Putting Modernity in its Place(s)

Abstract

Jack Goody’s work on the origins, spatial extent and defining characteristics of modernity has vigorously questioned claims that only European history led to assorted modern characteristics: capitalism, science, democracy, romantic love, and inwardly-motivated personal restraint. He argues that many societies which experienced the Bronze Age urban revolution share certain important material similarities (and some differences) which set them apart from others, and are best understood by constructing an analytical grid rather than categorical stages. With respect to alleged affective differences, Goody takes a more strongly relativist stance, rejecting any developmental divide in the prevalence of romantic love, internalized self-discipline, etc. These useful steps nonetheless generate new problems. One concerns the relationship between material/technical changes, which seem to suggest a few very general historical periods (one marked by early metallurgy, writing, etc., and another by the modern energy revolution), and affective traits, which have no history in this schema. A second concerns periodization itself; while agreeing that periods defined by the experience of one region (e.g. a feudal era) are usually unhelpful, some general terms (such as early modern) do seem essential for conceptualizing developments that, though less epochal than writing or fossil fuels, are nonetheless important.

The Making of a Slave-Trading Entrepôt: Rio de Janeiro in the Economic Spaces of Mining, 1565-1763

“…China drained a large volume of silver but this silver was not used as part of a coherent monetary system that allowed for com- parable financial transformations such as those found in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and eighteenth-century London. By flattening these differences, historians such as Pomeranz and Dennis Flynn have discarded the concept of capitalism itself as another Eurocentric invention (Pomeranz, 2009;Flynn, 2020). But it was precisely this sort of financial development that formed a key layer of capitalism as a historical system, as Fernand Braudel understood all too well (Braudel, 1987).…”

False binaries in management history, and the scope for a postcolonial project

“…Scholars have described modernity before as a “societal model” in terms of cross-national sets of values, norms, expectations and habits. In this sense, it has also been argued that there exist multiple versions of such societal models, including Asian modernities (Eisenstadt, 2003; Pomeranz, 2009). Bowden, in asserting modernity as a unitary societal model is also locating it within a specific historical moment.…”

Introduction: The Iberian Atlantic and the Making of the Modern World

“…Other global historians, however, such as Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez (2002), have dismissed the idea that the Atlantic comprised a specific unit within this broader history, calling instead for the analysis of what they consider to be a truly globalized market since 1571. Despite the differences between these historians, all of them dismiss the concept of capitalism as a Eurocentric invention, a theoretical step that has become very common in present-day historiography (Pomeranz, 2009;Flynn, 2020). One of the obvious dangers here is to further extend the unrepentant effort from economists to naturalize categories that are historically specific.…”