Asia Before Europe [review]
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Full Title: Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750? |
Professor Chaudhuri's Asia Before Europe is a treatise of phenomenal scope and erudition, advancing and surpassing the analyses and methodologies set out in his previous volumes, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1600-1760 (1978) and Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (1985). Self-consciously Braudelian, Asia Before Europe aims to import the structure of Fernand Braudel's renowned analysis of the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and thus Chaudhuri draws directly from Braudel's Capitalism and Material Life the structural categories for his own analysis. The Indian Ocean that Chaudhuri presents is an intricate ecology of production, bound together over the centuries by these deep “invariants”: maritime commerce and a shared set of cultural values, economic and social structures - in short, the Indian Ocean's longue durée.
Despite the Braudelian tenor to his work, however, what is significant about Asia Before Europe is Chaudhuri's discontent with his methodological inheritance; he seeks to transcend Braudel, with a more rigorous (id est mathematical) formulation of his methods of structural analysis. This informs his core theoretical concerns, meticulously considered in the first section: Chaudhuri seeks a sturdier justification for the geo-historical and temporal dimensions of study, one invoking Cantorian and Gödelian set theory to demarcate his inner and outer limits of discourse. In his hefty emphasis on theoretical considerations, Chaudhuri is in pursuit of no less than an entire “distinctive theory of comparative history” upon which to base his analysis. In an American Historical Review article, Ian Tyrell made an observation that inherent defects of comparative history have led to the dangerously artificial practice of setting rigidly defined national blocs in opposition with each other in order to reveal (or rather, reaffirm) national differences. Chaudhuri’s disregard for national units in deference to regional structures is refreshing and compelling; his attempt to examine the invariant “unities of discourse” – the underlying grammar rather than the statements of difference – even more so.
Although readers may find Chaudhuri’s theoretical preoccupations tedious and irrelevant, Part 2 of the book demonstrates that his theory is not simply baseless conjecture – it is more than adequately grounded in exhaustive studies of the Indian Ocean. Drawing from a breathtaking array of sources, it explores social identities through food, drink, housing, clothing, architecture, rural production, industrial production (focusing on long-distance trade materials such as textiles, glass and ceramics), and the dimensions and nature of towns and cities. His emphasis is on the continuity of the categories, or sets, that define and guide these identities. For Chaudhuri the "Indian Ocean" is a set (or rather, a “set of sets”) for which the outer limit is exceedingly arbitrary. Despite the distinct Islamic, Chinese, Southeast Asian and Hindu civilizations which constitute the region, the structural unities of trade, technology, production and material life encompassed a region far beyond the boundaries of the ocean itself. Chaudhuri’s work ranges from East Africa, the East Indies, Malaya and the subcontinent itself, to the Middle East, China and even Japan. This vast scape is surely to his Indian Ocean as the Baltic was to Braudel’s Mediterranean. In contradistinction to the bulk of preceding comparative histories, he adduces case studies and examples from each of these regional particularities in order to illustrate not the differences, but the invariant structural generalities – his unities of discourse.
Despite Chaudhuri’s own caveat at the start of his book in which he advises “non-theoretical readers” to skip straight to Part 2’s descriptive material, I believe to do so would be to end up with a crippled appreciation of just how consistently (and successfully) his theories are transferred into his historical practice. Readers may find disconcerting the lack of standard narration of social and economic processes over time; indeed, one of the criticisms I would make of Chaudhuri’s work is that it is almost too static, leaving the reader desperate for a simple sense of how Asia changed (as it must have) from the seventh century to 1750. This is perhaps a weakness of the French Annalist historical tradition in general. Nonetheless, Asia Before Europe is an important marker in extra-European history. In an age where we are beginning to question the standards by which European histories have been written and whether they are applicable to the rest of the world, Chaudhuri’s methodology, and more so his methodological self-awareness, remains an invaluable example to his successors and their future histories.