> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >It is anachronistic & culturalist to make capitalist rationality --
> >racialized into "European rationality" by Weber & Co. -- the cause
> >of capitalism.
>
> So do you buy Blaut's "prevailing winds" theory of the rise of
> European imperialism? Or did something happen internally in Europe
> that made primitive accumulation on a global scale possible?
Jim's argument in *The Colonizer's Model of the World* is seriously fractured, and itself lends credence to what Wood calls "The Commercialization" theory -- that commerce just "naturally" evolves into capitalism when feudal "fetters" are removed. (This connects to Yoshie's argument against the equation of priority with superiority.) But in her invocations of Jim Blaut Yoshie has *not* simply imported his whole argument but cited it selectively. Hence the focus of discussion on lbo (or pen-l) gets obscurred by taking particularities not cited from Jim's arguments.
To put it another way, Jim fails to make a distinction which Martin Bernal makes in his *Black Athena*. The first volume of that work, *regardless* of what one believes about ancient Greek history, is superb *modern* history. That is, it establishes quite well its accusations of racism (and eurocentrism) directed against classical scholarship of the last two centuries. In Vol. 2 Bernal makes a *much less* persuasive argument regarding ancient Greek history. (His attempt to redate the homeric poems is utterly unconvincing, for example.)
Though Jim did not make a similar distinction in his work (and the work suffers from it) that does not excuse readers of it from making the necessary qualifications. It is in any case more honorable to make errors of analysis in the process of fighting against eurocentrism or racism than to devote energy to excusing the racism of the vast majority of European and American scholars in almost all fields, and not just history, over the last century and a half.
And incidentally, I fail to see any remote connection between a proposition on the source of the destructive rationality of capitalism and one's view, one way or the other, of the impact of prevailing winds on history.
Carrol