How the West Came to Rule Symposium

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 an ‘Author meets Critics’ workshop on the recently published book How the West Came to Rule (Pluto Press, 2015) by Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu (see Celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the Marxism Reading Group).

At the workshop, the two authors introduced the main argument of their book, followed by four current members of the reading group providing critical interventions and reflections. The authors then had the chance to reply, before the discussion was opened up to the floor.

We are grateful to the Progress in Political Economy blog for providing the space to reproduce the various interventions in the form of a Symposium. The running order is as follows:

1. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu – Provincialising European Capitalism.

2. Jamie Jordan – Uneven and Combined Development: Challenging the Dominant Wisdom

3. Jokubas Salyga and Kayhan Valadbaygi – Uneven and Combined Development: What role for the Super-Structural?

4. Jon Mansel – Against Eurocentrism in the Emergence and the Transcendence of Global Capitalism

5. Andreas Bieler – How the West Came to Rule? Challenging Eurocentrism

6. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu – The Being and Becoming of Capitalism

The objective of this symposium is not only to present in more detail the major achievements of this fascinating book, but also to deepen further the discussion of how to overcome Eurocentrism inherent in so much critical and non-critical scholarship on global capitalism.