Where is Asia in global histories of early modern capitalism?

Abstract

The concept of capitalism has enjoyed a resurgence in historical research over the past two decades, but scholarship has focused inordinately on North America, the Atlantic and Europe. This paper asks why this is the case, most especially for the early modern period once the core of Eurasian narratives of economic divergence. We argue that if narratives of capitalist transformation aspire to be global, early modern Asia offers at least three important topics for debate: 1) a new emphasis on environmental variables in histories of capitalism, rather than just on land as a factor of production; 2) a focus on human capital, skills and work rather than simply the labour of unskilled and coerced populations; and 3) a broader reconceptualization of capital, a factor that surprisingly has not been fully addressed by recent histories of capitalism. We also reckon with the reluctance of historians of Asia to embrace the term capitalism. Indeed, since the late 1990s, economic historians of Asia have been united in criticizing the application to Asia of paradigms formulated in reference to early modern European capitalism. The danger of this opposition in this is twofold: in roundabout fashion, it enshrines European exceptionalism and it marginalizes the substantial advances in the study of economic life in early modern Asia over the past generation.