier (Togan 1990:2).

However as Adshead (1993: 179) suggests, these developments also meant that the seventeenth century decline of trans-Central Asian caravan East-West trade was complemented if not replaced by regional North-South trades, so that "Central Asia did not decline" (Adshead 1993:200). For Sino-Central Asian trade, Rossabi (1975: 139-165) catalogues Chinese imports from Central Asia of horses, camels, sheep, furs, swords, jade, ginseng and other medicines, as well as gold and silver; and Chinese exports of paper money [spendable only in China on] textiles, clothing, [other] drugs,tea, paper, porcelain, and after the late fifteenth century some silver instead of paper money.

It is easier to accept Rossabi's empirically based observation that "the common assumption that seaborne commerce superseded caravan trade needs qualification" (Rossabi 1990:367). The trade and trade routes of West and South Asia had always been and continued to be intimately tied into - and through - adjoining regions of Central Asia. Moreover, overland caravan and seaborn maritime trade were and continued to be far more complementary than competitive. Indian inland trade moved by ubiquitous short-haul coastal [small boat] shipping, over inland waterways where available such as in parts of South India, and mostly by caravan numbering 10,000 to 20,000 [some reports say up to 40,000] pack animals at a time, as well as by various combinations of all of the above -- and with transhipment to or from long distance maritime trade. "We see the relation between activities on land and sea as asymmetric. Most of the time sea activities had less influence on those on land than vice versa" (Pearson and Das Gupta 1987:5) Almost all the port cities were in organic symbiosis with the caravan routes into and from their respective hinterland interiors and sometimes also with distant trans-continental regions, especially in Central Asia. In southern India, the inland capital of Vijayanagara was for a long time the focal point of trade to and from Goa in the west, Calicut in the south, and Masulipatnam and Pulicat on the Coromandel coast to the east. These and many other port cities, and of course especially those with no or relatively unproductive hinterlands, were highly dependent on staple food imports, via other port cities from father up or down the coast, but often also from ports with access to rice and other grain producing areas thousands of miles distant. Moreover, the first and last named port cities and Vijayanagara also had overland connections to the north, both to inland centers such as Hyderabad and Burhanpur and to the northwest Indian port of Surat [or at other times Cambay], which in turn were entrepots for the Punjab and north of that Central Asia. However,

the trade of Central Asia had no such direct connections with the sea, and yet the whole regions itself exercised a vital influence on the lives of the people closer to the monsoon belts of the Indian Ocean. In terms of direct relationships, the Central Asia caravan trade was complementary to the trans-continental maritime commerce of Eurasia.... The rhythm of trade and its volume were themselves function of the two separate conduits. When the overland route was obstructed or made politically unsafe, the seaborne trade gained at its expense.... The overland trade followed geographical lines which had been worked out over many centuries, and the relative merits of alternative road-systems were well understood. The trade was also highly organised (Chaudhuri 1978: 172)

Moreover, there was a millenarian and still continuing India - China trade across Nepal and Tibet. That is, Bengal and Assam exported textiles, indigo, spices, sugar, hides and other goods to Tibet for sale to merchants there who took them on for sale in China. Payment was in Chinese products, tea, and often as necessary gold (Chakrabarti 1990). I have discussed some of these Central Asian routes and their "silk road" history in Frank (1992).

North-south trade routes also ran through Russia, especially along the major rivers, into the Ottoman and Persian empires, to whom Russia also exported furs and re-exported some silver and gold in turn. Persia became the major West Asian exporter of silk, produced at costs that were lower even than those of China and then of Bengal (Attman 1981:40). Major importers were Russia, Caucasia, Armenia, Mesopotamia, the Ottomans, as well as via the Ottomans the Europeans. This trade generated important earnings of silver and other income for the Persians producers from Russia, Europe and the Ottomans, but also made profits for the Ottoman middlemen.

Trade between Russia and Central Asia [in the latter especially to Khiva, Bukhara and Balkh, and to/from Orenburg and several other Siberian cities] also continued to prosper and indeed in the eighteenth century to grow. First, the caravans from Central Asia had also to carry some gold and silver in settlement for their purchase of Russian exports. However in the later eighteenth century, the exchange became more balanced as Central Asians exported more cotton and textiles to the Russians; and then the balance of trade turned to favor Central Asia, and Russia itself had to export precious metals to the Central Asians and then also to China (Attman 1981: 112-124). Accordingly, one Tsar after another issued edicts prohibiting the export of precious metals and coin. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and all the moreso in the eigtheenth century, the Russian state sought to reserve trade to its subjects and to exclude Bukharan and other Central Asian competition (Burton 1993).

Moreover, with Russian expansion into and through Siberia, beginning rapidly in the first half of the seventeenth century, the export of furs from Siberia increasingly complimented those from European Russia; therefore, money flowed farther eastward as well and itself helped open up Siberia. At the eastern end of Siberia and Eurasia, the Russians became important customers for tea from China, and Russian merchants and the Czarist government sought trading privileges in the eastern Russian-Central Asian-Chinese regional trade.

After the rapid Russian advance through Siberia in the first half of the seventeenth century, Sino-Russian competition for Central Asian and Siberian trade and territory and political power waxed and waned. The Russians seemed more intent on [long distance] trade, and the Chinese were apparently more concerned with political control [that offered regional/local tribute and trade]. By mutual agreement therefore, Russian trade was safeguarded but its political power in the region was ceeded in the 1689 the Treaty of Nerchinsk to China, until the latter again lost control in 1860 and only regained any in the mid-twentieth century.

Indeed, the Western Mongols gained control of the Oases along the northern branch of the Silk Road through the Tarim basin [which the Chinese had controlled only off and on since Han times]; and another competitive struggle for this vital area ensued until the Quin regime finally annexed to China the by now largely Muslim Uighur Xinjiang [whose interest in regaining its independence has only been heightened by the recent separation of the Muslim Soviet Central Asian republics].

In the late seventeenth and from the early eighteenth centuries, trans-continental trade was diverted from the more southerly routes across Central Asia to more northerly ones through Russia. In part, this change followed or accompanied the Russian settlement of Siberia. In part, as a consequence of the same, there was increasing Sino-Russian cross-border and onward trade. In part, Russian rulers since Ivan the Terrible [1533-1584] had been trying to shift or entice the Silk Road to pass through Russian territory (Anisimov 1993:255). Peter the Great [1682-1725) was determined to succeed. He wrote to his ambassador to Persia "...is it possible to make some obstacle to the Smyrna and Aleppo trade, where and how?" (cited in Anisimov 1993:255). Moreover, Peter also had other related ideas: War against Persia in 1722 [taking advantage of its temporary weakness due to troubles at the Safavid palace] and then with Turkey in 1723, with whom he sought to partition Persian territories and trade routes, all for commercial reasons. When he captured Baku on the Caspian Sea, he was "toasted joyfully [to] the health of Peter the Great, who had entered upon the path of Alexander the Great" -- to India! (ibid 259).

The magnet for Peter were the riches and trade of India, and it became an obsession with him to find a water route thither. He sought one or another via the Caspian Sea, the Oxus and other rivers, and inquired about diverting rivers and constructing connecting canals. Moreover, Peter also sent Bering [for whom the straits have since been named] to seek a passage between the Russian east and the Americas. As his ambassador to Persia, Artemy Volynsky, later recalled "according to His Majesty's designs, his concern was not for Persia alone. For, if matters had succeeded for us in Persia and his exalted life had continued, of course he would have attempted to reach India, and he nurtured intentions even to the Chinese state, which I was honored from his Imperial Majesty ....to hear myself" (in Ansiminov 1993: 263). So the received Eurocentric, "emphasis on Baltic commerce tends to obscure the development of Muscovite trade with the east....[in which] Turkey, Persia, the central Asian khanates, and China played important roles as well," not to mention Peter's interest to benefit from the flourishing India trade (Oliva 1969: 129).

Burton (1993) also surveys Bukharan Trade 1559-1718, which however includes trade also by non-Bukharans. His maps and text record continuing trade routes and substantial trade - and therefore division of labor - of commodities, far too many to list here, of sumptuary as well as daily use. Particularly noteworthy however are slaves from all over [including Germany and Eastern Europe, but especially "non-Christian" ones from the west and "non-Muslim" Hindu ones from the south]; horses and other livestock as well as hides, skins, and furs; fibres and textiles of all fibres and sorts; indigo and other dyes; metals and metal wares and especially small arms; porcelain and other ceramics; food of all sorts including grains, sugar, fruits and especially rhubarb; medicines; tea and tobacco; precious stones;, and of course precious metals and coins. The trade routes connected Central Asian emporia such as Khiva, Bukhara, Balkh, Smarkand, Kabul and many others northward, westward, southward, and eastward. Northward they went via Astrakhan and Orenburg to Moscow and onwards from there to Eastern and Western Europe. Westward, they went to Persia, the Levant and Anatolia and/or via the Black Sea route to Istanbul and the Mediterranean. Southward, they went into India. Eastward, they went along the old "Silk Road" to China and northeastward to Siberia and through the same also to China.

Thus, the continuing role of Central Asia in the Asian and world economy to 1800 is revealed both by more careful examination of the historical evidence from Central Asia alone and by doing the horizonataly integrative macrohistory that Fletcher recommends in our opening epigraph. The answer to Fletcher's (1985:54) question "is there a general economic recession in the seventeenth century or not?" is negative not only on the evidence from Central Asia itself. It becomes even more negative if we also examine the horizontally integrative macrohistorical relations between

Central Asia and other parts of Eurasia and the world. Then it appears that there were simultaneous political economic crises o in China and Japan, and perhaps also in paets of Southeast Asia and the Ottoman Empire. However, they were apparently only two to three decades long and were caused by temporary problems of climatic and agricultural production, [world] silver supply and fiscal deficits, and consequent political upheaval. Reviewing the simultaneous developments throughout Asia region by region over the century as a whole shows that there was no such general "seventeenth century crisis" in Asia. Doing horizontally integrative marcohistory shows on the contrary that East, South, and West Asia and their relations with and through Central Asia experienced continued, if not always continual, economic expansion right through the seventeenth century into much of the eighteenth century as well (Frank 1998).

In short, all dismissal of Inner and Central Asia from early modern and still continuing world history is premature - or rather a belated consequence of latterday Eurocentrism. Burton (1993:84) concludes, "throughout the period reviewed [1559-1718 Central Asians] continued to ply their trade, regardless of dangers and difficulties. They carried an enormous variety of goods,and were always able to adjust to changing circumstances. They continued to trade with Muscovy and Siberia even after the Tsars [imposed impediments]."

In conclusion, Asia continued to predominate in the world economy right through the eighteenth century until at least 1800. Within Asia, Inner and Central Asia also continued to play an important world economic and political role in the world historical process, which had for millennia already been subject to The Centrality of Central Asia (Frank 1992). Why else would the British and Russian Empires have engaged themselves in "The Great Game" of competition over Central Asia still even in the nineteenth century? Why still in the twentieth century did Lenin and Stalin and still Mao and Deng devote so much attention to Central Asia? What renewed or continued "Great Game" will play itself out there over oil and other resources in the twenty-first century among Russians, Turks, Persians, Indians, Chinese and above all the [still] Central Asians themselves?

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