How the West Came to Rule is an ambitious book that has three related components – a critique of existing accounts of the emergence of capitalism as Eurocentric, an alternative approach based on Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development (UCD), and a series of empirical [...]
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In this post, jointly written with Kerem Nisancioglu, we want to thank the contributors to this forum as well as Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton in organising it and for posing a number of insightful and challenging questions concerning our analysis of the origins of capitalism and the [...]
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The notion of uneven and combined development (U&CD), introduced by Leon Trotsky in his assessment of the Russian political economy and the possibilities of transformation toward communism in the early 20th century, has gained increasing attention within [...]
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Every cosmology, every religion, every philosophy has its myth of creation. The monotheistic faiths have the book of Genesis, the pre-Socratic metaphysicians had their accounts of primordial forces, even modern secular science has its “big bang” [...]
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It was through the method of rational abstractions that Marx sought to delineate the formal structures of the capitalist mode of production, which informs his major aim in Capital. Except the section on primitive accumulation, his analytical object was ‘a pure [...]
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In How the West Came to Rule, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu aim ‘to subvert, and [they] hope displace, the dominant wisdom’ of analyses that focus on the historical origins of capitalist development. Stating that the dominant wisdom is so far ‘an unmistakably Eurocentric history’ [...]
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In How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism myself and Alexander Anievas tackle a foundational myth of Eurocentrism – that capitalism was the invention of a uniquely European history and culture. In Eurocentric narratives, non-Western societies have been side-lined [...]
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On Tuesday, 7 June 2016, the Marxism Reading Group of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) in the School of Politics and International Relation at the University of Nottingham/UK celebrated its tenth anniversary. To mark the event we hosted [...]
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