Economic Imaginaries of the Global Middle Ages*
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: A global economic history can even less afford to ignore ‘culture’ in the sense of knowledge, rules of conduct and value-orientations than economic history in a national mode.1 This chapter explores two related prospects for the ‘Global Middle Ages’: first, the loosening of conceptual ties in which modern historiography binds the Middle Ages;2 and, second, the reframing of the middle ages of conventional western historiography as a global phenomenon.3 It considers examples of the relationship between governance and wealth at intersections of culture-political and socio-economic history, and will explore ‘medieval globality’ as the unfolding of collective imaginaries in tension with diffuse local and entangled modes of evaluative agency. What constitutes value and who says so? It is scarcely credible that those periods currently circumscribed as ‘modern’ and ‘medieval’ can survive scrutiny from the perspective of global history. It is one thing, however, to spot the tyranny of a construct; another, by changing old habits, to erase it.4 A global approach should help to expose the illusory differences encoded in this binary, as we find more fruitful differences within and across their constituent elements.5 It should also reveal the immense variety of ways in which people across different periods and in different regions have thought about and experienced ‘economy’. If this is a term which is to be part of the global historian’s lexicon, it is important that we acknowledge that exceptional range of economic thought and experience. It is a range which renders the western-capitalist variant merely one of many modes of thinking and acting economically rather than the singular framework within which all societies, pre-modern and modern, are to be interpreted. The ways in which secular constitutionalism and liberal historicism have fixed upon the uniqueness of European capitalism — its definition, origins and rise — as the backbone of grand narratives of transition, divergence and modernization, have been elucidated in Chakrabarty’s study of the influence on western historiography of Adam Smith’s classical account of political economy and Karl Marx’s subsequent critique. Their influence on historiography and the social sciences have made for a peculiarly narrow modern-western view of the historical relationship between governance and wealth, the extent of whose colonizing effects on both the medieval and the non-European past have only relatively recently become apparent to scholars.6 Any exploration of medieval globality becomes partly dependent on a cultural critique of conventional frameworks derived from national and colonial teleological foundations. Such an approach may help us to avoid the reduction of the Global Middle Ages to some infant precursor to modern globalization, understood as increasing market integration, price convergence, the free flow of commodities, labour and capital, and growth recurring. Two early revisionist contributions, working broadly within but pointing beyond this tradition, have been offered by Janet Abu-Lughod and Christopher Bayly. Janet Abu-Lughod gathered abundant evidence of global medieval connectedness almost thirty years ago in her description of a complex world system of eight overlapping trade circuits spanning Eurasia and north and west Africa between c.1250 and c.1350 (Map 8). It was distinguished by cultural and political polycentrism, involving long-distance trade between regional powers, aided by smaller societies, and with no evidence of the cultural exceptionalism associated with its modern successor, whether understood in terms of Weberian psychology, institutional optimalities, ‘religious beliefs and values’, or any other designations of western civilization.7 Despite her immense contribution to the recovery of an Islamicate world system, which has encouraged some to explore a history of Islamic capitalism,8 her intention was not to supplant Immanuel Wallerstein’s account of the modern world system, but rather to check assumptions that his system had pristine western origins.9 Christopher Bayly’s account of ‘archaic globalization’ for the period spanning these contrasting world systems, between 1300 and 1800, similarly emphasized the processual and cannibalistic nature of western globalization. Bayly described a period of increasing connectivity, and the eventual incorporation and subordination of local globalizing agencies to larger European colonial and capitalist operations across ever-widening circuits. In place of nations and political economy he adopted ideologies and consumption patterns as themes for understanding connectedness. According to Bayly, this phase of globalization was driven by prevalent epistemological commitments to cosmic kingship, universal religion and humoral understandings of the body. The principal role as economic actors played by imperial and state formations enabled middle-range institutions to operate within, parasitically upon, and beyond (at a distance from) state infrastructures through nomads and bandits, monastic orders, itinerant religious devotees, camel caravans, seaborne merchants, pilgrims and pirates.10 Both these approaches usefully stressed the global implications of relations between socio-economic arrangements and the culture-political in what might be called ‘a very early modern’ or ‘late pre-modern’ (as experimental alternatives to a ‘medieval’) context.11 Bayly’s account avoids the canalizing effect that network approaches can have on what are complex and textured cultural and social links, but he is more attentive in his model of archaic globalization to cultural consumption than to the production of meaning highlighted in the culturally pluralistic world system evoked by Abu-Lughod.12 The production of meaning and value that takes place at that imaginative junction between governance and wealth, of which classical western political economy is only one formulation among others, is one possible way of exploring medieval globality. We might usefully cast political economy not as a social science but as an example of mythopoesis. Culturally situated literary readings of modern Europe’s social science antecedents have helped make visible their distorting and obscuring teleologies.13 For example, Kathryn Sutherland has described the ‘civic moralism’ of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as a form of myth-making, the rhetorical equivalent of a free market in ‘different modes of saying, in which discourses of history, literature, anthropology, and ethical and scientific description compete and are exchanged’.14 Mike Hill and Warren Montag build on theological readings of Adam Smith, noting in his ‘invisible hand’ a benign providence at work in markets unbridled by the state, where his heroes, entrepreneurial artisans, traders and gentleman-investors, find personal moral and material enrichment through an immanent ‘oeconomy of nature’ that underwrites individual and national prosperity.15 The conventional attribution of the discovery of natural economic laws to Smith would have galled medieval Arab-Islamic scholars such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun, whose acute understandings of market forces matched his, even though they were articulated in different scriptural and moral frameworks.16 Nor should it escape our notice that ideological work on behalf of a ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative obscures the descent of Smith’s ‘oeconomy of nature’ from a Christian morality crystallized in the work of Thomas Aquinas, that itself had depended on Arabic translations of Greek philosophy.17 Giorgio Agamben has similarly traced the providential core of the political economy of Smith and his interlocutors back to the thought of Aristotle and Xenophon, to whom the term oikonomia denoted ‘household governance’. Agamben shows how the idea percolated through medieval Christian scholarship into a theology of the divine government of the world enacted through the Trinity.18 The role of the state is famously downplayed, though not wholly abandoned, in Smith’s account of governance and wealth, but is something Marx reasserts in his interpretation of primitive accumulation as a form of surplus extraction. But Marx’s use of feudalism and capitalism as developmental stages in history, and his etiolated theory of culture-politics,19 limits our view of the global varieties of political economy that existed in the pre-modern world, notwithstanding talk of Asiatic or hydraulic modes of production.20 We might suspect that other types of economic imaginary were generative of different kinds of connectedness, and that these hollowed out those globalizing tendencies and characteristics that liberal historicists are conditioned to detect and narrate, whether those of conventional political economy or its materialist critiques.21 Religions, cultures or exegetical technologies — including here writing, gift exchange and embodiment — might help us to parse the various articulations of governance and wealth that lent impulse and energy to medieval globalities. I borrow the germane phrase ‘economic imaginary’ from Tamara Chin’s recent examination of classical Confucian writings and material cultures of Han China (206 bce–220 ce). I gloss the term here as a historically situated complex of literary and material discourses productive of meta-narrative themes of theodicy, providence, governance and identity, rendering them legible, reproducible and contestable in concrete terms. Chin’s book, Savage Exchange, is a highly nuanced study of an extended moment of rumination among Han China’s ruling elite (and especially during the reign of Emperor Wu in the first century bce) over the relationship between governance and the increased economic and cultural exchange then occurring across the imperial frontier (Map 3).22 Emerging from this literature, and subsequently canonized in Chinese political culture, was the story of the ‘Tribute of Yu’, part of the Book of Documents, one of the Confucian classics.23 It detailed the ‘tributary model of imperial China’, the expression of what Chin calls ‘a hierarchical and centrally organized agricultural world order’.24 Chin crucially shows how mixed analyses of market and tributary systems were an important part of these classical reflections, and remained grounds for subsequent debate about imperial policy, despite the tributary system’s primacy as a Confucian myth of political and moral authority. The qingzhong 輕重 theorists, among them Sima Qian, argued for state control of the frontier markets through monitoring and manipulation of the money supply. These took a quantitative and market-oriented view of cross-cultural relationships between those societies the tributary model identified as ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’. The victory of tribute over more Smithian ideas had implications for normative social roles and domestic order including, for example, women’s labour in textiles. The market-oriented group upset the cultural politics of tribute through which male heads of households, by symbolically rendering grain and other agricultural produce to imperial agents, re-enacted domestic Chin here not to the modern of ideas in this literature, but rather to the of its in the economic imaginary of its is not to the origins of the European political but rather the of Han literary and material In to a model of production and Chin’s approach to the recovery of the form and of a non-European classical understanding of wealth and governance from the of the and political are the of order that by into the For the first he has traced the of in the of a political a for which from to between this and the of a over the on as a of between and noting that the idea of that with was from universal ideas of in of Both of these he imaginative to of literary the These were by the expression of political in regional that on identified by of were for local political expression between the and in and of the and in and The relationship between governance and wealth in this political economic imaginary is famously in the a on and governance by the century whose core is to a of Aristotle working at the of It a world of and on such as and and the of and in the of state and examples of its are and its ideas these and in including the of which the of is the We might be a of the influence in the of a of the of a order to and the both the and those which are The or of of between and took and the on and from his classical they to ‘a of ideas and that part of a relatively classical model of with regional and beyond the of the into as the of the first at the other of the in and of and west and and on what calls the we the of Christian and Islamic scriptural (Map These were by the institutional and of technologies and the and interpretation of through exegetical and and by the and literary among other history, and of in was a world of but also entangled in the of and These on the imperial or of governance and of wealth and were by of from and operations to and were by and of and and by production for the driven by local of and These formations and within changing and and or in the of political and almost upon by more or less in and in of knowledge, and of and to state of such as these we can to talk of of and the of medieval The economic imaginaries of medieval globality were not crystallized in religious or Nor they societies to or This the of over the of and to study of the of these entangled and that across a range of and relations in what has called a of the as in the more of trade and ideas of governance and over political and the of by at or by at the of and or the of from the to in the of Islamic from the to the were different and societies, where they were to different of and The of and exegetical technologies and material for thinking and acting that extended beyond These were and and forces and powers, and they enabled the of local across social 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scholars of have the of historical such as that of of the and of these calls these ‘a religious of the recently has out that the of such as of the which be in was to the of on to that was by a that was the and be in the of complex social for of local of to and and in a of value involving and in might be and to as to the as the effect of distance their money and in cross-cultural These were by an of from the to subsequent in with from one to the across the this as a of of two religious entangled not or and out through of and on working arrangements that in The of one such a of who was in to his is at Ibn by the in among other to the in which he was by the people of this of his These of the cultural that Abu-Lughod identified as of the medieval world system to the ways in which between on the one or the and of local of socio-economic and political and on the other the of and religious in of and, at But a of political economy at this of the economic imaginary the assumptions about the Global Middle Ages that in the of world economy and Such a reframing also us to and political and religious formations upon whose historical we have It of and and within which us to explore how people were or encouraged to with and literary and cultural how was articulated and how were through that and This chapter has offered a on the of medieval — ‘late early modern’ or we might — to for the study of such a historical historicism has or of the global pre-modern — including its various and the political of and and — such have and study of medieval can help to how the of modern political economic frameworks have entangled In these the of money production and the of markets and exchange were in a economy in which with diffuse institutions and where concrete of and divine and providence were through mixed evaluative is a productive tension in between and of these kinds of We might explore this tension through of and in the Global Middle — as they what calls a way of and the global economy as — and by exploring what calls that between global and local in which both are into and
Source: Past & Present
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gty029
Author: Simon Yarrow
Institution: University of Birmingham
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2902958575