How Did the West Usurp the Rest?

What is it about?

How did the West come to rule the world? This question has been at the forefront of social scientific debates since their inception. In this article, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu explore the long-term origins of the 'rise of the West' from a genuinely global perspective. Focusing in particular on developments in the 'non-Western' world shaped and re-directed social and geopolitical changes in Europe, they argue against dominant Eurocentric narratives of an internally-generated 'European miracle' and instead make way for alternative non-Eurocentric theorization of the sources of European domination.

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Why is it important?

There has been much recent debate about the potential unravelling of the centuries long Western-centred global order. This timely article by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu seeks to re-examine the origins of such order through a genuinely global account of the 'rise of the West'. In so doing, Anievas and Nisancioglu creatively build upon the idea of uneven and combined in providing a non-Eurocentric account of Europe's global ascendancy. They examine the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée, tracing 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 Anievas and Nisancioglu’s conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain's colonization of India. Given the historical scope and theoretical depth of their analysis, the article will be of interest to students of International Relations, Historical Sociology, International Political Economy, World History, and many other related fields.