Kerem Nisancioglu

What’s at Stake in the Transition Debate? Rethinking the Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West"

This article draws on the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to construct a non-Eurocentric and ‘internationalist’ analysis of the transition to capitalism. In doing so, we seek to respond to and rethink two challenges: exposures of Eurocentric notions of the ‘Rise of the West’ on the one hand; and recent critiques of Eurocentric assumptions in the theory of U&CD on the other. Beginning with an assessment of Robert Brenner’s Anglo-centric theorisation of capitalism’s origins, we argue Brenner’s efforts are hamstrung by an omission of international determinations and conditions. In turn, we retrace these missing international factors through an analysis of the Mongol invasions of the 13th/14th centuries, Ottoman imperial expansion in the 15th/16th centuries and the contemporaneous discovery and colonisation of the New World. We argue that each case demonstrates the historically specific forms of U&CD that fed into – and ultimately determined – the developmental trajectory of capitalism in north-western Europe.

The Ottoman origins of capitalism: uneven and combined development and Eurocentrism

The history of capitalisms origins is unmistakably Eurocentric, placing sixteenth-century developments in politics, economy, culture, and ideology squarely within the unique context of Europe. And while the disciplinary remit of International Relations (IR) should offer a way out of such European provincialism, it too has been built on largely Eurocentric assumptions. In Eurocentric approaches, the Ottoman Empire has been absent, passive, or merely a comparative foil against which the specificity and superiority of Europe has been defined. And yet, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most powerful actor in the Early Modern period. In this article, I argue that any history of capitalisms origins must therefore account for the historical importance of the Ottomans. In doing so, this article seeks to address the non-European blind-spot, both in theorisations of capitalisms origins and in IR theory, by reincorporating the material significance of the Ottoman Empire in historical processes, which led to the transition to capitalism. I do so by utilising the theory of Uneven and Combined Development, and in the process seek to defend its credentials as a non-Eurocentric social theory on the one hand and as a sociologically and historically sensitive theory of international relations on the other.

Counter-Conduct in the University Factory: Locating the Occupy Sussex Campaign

Deploying the Foucauldian concepts of “conduct” and “counter-conduct”, this article provides an analysis of “Occupy Sussex”—a two-month-long student occupation launched in opposition to the outsourcing of service staff at the University of Sussex. Situated in the context of a post-Fordist political economy, we argue that the British university constitutes an especial site of conduct formation—a University Factory—wherein individuals are sorted and socialised as immaterial labourers. We argue that Occupy Sussex was a reaction to such conduct formation. As such, counter-conduct is deployed as a concept that can effectively map the tactics and strategies undertaken by Occupy Sussex against the university management. Moreover, counter-conduct is used in order to trace prefigurative attempts to redefine the university within the space of the occupation—away from the University Factory, towards collective self-management, alternative understandings of the “university experience” and an emergent notion of “community”. Finally, the use of counter-conduct serves to highlight the dangers of appropriation and co-optation; how university management attempted to co-opt and thus defuse the counter-conduct of Occupy Sussex.

How Did the West Usurp the Rest? Origins of the Great Divergence over the Longue Durée

Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europes ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue duree and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britains colonization of India.

Limits of the Universal: The Promises and Pitfalls of Postcolonial Theory and Its Critique

This article seeks to reassess the potential merits and weaknesses of the Subaltern Studies project through the prism of Vivek Chibber’s much-publicised and controversial book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital . By critically examining Chibber’s work, the article aims to better pinpoint exactly what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with the Subaltern Studies project, while drawing out some productive points of engagement between Marxism and postcolonial theory more generally. In particular, we argue that an understanding of the origins of capitalist modernity remains a relatively unexplored omission within postcolonial thought that problematises their broader project of ‘provincialising Europe’. Against this backdrop, the article explores the affinities between Leon Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development and postcolonialism, demonstrating how the former can provide a theoretical solution to the problem of Eurocentrism that the Subaltern Studies project correctly identifies but inadequately conceptualises.