The Global History of "Modernity": A Response to a Reply Author(s): David Washbrook Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 41, No. 3 (1998), pp. 295-311 Published by: BRILL Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3632416 . Accessed: 23/07/2014 15:06 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. BRILL is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-A RESPONSE TO A REPLY BY DAVID WASHBROOK (University of Oxford) Before embarkingon the unusualstep of replyingto what was, itself, an invited response,let me begin by thankingPeter van der Veer for consideringthe essays on "Modernity"and Its Contents in the Economic and Social History of the Orient,collected for the Special AnniversaryIssue of JESHO40.4 (1997), and for the many interestingquestions which he raises. As he, himself, points out, his own concernwith modernitylies largely with the West and in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies; whereas, for most of the essayists, the issue is more how the concept has affected understandingsof prior epochs and non-Western societies. Also he is suspicious of the practice of "history"itself, viewing the past more from the perspectiveof culturaltheory. It is, therefore,doubly appre- ciated that he should cast his eye over these essays from so differenta window on the world. At the same time, however, a reply from one of the original essayists may not be wholly inappropriatebecause the very differenceof his perspectivemay have created problemsof vision. In the first place, the constructionwhich he puts on our words and the way that he interpretsour argumentsleave many of us puzzled. The act of "reading"involves a sharing of language between authorand reader:it may be that the languagesof our differentdisciplines have now moved so far apart that we have difficultyin communicatingwith each other. But, and second, it is also his peremptorydismissal of our approaches, in favourof one of his own, which leaves us somewhataghast. For he fails to engage with-or apparentlyto see-the many points of criticism which our essays would raise with the position that he adopts.Indeed, far from offeringa critiqueof "the projectof modernity,"as he claims, from our position his argu- ments have more the effect of continuingit-albeit now from a power-centre differentlylocated on the "globe." To begin with the issues of misunderstanding,van der Veer's renditionof the argumentsof Veenhof,Eyre, Andaya and Washbrookis most curious.Their views of pre-modernhistory are held to reflect "the sense of many roads lead- @ KoninklijkeBrill NV, Leiden, 1998 JESHO41,3 This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 296 DAVID WASHBROOK ing to Rome":"to find characteristicsof modernity,especially in the sphere of mercantilism,which lead to the same economic developmentas in the modern West... in a numberof cases, the conditions for modernityare shown to be fulfilled and, subsequently,the argumentgoes onto show how what was poten- tially available did not, in the end, yield the same end-resultas in the West. Some of this has difficultyin escaping the depressingmodernist language of 'failure' and 'lack'."') But, in the first place, Veenhof's discussion is of ancient Assyrian tradeand Eyre's of ancient Egyptian land tenures:does van der Veer seriously believe that they are implying the possibilities,even "failed"possibilities, of industrial capitalismthree thousandyears ago or see "the roots" of the moderneconomy reachingback to ancienttimes? Their own words do not say it. Indeed,Eyre's explicitly deny it: "Behind[my] analysis lies a rejectionof the assumptions... of a Social Darwinism that envisages a progression of modernisations or "development"as an issue of historicalsociology."2) In Washbrook'scase, the imputationis no less hard to understand.Van der Veer links it to his usage of the term "proto-capitalism"3)without, apparently,noticing that he offers an ex- tended critique of the concept, precisely because of its teleology, and seeks alternative,more contingent,ways of explaining some of the phenomenaheld to constitutemodernity.4) Both Eyre and Washbrookare, in fact, disputingthe meaning and utility of the concept of modernityin history and the social sci- ences: not providingit with historicistgenealogies. The second area where his response to our essays causes puzzlementcon- cerns his objectionto their notion of a series of somewhatdistinctive "moder- nities"-Islamic, Chinese and SoutheastAsia-developing across the world in the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies, which features especially in the works of Lapidus,Zurndorfer and Andaya. He argues that this obscures"the unique- ness and power of Europeanmodernity" and prefers, instead, a formulation which would see there to be only one (Western)modernity, outside which other societies may have different"histories."5) Where this distinctionshows itself, par- ticularly,is with the three authors'emphases on the way that received cultural traditionsand/or local political imperatives patterneddifferent regional con- structionsof modernity.For van der Veer, such apparentdifferences, especially as manifestedin revivalist-and neo-traditionalisms,are betterseen as subsumed 1) van der Veer 1998, p. 286. 2) Eyre 1997 p. 386. 3) van der Veer 1998, p. 286. 4) Washbrook 1997, pp. 412-13. 5) van der Veer 1998, p. 285. This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE GLOBALHISTORY OF "MODERNITY"-ARESPONSE TO A REPLY 297 within the universalising(or colonising) logic of Europeanmodernity itself- apparently,because they have to take place within the European-imposedterms of the state/civil society paradigm.Genuine difference with modernEurope can lie only in the "histories"experienced beyond those terms. But, in the firstplace, none of the essayistsdisputes the pointthat, in the mod- ern era, most societies in the world-certainly those that they study-have been subjectedto powerfuluniversalising and homogenisingforces from Europe.Nor do they disputethat these forces have been involved in framingthe criticallim- its within which experiencesof modernityoperate: the modern state, engage- ment with a trans-nationalcapitalist system, exposure to a globalised culture, even the re-generationof "neo-traditions."Whatever happens inside the mod- ern world is confinedby these conceptualschema. However, the questionsthat principallyconcern them are why is it that experiencesof modernitybetween non-Europeansocieties have been so very different,why have they adopted/ adaptedto its imperativesin such variegatedways and what have been the con- sequences of these differences? These are scarcely questions which can be swept aside in view of the very importantimplications which answersto them have for the peoples living inside these societies themselves-answers which literallymean the differencebetween life and death.But it is not clear how they might be pursuedfrom van der Veer's own position. He offers two differentapproaches to understandingnon-European societies' experiences of modernity:the first suggesting that their specificitiesmight be seen as direct functionsof Europeanmodernity itself, particularlyits tendency to generate"neo-traditionalist" ideologies.6) However, he does not elaborateand it must be worthnoting that all the several previousattempts to explain"periph- eral" specificities simply in terms of Euro-generatedfunctions have ended in what most scholarsthese days would regardas failure.The "underdevelopment" theoryof A.G. Frankand the "worldsystems theory" of ImmanuelWallerstein no longer possess much credibility:their empiricalweaknesses being compounded by tendencies,in practice,to become so convolutedthat it ceases to be clear what they are trying to explain.7)We must await, with interest,van der Veer's new, unstated(and presumably cultural) theory of unilinealEuropean determinacy but, in the interim,we may be entitled to remainsceptical. His second approachproposes that non-Europeansocieties should be seen (solely?) in terms of the way that Europeanmodernity "clashes with other his- 6) "... another part of the [modern] project is to invent a traditionthrough which modern culture is naturalized and nationalized. This is happening simultaneously in the colonial metropoles and the colonies... " van der Veer 1998, p. 292. 7) Washbrook 1990. This content downloaded from 164.73.224.2 on Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:06:16 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 298 DAVIDWASHBROOK torical forms of social life and governmentality":8)they shouldbe seen in terms of the negation of modernity.This approachdraws on postcolonial theories which posit an "Alterity"in the consciousnessof non-Europeanpeoples, which lies beyond the terms of modernityand providesthe basis for alternativeforms