Archer.Todd at ic.gc.ca wrote:
>
>
> Do you mean solely equating it with commercial activity and NOTHING else
> (not even elements of "non-commercial activity" which impinge upon it e.g.
> relationships). Is that what is meant by these adherents and this Blaut
> fellow?
>
That is the tendency -- but Jim Blaut has written some fine things as well. I am of course over-simplifying. If you access the PEN-L archives and look up the recent posts from Jim Devine & Lou Proyect you will get a fairly good feel for the debate. My own feeling is that Blaut (and Lou Proyect) replace Marxism with moralism -- and though their passionate reaction to imperialism is to be shared, I do not think that it is necessary, to oppose imperialism, to surrender one's marxism.
The major texts of the debate are as follows:
T.H. Aston & C.H.E. Philpin (eds.) _The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe_, Cambridge UP, 1985, 1987.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, _The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States_, London: Verso, 1991.
James Blaut, _The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History_, New York: Guilford Press, 1993.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, _Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism_, Cambridge UP, 1995. (The major contemporary source for my own politics.)
Ellen Meiksins Wood, _The Origin of Capitalism_, MR Press, 1999.
James Blaut, _Eight Eurocentric Historians_, New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
Michael Perelman, _The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History if Primitive Accumulation_, Duke UP, 2000.
Immanuel Wallerstein, "Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science," NLR 226 (Nov/Dec 1997), pp. 93-107. [Wallerstein is of course one of the major "worlds systems" theorists, but in this article he offers what seems to me a cogent critique of what he calls "anti-eurocentric eurocentrism."]
Ellen Meiksins Wood, "A Critique of Eurocentric Eurocentrism," _Against the Current_ (May-June, 2001), pp. 29-35.
(All these works contain extensive bibliographies.)
I would also highly recommend as pointing to the core of the disagreement though they do not touch on the topic directly, Ellen Meiksins Wood, _The Retreat from Class: a new 'true' Socialism_, Verso, 1986, Wood, _Peasant-Citizen & Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy_, Verso, 1988.
Carrol