JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND

DEVELOPMENT (pre-publication draft, published online

April 13, 2018)

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0146-0

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41268-018-0146-0

Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism: International

Relations, Historical Sociology and Political Marxism
Eren Duzgun

Abstract The critique of Eurocentrism has become one of the main benchmarks for
critical scholarship in International Relations (IR). Unsurprisingly, the effort to
overcome Eurocentric conceptions of world history has been at the forefront of the
bourgeoning subfield of International Historical Sociology (IHS). In many anti-
Eurocentric theorisations of IHS, Political Marxist approaches to world his-tory
have been posited as counter-models imbued with methodological ‘internalism’ and
Eurocentrism. In this article, I critically re-evaluate the extent to which IHS has
remedied the problem of Eurocentrism. Furthermore, I argue that the conventional
critique of Political Marxism (PM) is largely off the mark and, indeed, IHS in gen-
eral and the theory of Uneven and Combined Development in particular need PM to
deepen the international sociological imagination and deliver a non-hierarchical
reading of world history.

Keywords Eurocentrism · International Historical Sociology · International

Relations · Political Marxism · Uneven and combined development

Over the past three decades much effort has gone into advancing Historical Soci-
ology as a critical approach to International Relations (IR) (Hobden and Hobson
2002; Halliday 1999; Lacher 2006; Matin 2013; Buzan and Lawson 2015; Linklater
1990; Teschke 2005; Rosenberg 1994; Morton 2007; Van der Pijl 2007; Knafo
2013; Zarakol 2011). Historical sociological approaches to IR (HSIR) have ena-
bled a ‘thicker’ conception of the ‘international’, which, in turn, has not only deep-
ened our understanding of the socio-temporally changing character of international
Duzgun

interactivity, but has also served as a panacea for the indisputably Eurocentric foun-
dations of much of social and international theory (Buzan and Little 2000; Hobson
2012). As the ‘international’ has gained historical-sociological depth, thereby going
beyond the timelessness of ‘anarchy’, it has disturbed the Eurocentric conceptions
regarding the origin of the modern present, revealing IR’s ontological exclusion of
non-Western agency in the constitution and reproduction of world order (Inayatul-
lah and Blaney 2004; Jahn 2000). Indeed, over the last decade, the rapprochement
between Historical Sociology and International Relations has generated a new sub-
field, i.e. International Historical Sociology (IHS), which has posed even a more
powerful challenge to Eurocentrism. By attempting to theorise systematically the
social aspect of the international and the international aspect of the social, IHS has
presented an ontological alternative to Eurocentric theorisations of world history
that read back Western dominance in history and privilege the ‘West’ as the sole
progenitor of the present international order (Matin 2013; Anievas and Nisancioglu
2015; Anievas and Matin 2016).
IHS has drawn upon a variety of theoretical schools and contributed to a variety
of debates.1 Methodologically, however, what is hinted at by the IHS project in
general is a distinct mode of theorisation that is free from what may be called
methodological presentism and methodological internalism (e.g. Hobson 2002;
Rosenberg 2013; see also Buzan and Little 2010). Methodological presentism
relates to the awareness that much social and international theory tends to view the
past in terms of the present, thereby naturalising and extrapolating back in time the
structure and logic of the present international order. The critique of presentism is,
in turn, firmly connected to the critique of ‘methodological internalism’. For, by
assuming the existence of autonomously and endogenously developing societies in
history, ‘internalist’ models of development abstract the ‘social’ from its wider
international context. This, in turn, reads back in time the hierarchies that constitute
the present international system as well as perpetuates the false image of bounded
societies. Indeed, it is this combined critique of presentism and internalism that has
put IHS at the centre of attempts to develop a non-Eurocentric theorisation of world
history. Several IHS scholars have sought to overcome the naturalisation and
transhistoricisation of ‘Western’ dominance in the international system,
deconstructing the notion of ‘Western’ superiority and priority by granting greater
agency to the non-West in the constitution of the modern present (Hobson 2004,
2012; Shilliam 2009a; Tansel 2015; Anievas and Matin 2016).
In this article, I will concentrate my focus on Marxist IHS and ask to what extent
the existing Marxist approaches have succeeded in fulfilling the task IHS has set
out for itself, namely to solve the problem of Eurocentrism on the basis of a non-
presentist and non-internalist theorisation of IR. The article proceeds in five steps.
In section one, I provide a review and critique of postcolonial theory and the Cali-
fornia school in order to specify the ways in which IHS departs from other non-
Eurocentric approaches to world history and IR. Furthermore, I argue that the pre-
sent Marxist contributions to the formation of a non-Eurocentric IHS, despite their

1 For an overview, see Hobson et al. (2010).

Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

ontological complexity, fall back into a form of presentism by reading back the logic
and dynamics of the present economic order, i.e. capitalism. They spatially and
temporally extend the ‘preconditions’ and ‘determinations’ of the rise of capitalism.
Capitalism is no longer seen as something unique to the West, i.e. its ‘pre-conditions’
and ‘determinations’ are extended both in time and space in an effort to trace the non-
Western ‘contributions’ to the rise of capitalism. I contend that this form of anti-
Eurocentrism, in fact, reproduces hierarchical readings of world history, hence
undermining the very objective that IHS seeks to realise. In sections two to four, I take
an unconventional tack to reinvigorate anti-Eurocentrism in IHS. I turn to Political
Marxism (PM), which is perhaps one of the most commonly criticised approaches to
global history for its Eurocentrism and methodological internalism. I show that the
critiques of PM are, by and large, off the mark, and indeed IHS, when underpinned by
PM, provides a better foundation for a non-Eurocentric theorisation of world historical
development. In conclusion, I provide a summary as well as I sketch some wider
theoretical implications of my overall argument.

Anti‑Eurocentrism reconsidered: International Historical

Sociology and the issue of presentism
More than two decades ago, one of the founders of modern global history opined
that ‘[a]ll our modern attempts at understanding world history’ are underlined by a
series of assumptions based on the image of ‘distinct societies, distinct culture
worlds, each with its own inner unity and with only external relations to the others’.
The scholar concluded that ‘as long as we do not radically overhaul our historical
categories […] we find ourselves dragged back by older [Eurocentric] preconcep-
tions’ (Hodgson 1993, pp. 10–11, 7). Clearly Hodgson’s remarks echo IHS’s call
for a distinct methodology for a non-Eurocentric IR, i.e. a method that does not read
back the socio-spatial parameters of the contemporary international order and is
able to capture the inter-societal constitution of the origins of the modern pre-sent.
For, from an IHS angle, IR suffers severely from methodological internalism and
methodological presentism, which together underlie the empirical absence and
theoretical exclusion of the non-West from world politics. Narratives underlined by
internalism and presentism privilege the West systematically as the ‘proactive’ and
‘pristine’ subject of world history, while pushing the non-West to the margins as
‘passive bearers’ of Western socio-economic structures (Hobson 2012). Thus, most
approaches in IR, partly due to these methodological shortcomings (and partly due
to the discipline’s organic links to Western power structures (Vitalis 2015; Tickner
and Waever 2009) obscure systematically the place and role of the non-Western
world in the theory and practice of IR, and are hence inherently antithetical to the
formation of an ontologically plural and non-Eurocentric understanding of the ori-
gins of the modern international system (Matin 2013, p. 9).
Within the wider literature on Eurocentrism, postcolonialism poses, arguably, one of
the strongest theoretical challenges to the systematic degradation of non-Western
agency in world history. Postcolonial theory (particularly its ‘subaltern’ variants that
take Marxism as one of their primary interlocutors) rejects ‘any universalist
\ Duzgun

narratives of capital’ by positing the contested and heterogeneous formation of

global capitalist institutions and practices as constitutive of colonial modernity. By
registering the spatio-temporally differentiated nature of capitalist social relations,
postcolonial theory invokes ‘difference’ and ‘interconnectedness’ as ontological
conditions, thereby conceptualising capitalist modernity away from cultural particu-
larism and a homogenising universalism (Chakrabarty 2000, pp. 9–21, 70, 85). In a
similar vein, postcolonial theory in IR, approaching the question of historical
difference, has sought to repudiate Eurocentrism by registering the contested,
multilinear and spatially interactive experience of global modernity. Postcolonial
theorists of IR have called into question the conventional narratives of the
expansion of modern international society, bringing in the processes of Western
imperialism and colonialism in the constitution of geocultural binaries and
dichotomies (e.g. Seth 2011; Shilliam 2009a; Bhambra 2011). As such, postcolonial
scholars have not only suc-cessfully contested the Eurocentric roots of such key IR
concepts as ‘sovereignty’, ‘balance of power’ and ‘security’ (e.g. Bilgin 2010;
Grovogui 2002; Barkawi and Laffey 2006), but have also provided a fertile
intellectual ground for reconstructing IR as a truly global discipline (Acharya 2014;
Tickner and Waever 2009).
In this respect, postcolonial theory shares many affinities with IHS, especially in
terms of its endeavour to depart from internalism and to highlight the constitutive role
played by the non-European actors in the formation of global modernity. Yet, two
important differences remain. First, IHS scholars (Marxists and non-Marxists alike)
claim to be departing more decisively from internalism and engaging more
systematically and comprehensively with the question of the ‘international’. That is,
although most postcolonial theory is underwritten by an explicitly internationalist
critique, its proponents have not offered an alternative general theoretical framework for
investigating international connections and differences (Buzan and Lawson 2015,
pp. 59–60, 330; Matin 2013, p. 2; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015, pp. 39–42). Sec-
ond, while postcolonial approaches tend to take the origins of the ‘European mira-
cle’ at face value, IHS problematises it. For example, Anievas and Nisancioglu
argue that postcolonial theory suffers from a ‘lack of any substantive engagement
with the question of how capitalism emerged and developed in Europe’, which, in
turn, limits the ability to provide a non-Eurocentric and truly multilinear history of
modernity. They insist that ‘in order to truly “provincialise” Europe we must dissect
European history itself, and there is no more central myth to be dissected than that
of narrating European history around the history of capitalism’ (Anievas and
Nisancioglu 2015, p. 40). This echoes Kamran Matin’s critique that postcolonial
theory successfully reveals the differentiated, hybrid and ambivalent character of
colonial modernity, yet it ‘does not account for, or even address, the initial
crystallization of […] capital in Europe’ (Matin 2011, p. 364).
In this sense, deconstructing the myth of the European miracle is central to the IHS
project. This, in turn, makes IHS comparable to another anti-Eurocentric approach
commonly known as the California school. The California school has sought to
dismantle the Eurocentric assumptions about the rise of Europe by empha-sising the
historical existence of proto-capitalist tendencies in the non-Western world. James
Blaut, for example, has argued that there was nothing ‘unique’ about Western Europe
before 1492, different expressions of ‘proto-capitalism’, such as
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

commercial agriculture, monetised rent and long-distance trade, existed in most

parts of Asia and Africa; therefore, they must be considered to have fostered ‘the
same potential for evolution towards capitalism’ (Blaut 1993, pp. 160–165). In a
similar vein, Kenneth Pomeranz contends that well-developed commercial actors
and institutions were equally present in the ‘core’ areas of Asia (primarily China)
and the core areas of Western Europe (primarily England), which experienced ‘very
similar processes of commercialisation and proto-industrial growth’ before 1800
(Pomeranz 2000, pp. 16–24). The implication is that according to the California
school market dynamics, market actors and market rationality alone cannot be used
to explain the final ‘divergence’ of the West from the non-West. Blaut and
Pomeranz eventually concur that capitalism in the West would have never ‘taken
off’ without the ‘extra-economic advantages’ which other parts of the world did not
have, such as the relative proximity of colonial/natural resources, favourable ‘trade
winds’ and so on (Blaut 1993, pp. 180–182; Pomeranz 2000, pp. 437–445).
While the California school has been praised by Marxist IHS scholars for its vig-our
to overcome Eurocentrism, it has been found wanting in one important respect. IHS
criticises the California school for falling into a presentist mode of explanation.
According to Anievas and Nisancioglu (2015, pp. 249, 224), for example, the Cali-
fornia school simply stretches the spatial reach of, rather than contests, the teleological
view that capitalism is the outcome of the ‘unimpeded’ growth of wealth, trade and
commercial actors. Capitalism is treated as present in the age-old practices of exchange,
which, in turn, ‘results in a transhistorical extension, and thus a naturalization of
capitalism’s existence’. One may argue that Marxist IHS’s defiance of such presentist
conceptions of the origin of capitalism resembles Robert Brenner’s long-standing
critique of ‘Neo-Smithian’ conceptions of the origins of capitalism (more on this
below). Yet, Marxism in IHS also claims to depart from Robert Brenner (whom they
charge with internalism) by bringing in ‘“extra-European” geopolitical conditions and
forms of agency conducive to capitalism’s emergence as a distinctive mode of
production’ (ibid., pp. 5–6). According to Marxist IHS scholars, what is needed is a
‘horizontally integrative approach’ that combines the ‘historical specificity’ of the
origins of capitalism with the wider inter-societal and extra-economic conditions
shaping Europe’s transition to capitalism (Matin 2013, p. 55; see also Anievas and
Nisancioglu 2015, pp. 220, 246; Tansel 2015, pp. 81–82).
From a Marxist IHS angle, therefore, what is at stake for a non-Eurocentric nar-rative
of world history is a non-presentist and spatio-temporally extended history of
capitalism’s origins. No doubt, one of the most sophisticated attempts in IHS seek-ing to
challenge the presumed ‘pristine-ness’ of European modernity is the work of Anievas
and Nisancioglu (2015). Anievas and Nisancioglu use the theory of ‘uneven and
combined development’ (UCD) to re-conceptualise the origins and development of
capitalist modernity in Western Europe. This theoretical framework is predicated on the
idea that inter-societal ‘unevenness’, which is inherent in the condition of societal
multiplicity, leads to a continuous process of inter-societal ‘combination’. That is,
pressures generated by inter-societal ‘unevenness’ compel ‘less developed’ societies to
learn from and ‘combine’ with local social resources the best aspects of more
‘advanced’ societies. As a result, less developed societies, if they do not become extinct,
can selectively imitate and possibly surpass more developed
\ Duzgun

societies that are constrained by existing social structures. Thus, the condition of
inter-societal unevenness initiates inter-societal comparisons that lead to the launch-
ing of ‘substitute’ development projects and the creation of novel combined forms
and political orders. All this ultimately result in the emergence of an infinite
number of ‘combinations’ of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’, which, in turn, reacts
back on the ‘international’, leading to the transformation of the initial conditions of
uneven-ness. At a conceptual level, then, recovering the uneven and combined
character of world historical development accomplishes two things. First, it
systematically integrates the ‘international’ into the explanation of the social (and
vice versa), thereby defying internalist conceptions of social change. Second, it
activates a historically and sociologically dynamic conception of the ‘international’,
which, by definition, enables a multilinear and non-presentist narrative of the
transition to modernity. For, by stressing the historically accumulating and
sociologically amalgamated character of international relations, UCD uncovers the
changing rules of entering modernity, thereby countering one-dimensional and
unilinear conceptions of the origin and development of the modern world order.
Read together, UCD, underlined by non-internalism and non-presentism, has a
potential to ‘eschew both Eurocentric notions of an internally generated “European
miracle” and the linear developmentalism supposedly marking each and every
society’s transition to capitalist modernity’ (ibid., p. 122).
Anievas and Nisancioglu utilise UCD to dismantle ‘any kind of “stylized and
abstracted” conceptions of Western European development (ibid., p. 55). More spe-
cifically, they show how non-Western societies/powers acted as ‘preconditions’ and
‘determinations’ of the rise capitalism in Western Europe from the very outset, i.e.
how they commercially/technologically/demographically ‘contributed’ to or geopo-
litically ‘conditioned’ the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe (ibid., pp. 52,
67, 72, 94, 117, emphasis added). For example, the authors argue that the 13th cen-
tury Mongolian expansion and the resultant unification of the Eurasian landmass
under the Mongol rule revitalised intercontinental commercial linkages and urban
sites, while facilitating the diffusion of the scientific inventions and military tech-
niques of the advanced Asian societies to relatively ‘backward’ Europe. Equally
important, the Mongols caused the transmission of ‘diseases’ from the East to the
West, thereby indirectly causing the demographic collapse of Western European
populations (the ‘Black Death’), which was central to the eventual emergence of
capitalist social relations. For the demographic transformation brought about by the
Black Death engendered a new balance of class forces and socio-institutional inno-
vations that would facilitate the end of feudalism and the emergence of capitalist
modernity. All combined,
the Mongol Empire provided the propitious geopolitical conditions for the
extensive development of market relations, trade, urban growth, and per-haps
most importantly an increasingly complex division of labour in Western
Europe—the latter constituting an integral aspect of the development of the
productive forces. To be clear, this did not automatically entail the advent of
capitalist relations of production, but it did provide the preconditions for their
subsequent emergence. (Ibid., pp. 75, emphasis added)
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

From this angle, then, the so-called European ‘miracle’ was not ‘European’ per
se, but a ‘combined’ outcome of the interaction and ‘contribution’ of multiple and
‘unevenly’ developed societies. By questioning the ‘internalist’ and ‘presentist’
conceptions of European history, Anievas and Nisancioglu have come some way in
illuminating the spatial multiplicity involved in the origins of the rise of Europe.
Nevertheless, in my view, they fall back into hierarchical readings of world history,
for they have not provided a full-on critique of methodological presentism. That is,
Anievas and Nisancioglu, in their historical exposition, fail to deliver a non-presen-
tist account of the transition to capitalism. Despite their critique of the approaches
that presume capitalism from the very outset, their historical narrative tends to
extrapolate back in time the logic and imperatives of the present economic order,
i.e. capitalism, in order to explain its origins and development. This is partly caused
by the stretching of the concept of uneven and combined development. As alluded
to earlier, there are some concepts central to the theory of UCD, such as ‘the
privilege of backwardness’, ‘the whip of external necessity’ and ‘substitution’. Less
developed societies, ‘under the whip of external necessity’, attempt to catch up with
more advanced societies by adopting selectively the latter’s developmental
dynamics. If they survive this process, they can turn their historical backwardness
into a ‘privilege’: they are compelled and enabled to adopt ‘whatever is ready in
advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages’
(Trotsky, quoted in Matin 2013, p. 18). Meanwhile, less developed societies
mobilise the existing insti-tutions to execute novel tasks, and through this process
of ‘substitution’, these societies attempt to make up for the institutions and relations
that, while available to the geopolitical enemy, are missing at home. Substitution
(and combined development) thus points to a process in which a geopolitical enemy
becomes a teacher, showing the kinds of transformations that would facilitate a
‘catch-up’ (e.g. Matin 2013, p. 19; Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015, p. 50). The point
is that, if UCD is at least partly about the transformation of a geopolitical ‘foe’ into
a ‘mentor’, processes of inter-societal comparison and inter-societal learning
constitute the heart of ‘combined development’. ‘Combined development’,
therefore, is not about international inter-activity per se, but possesses an
international aspect in so far as it is prompted by the act of inter-societal
comparison and inter-societal learning (cf. Shilliam 2009b, p. 18).
UCD, as such, has the potential to provide a plausible theoretical framework to
expound the emergence of substitution projects in competition with capitalism (such as
socialism and jacobinism) as well as the (geo)politically driven and sociologically
differentiated expansion of capitalist social relations (e.g. Duzgun 2017b, 2018; Matin
2013; Shilliam 2009b). Yet, a serious problem arises when UCD is applied to explain
capitalism’s birth. For, if UCD, by definition, entails a process of inter-societal
comparison, learning and substitution, UCD’s application to the question of capitalism’s
origins presupposes an intentional process of learning, contributing to and inventing
capitalism, which, in turn, lets the spectre of presentism back into Anievas and
Nisancioglu’s narrative. That is, the theory of UCD presupposes that, over time,
different societies either gradually learned, re-shaped, passed on to one another different
ingredients (be it demographic, commercial or geopolitical) necessary for the final
emergence of capitalism, or, in the course of combining
\ Duzgun

pre-existing and foreign modes of life, they ‘invented’ capitalism as a substitute for
competing forms of societal organisation, say absolutist or tributary systems. Either
way, UCD introduces an overdose of intentionality and transhistoricism to the
analysis of capitalism’s origins (Lacher 2015). For example, only through this
implicit transhistoricism, i.e. only when one assumes a necessary and transhistorical
connection between commercial, demographic and technological factors on the one
hand, and capitalism on the other, can Anievas and Nisancioglu deem the
incremental, cross-civilisational and long-range accumulation of these factors as
‘contributions’ to, ‘determinants’ of, and ‘preconditions’ for the birth of capitalism.
What is overlooked by the proponents of UCD is that capitalism’s birth was too
unnatural a break in human history to be understood as a learned or invented
combination. Capitalism was fundamentally different from past forms of societal
organisation; it could not emerge as a result of a mere modification of pre-existent
socio-economic patterns, nor could it be simply invented as a substitute project of
rationalisation. Whereas in all non-capitalist societies, whether hierarchically or
communally organised, social reproduction was a direct derivation of the relations of
dependence constitutive of the community, capitalism completely broke ‘the natural
unity of labor with its material presuppositions’ (Marx 1993, p. 471), i.e. it separated
human existence from its previous communal/political functions, subjecting social
reproduction to a (seemingly) autonomous market mechanism of supply and demand of
‘things’. In a ‘market society’, as distinct from ‘societies with markets’, social relations
are ‘embedded’ in the market, rather than, as has been the case in a multiplicity of ways
for millennia, the market embedded in social relations (Polanyi 1977). In short,
capitalism was a fundamentally unanticipated system in human his-tory, whose origins
cannot be understood as a cumulative, learned, contribution-based or invented
phenomenon. Anievas and Nisancioglu, applying UCD to the question of the origins of
capitalism, tend to obscure the unprecedentedness of this qualitative rupture and, by
doing so, they risk the transhistoricisation of capitalism. Although they claim to depart
from the presentist explanations of capitalism’s emergence (Anievas and Nisancioglu
2015, pp. 224, 249), their theoretical framework remains non-congruent with a non-
presentist reading of the origins of capitalism.
Unsurprisingly, once capitalism is transhistoricised, a problematic understanding
of causality prevails, which runs the risk of turning every past event into a neces-
sary ‘precondition’ for the rise of capitalism. In other words, presentism, built into
this mode of explanation, leads to transhistoricisation and ‘everything-isation’ of
the preconditions of capitalism’s emergence. If we follow Anievas and Nisancioglu
in the literal sense, for example, one wonders if, say, climatic conditions and
overgrazing in Central Asia, two factors often said to have spurred Mongol
conquests, could also be considered a ‘precondition’ for the rise of capitalism in
Western Europe. Surely, this would be a strange argument, yet it is still not clear
whether such an argument would necessarily be in conflict with the kind of
causality advanced by Anievas and Nisancioglu.
One grave implication follows the persistence of methodological presentism in
International Historical Sociology. Such a ‘contribution-based’ anti-Eurocentrism
cannot but continue to hierarchically provincialise the world in terms of geopoliti-
cal/commercial/intellectual contributions to the rise of capitalism. That is, no matter
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

how IHS tries to overcome Eurocentrism, either by emphasising the non-Western

‘contributions’ to European commerce, technologies and institutions or capitalism’s
non-Western ‘geopolitical determinations’, the only way for IHS to be truly non-
Eurocentric is by showing that everyone equally conditioned or contributed to the
origin of capitalism. Given the impossibility of equal contributions, IHS is bound to
produce ‘deviant’ historical cases. Therefore, although IHS scholars increase the
number of regions/areas, which they consider ‘contributed’ to the origin of capi-
talism, they inevitably reproduce hierarchical readings of world history. They offer
a non-Eurocentric history only by creating new spatial hierarchies. 2 Relatedly, by
trying to narrate an all-inclusive history of the transition to capitalism, i.e. a narra-
tive purporting that everyone ‘contributed’ or ‘could have contributed’ to the rise of
capitalism, non-Eurocentric accounts implicitly reproduce perhaps the most Euro-
centric assumption that capitalism represents a superior and better mode of organis-
ing human relations, so that everyone must have contributed to its rise (Wood 2001;
Lacher 2015; see also Wallerstein 1997). Radical as it may seem, anti-
Eurocentrism, as such, turns into a self-defeating exercise.
Without overcoming presentism, therefore, theorising an anti-Eurocentric IHS is
bound to remain a stillborn attempt. In other words, pondering the problem of geo-
spatial differentiation in terms of the transhistorical preconditions and determina-
tions of capitalist development inevitably reproduces hierarchical readings of world
history. If documenting the non-Western ‘contributions’ to capitalism proves to be
a counter-productive exercise, the first step to overcoming Eurocentrism must be to
conceptualise the origin of capitalism away from its transhistorical precursors. For a
truly non-Eurocentric Marxist IHS, we need to challenge the view that capitalism
emerged once certain European, non-European or universal human resources/tech-
nologies/abilities accumulated. Only when we develop an alternative approach to
IHS that systematically sterilises the origins and rise of capitalism from teleological
assumptions, can we can step out of the Eurocentric cage.
Above all, then, Marxist IHS fails to deliver a non-Eurocentric theory, precisely
because it does not sufficiently abide by the methodological underpinnings of the
original IHS project. What is needed for a truly ‘historical’ international historical
sociology is a method that advances the critique of internalism while completely
dispensing with presentism (cf. Lawson and Hobson 2008). This is to say, the way
out of the Eurocentric dead-end rests not on the rather fruitless addition of another
case study said to have somehow contributed to the rise of capitalism, but on
challenging the view that capitalism is a natural and necessary category of human
development, growing out of pre-existent social patterns. Saving IR from
Eurocentrism is thus closely linked to our ability to reassert both the historical
specificity of capitalism’s emergence as well as the inter-societal character of world
historical development. In the next section, I argue that Political Marxism, despite
being persistently charged with internalism and Eurocentrism, has the potential to
set up a truly historical and non-hierarchical account of world historical
development, thereby constituting a key to revitalising the original IHS project.

2 I owe this argument to Hannes Lacher (2009, personal communication).

\ Duzgun

What is wrong with Political Marxism? From economic

determinism to internalism?
Political Marxism (PM) was born in the 1970s as a reaction to economic deter-
minism prevalent in conventional Marxist and non-Marxist accounts of the transi-
tion to capitalism. Based on Marx’s later writings, Robert Brenner, the founder of
PM, developed a narrative of the transition to capitalism which does not take for
granted the existence of a transhistorical economic logic in order to explain
capitalism’s origins (Brenner 1985a). From a Political Marxist angle, the mere
existence of commercial classes, wage labour or private property cannot be taken as
necessary precursors of capitalism, for all these phenomena can be dated back to
ancient societies and are far too general, telling us little about the relational content
and societal context of productive activity. Undoubtedly, this is not to deny that
capitalism increases the volume of production, commerce and the size of a
commodifiable workforce; yet, from a Political Marxist angle, taking these as
necessary indicators of the beginning of capitalism would simply collapse capi-
talism’s consequences into its causes (Wood 1999, pp. 176–177; Brenner 1977, p.
52). In this respect, according to PM, the transition to capitalism cannot be
understood as the quantitative extension of any ‘economic’ phenomena, but is best
understood in terms of socially and temporally varying ways of organising human
relations and the institutions that produce the historically specific impact of ‘market
dependence’ (Wood 2002b ). Put differently, the transitions to capital-ism did not
follow a universal pattern, but all transitions, in principle, presuppose a strategic
political intervention into the traditional conditions of subsistence and the
elimination of non-market survival strategies (Brenner 1985a , p. 20). By focusing
on the political/legal/institutional moment of the origin of capitalism, therefore, PM
diverts our attention from transhistorical phenomena usually con-sidered as
‘preconditions’ to the birth of capitalism such as commerce, wealth or wage labour.
It argues that only when people are enabled/compelled to depend on the market for
their means of subsistence, they are systematically forced and enabled to alter the
conditions of production, increase ‘the ratio of unpaid labor to paid’ and to shape
the space and scale of production according to nothing else, but the requirements of
profitability and competitiveness (Post 2013). As such, capitalism as market-
dependence does not presume capitalism to be there from the very beginning, but
explains capitalism’s rise through the interventions into the political and
institutional structure governing social reproduction.
Clearly, PM is not alone in its attempt to overcome the economistic models of
capitalist transition. Historical materialist scholars, in particular, make simi-lar
arguments, and indeed most Marxist IHS scholars acknowledge the relevance of
Political Marxism’s emphasis on the specificity of capitalism (e.g. Anievas and
Nisancioglu 2015, p. 21; Matin 2013, pp. 48–49; Morton 2007, pp. 44–45;
Rosenberg 1994, pp. 84–85). Given the shared awareness that capitalism is not an
attribute of human nature, one would also expect to see a broad consensus that
capitalism has to have a spatial and temporal beginning. Yet, surprisingly, this is
precisely where the contention arises. As PM turns to specify the birthplace
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

of capitalism, England, it has been persistently criticised for being Eurocentric or,
to be more precise, for being Anglocentric. For example, it has been argued that
PM, with an exclusive focus on England, subscribes to the assumption of ‘self-
contained entities’ as its ‘ontological starting point’ (Shilliam 2009b, p. 13), thereby
reproducing the problematic view that ‘posits a world historical centre from which
developments diffuse outwards’ (Bhambra 2011, pp. 127–28). Like-wise, Kamran
Matin argues that by focusing on ‘internal processes of class strug-gle’ PM has
rendered ‘intersocietal relations tangential to class relations’, i.e. in PM ‘the state
and therefore interstate relations are subordinated to “class” both theoretically and
analytically’ (Matin 2013, p. 53). Similarly, Anievas and Nisan-cioglu (2015, p. 14)
write that PM, underlined by an internalist methodology, is unable to examine the
relationship between the making of capitalism and geopoli-tics. PM, as such, not
only erases the causal significance of colonialism, imperi-alism and slavery in the
rise of capitalism (Rioux 2014, p. 122), but also ‘casts a myopic theory within
which universal categories could only offer explanatory utility vis-a-vis Western
Europe’ (Tansel 2015, pp. 81–82).
In short, Political Marxism’s effort to overcome economic determinism seems to
have come at the expense of a non-Eurocentric worldview. In other words, PM seems to
have jumped from the frying pan of ‘economism’ into the fire of internalism and
Eurocentrism. All that said, however, when one further dissects the critique levelled
against Political Marxism, a rather ambivalent aspect arises, which makes the charge of
internalism more ambiguous than it appears. Despite all the talk of internalism, for
example, Matin notes that Brenner’s account is not about ‘class’ only, but has a
tendency to move from ‘internalism’ towards ‘internationalism’, i.e. it implicitly
recognises the importance of military conquest and territorial conflicts in the rise of
English capitalism. As such, he concludes, ‘[c]uriously enough Brenner’s explana-tion
rests on essentially international factors’ (Matin 2013, p. 53). The ‘curious’ case of PM
also echoes Anievas and Nisancioglu, who note that ‘in explaining the diver-gent state
trajectories [in Europe] Brenner explicitly evokes international factors’ (Anievas and
Nisancioglu 2015, p. 23). Even more contradictorily, Adam Morton, while criticising
PM for ‘Eurocentric diffusionism’, argues that the problem with PM is not its exclusive
focus on ‘class’, but its overriding emphasis on the reproduc-tive requirements of lordly
classes and political elites, and hence its overemphasis on territorial/geopolitical
conflicts ‘at the expense of an appreciation of the struggles of direct producers’ (Morton
2007, pp. 49–50). To add more ambiguity, Alex Callin-icos, a long-standing sceptic of
PM, expresses his surprise at the dismissal of Bren-ner on the grounds of internalism,
for one of the strengths of Brenner’s approach, according to Callinicos, is its ability to
delineate the linkages between inter- and intra-lordly struggles, i.e. between surplus
extraction relations and medieval state building, a process explicitly captured by
Brenner and his disciples as a case of ‘uneven and combined development’ (Callinicos
and Rosenberg 2008, p. 101; see Brenner 1985b, p. 255; Teschke 2003, p. 11).

Unsurprisingly, the whole charge of internalism, which allegedly installs PM in the

Eurocentric camp, ultimately changes colour, shifting from the neglect of the
‘international’ to its ‘under-theorisation’. Anievas and Nisancioglu, for instance, argue
that even if Political Marxists themselves somewhat evoke the international in
\ Duzgun

order to explicate capitalism’s origins, in PM ‘“the international” remains an ad hoc

addendum to an essentially “internalist” analysis of the changing balance of class
forces and state formation. Nowhere does “the international” enter into Brenner’s
theoretical presuppositions centred, as they are, around his concept of “social prop-
erty relations”’ (Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015, p. 24). Indeed, it is precisely this
irreparably internalist nature of ‘social property relations’, which leads Justin
Rosen-berg to write that he ‘would do everything [he] could to avoid making a
choice’ between the Brennerian and Waltzian conceptions of international historical
change (Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 88).
The nub of the critique of PM, then, does not lie in the lack of the ‘international’ per
se, but in its insufficient theorisation, i.e. PM’s failure to sufficiently theorise the
constitutive impact of the international on domestic class struggles. PM’s exclusive
focus on class or ‘social property relations’ does not allow for an adequate incorpo-
ration of the international into the social. Social property relations, with an exclu-sive
focus on ‘class’ relations, do not accord sufficient recognition and obscure the
theoretical centrality of inter-societal relations in the making of the capitalist world
order. In the following section, I argue that such a critique has little to summon to its
support. It is based on a fundamental misreading of the concept of ‘social property
relations’, which, in turn, causes manifold misconceptions about Political Marxism. I
will show that, once these misconceptions are revealed, PM appears in a new light, able
to provide not only a strong antidote for presentism, but also the foundation necessary
for a non-hierarchical account of world historical development.

Confronting the critics: Political Marxism and the international

I have argued that anti-Eurocentrism without a complete break from presentism

takes us nowhere but to a theoretical cul-de-sac. In this respect, PM seems to be the
reverse image of the existing approaches to IHS. On the one hand, given its insist-
ence on the historical specificity of capitalism and its refusal to transhistoricise the
preconditions of capitalism, PM could be considered a panacea for prevalent pre-
sentism in IHS. Yet, on the other hand, the general verdict is that PM, with a theo-
retical focus on ‘class’ or ‘social property relations’, is inherently internalist, hence
crippled from the very outset from providing a non-Eurocentric view of world his-
tory. In short, even though PM is well equipped to handle presentism, it fails to
over-come methodological ‘internalism’. Or does it? Does the concept of social
property relations and the Political Marxist emphasis on ‘class’ really signify an
inherently internalist methodology?
The whole critique of internalism is based on a rather misguided reading of the
concept of ‘social property relations’. As discussed earlier, PM begins with a denial of
any notion of transhistorical capitalist rationality. By implication, it switches from a
priori and transhistorical conceptions of ‘class’ towards an approach that empha-sises
the historicity of class interests. In other words, according to PM, class inter-ests are not
pre-given but can be understood only through an analysis of historically specific
conditions of social reproduction. In this sense, PM is marked by a ‘sub-stantivist’
methodology [which also characterises critical approaches to economic
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

anthropology (e.g. Polanyi 1977)] that refuses to equate ‘class’ to market or produc-tion
relations. For it is only under capitalism, i.e. when people lose their unmediated access
to the means of subsistence, that ‘class’ becomes thinkable in ‘economic’ terms and the
‘market’ and ‘production’ per se have a practical significance (Brenner 1985a, p. 11). It
is indeed this awareness of the historicity of class relations that rests behind Robert
Brenner’s formulation of the concept of ‘social property relations’ as opposed to more
standard conceptions of the ‘relations of production’. The latter concept, argues
Brenner, is ‘disastrously misleading’ as it is often used to convey the idea that ‘the
social structural framework in which production takes place is some-how determined by
production itself, i.e. the forms of cooperation or organization of the labour process’
(Brenner 2007, p. 58). Such a view, with an exclusive focus on ‘vertical class relations’,
i.e. relations between exploiters and direct producers, obscures the centrality of
‘horizontal class relations’ among the exploiters them-selves, i.e. geopolitical relations.
Therefore, ‘[i]t is, if anything, even more critical to bring out the structuring or
constraining effects of the horizontal relationships’ in historical analysis of social
change (ibid.). In this respect, by ‘social property rela-tions’ Brenner means not only
‘production relations’ between the exploiters and pro-ducers, but also the relationships
among the members of the surplus appropriating classes. Horizontal and vertical
struggles together lead to the formation of social property relations, which in turn
‘specify and determine the access of the individual economic actors (or families) to the
means of production and to the economic prod-uct’ (Brenner 1985a, p. 19, 2007, p. 58).
In short, intra-ruling class, i.e. geopolitical relations, are as central as production
relations to the formation of social property relations (see also Dimmock 2017).

Viewed in this light, it is utterly mistaken to argue that Brenner ‘take[s] the sin-gular
relation of exploitation between lord and peasant as the most fundamental and axiomatic
component of the mode of production’ (Anievas and Nisancioglu 2015, p. 24). In
contrast to the common charge of internalism, the ‘international’ dimension of social
transformation is theoretically incorporated into PM. What is even more striking, a
closer look at Brenner’s work reveals that he not only grants importance to geopolitical
relations, but also analytically penetrates the ‘international’ by recog-nising its
temporally and spatially changing character (cf. Callinicos and Rosenberg 2008, p. 85).
For, in his attempt to depart from teleological views of capitalist devel-opment, Brenner
insists that there can be no ‘transhistorical laws’ governing the path to capitalism, not
only because of variations in social reactions from ‘below’, but also due to the changing
inter-societal context of capitalist transformation. He notes ‘once breakthroughs to
ongoing capitalist economic development took place in various regions these
irrevocably transformed the conditions and the character of the analogous processes,
which were to occur subsequently elsewhere’ (Brenner 1985b, p. 322). In other words,
once capitalism developed in some places, the rules of reproduction and conditions of
transitioning to capitalism elsewhere were subject to change (Brenner 1986, p. 29).
Therefore, the argument that PM is an inherently ‘myopic’ theory applicable only to
Western Europe is far off the mark.
Seen from this angle, the critique that PM neglects colonialism, imperialism and
slavery becomes susceptible to serious ambiguities as well (Post 2013; Evans 2016). For
what is repeatedly rejected by PM is not the relationship between international
\ Duzgun

trade, colonialism and capitalism per se, but their unqualified equation. Ellen Meik-sins
Wood, for example, writes that ‘[w]e can certainly say that the European trad-ing
system was a necessary condition of capitalism [in England]’ (Wood 2002a, p. 49).
Similarly, elsewhere she notes the importance of the Indian economy for British
colonialism, as well as acknowledging that Europeans ‘borrowed massively’ from non-
Europeans whose level of ‘commercial sophistication, domestic manufacture and
cultural achievements’ were simply unmatched at least until the rise of indus-trial
capitalism in Western Europe (Wood 2001, 2012, pp. 44–45). Despite her rec-ognition
of these non-Western ‘contributions’ and ‘achievements’, however, Wood firmly
distances herself from circular theorisations of world historical development. She argues
that ‘superiority in cultural, technological, or even commercial develop-ments’ by
themselves cannot explain and indeed ‘had nothing to do with the specific conditions
that generated capitalism in one place and not in another’ (Wood 2001). For ‘we cannot
just assume that commerce and capitalism are one and the same, or that one passed into
the other by a simple process of growth’ (ibid.). For exam-ple, ‘wealth from the colonies
and the slave trade contributed to Britain’s industrial revolution […] because the British
economy had already for a long time been struc-tured by capitalist social property
relations. By contrast, the truly enormous wealth accumulated by Spain and Portugal
had no such effect because they were unambigu-ously non-capitalist economies’ (ibid.).
Yoked together, PM accepts that capitalism may presuppose international trade and
colonialism in a particular historical setting, while firmly rejecting a necessary and
transhistorical connection between them.
All that said, one caveat still remains as far as PM’s relevance for IR is con -cerned.
That is, even if the international dimension of social transformation is pre-sent in
Brenner and Wood’s work, neither Wood nor Brenner were IR scholars, therefore they
did not address the question of the ‘international’ in a systematic way that would fulfil
IR’s own disciplinary considerations. In other words, they both remained
‘comparativists’, for whom the question of ‘difference’ was more impor-tant than the
question of ‘interconnection’. Indeed, this has been the lacuna that Political Marxists
who work in the field of International Relations have acknowl-edged and sought to fill
(inter alia Teschke 2003; Lacher 2006). PM in IR has moved beyond Brenner’s and
Wood’s ‘comparativist’ focus by highlighting the con-stitutive impact of the
‘international’ on the processes of early modern state forma-tion (Teschke 2005, pp. 4,
9; Lacher 2006, p. 103). Teschke, for example, argues that PM in IR needs to move
beyond the comparative approach by ‘combining the theory of social-property relations
with the theorem of socially uneven and geopolitically combined development’
(Teschke 2005, p. 21). Phrased differently, PM in IR is re-oriented in a way that ‘comes
to terms with the nationally specific and diachronic, yet cumulatively connected and
internationally mediated nature of “capitalist transi-tions” within the framework of
socially uneven and geopolitically combined devel-opment’ (ibid., p. 13). What PM in
IR strives to do is to ‘systematically integrate the problem of the international into
Marxist social theory and, hence, to provide a theoretically controlled historical
reconstruction of the dynamics of European and global developments that places the
international at the centre of, and not as an afterthought to, the analysis’ (ibid., pp. 9–10,
emphasis added). Of course, this disci-plinary re-orientation via uneven and combined
development intends to clarify PM’s
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

relevance for IR. Yet, the opposite is also true. Teschke’s endeavour to re-read PM
through the international is based on the precondition that the international or UCD
itself is sterilised from teleological assumptions about capitalist development.
Coming full circle, treating PM as the black sheep of IHS on the grounds of
theo-retical ‘internalism’ is irrelevant. The ‘international’ is theoretically present in
the ‘first generation’ and (even more so) in the second generation of PM. PM’s
differ-ence, therefore, rests not so much in its ‘internalism’ but in the way it
operation-alises the ‘international’. PM uses the ‘international’ and ‘uneven and
combined development’ in a way that does not transhistoricise and everything-ise
the precur-sors and preconditions of capitalism. Put differently, PM does not
instrumentalise the international, i.e. it does not merely add and stir the
international in a narra-tive that presumes capitalism from the outset. Instead, it
focuses on the spatially and temporally specific outcome of international
interactions. Overall, then, PM has a historically specific understanding of
capitalism and international relations, both adequate for a non-internalist and non-
presentist reading of world history. PM’s sub-stantivist conception of historical
transitions enables a sociological conception of the international, and vice versa.
All that said, however, it is important to note that although PM has forcefully
debated what capitalism is, its relevance for the broader debate on Eurocentrism has
remained limited; that is, PM has not systematically responded to the question of
how to overcome eurocentrism. As a result, the question as to how to re-activate the
constitutive agency of the non-Western world in the making of the modern world
has remained under-studied from a Political Marxist angle. The next section takes
up this task. Drawing on Political Marxism, it reconsiders the co-constitution of the
West and the non-West, demonstrating the possibility of an alternative anti-
Eurocen-tric foundation on which the IHS project can be built.

Political Marxism and Eurocentrism: capitalism versus modernity

I have argued above that, without overcoming presentism as well as internalism, no

theory can serve as a foundation for a non-Eurocentric conceptualisation of IHS.
IHS is not able to undermine hierarchical readings of world history precisely
because it has accepted circular narratives of the rise of capitalism as the basis for a
non-Eurocentric theorisation. What is needed, therefore, is an IHS that recognises
both inter-societal interconnectedness and differences as ontological conditions
without invoking capitalism as a transhistorical phenomenon.
IHS, underpinned by PM, can shed new light on the Eurocentrism debate pre-cisely
through its non-presentist conception of capitalism. As argued earlier, in the framework
of PM, the transition to capitalism is not understood as a natural conse-quence of the
liberation and elevation of propertied classes. Rather than pre-label-ling any single class
or phenomenon as conducive to the transition to capitalism, PM focuses on the socially,
temporally and geopolitically distinct circumstances that compel the reorganisation of
political power in such ways that the markets system-atically undercut the customary
conditions of social reproduction, imposing suc-cessful commodity production as the
ultimate basis for holding and expanding the
\ Duzgun

means of subsistence. Markets by themselves have no inherent tendency to generate

a ‘market economy’; the latter can be established only based on the annihilation of
long-standing communal systems of social reproduction.
As such, PM attempts to depart from a ‘presentist’ (evolutionary) interpretation to a
‘non-presentist’ one, i.e. from a transhistorically cumulating capitalism towards a
historically specific conception of capitalism. Marxist IHS can utilise this recon-
ceptualisation of capitalism to provide a non-hierarchical world history in four inter-
related respects. First, given capitalism’s epochal distinctiveness, the initial emer-gence
of capitalism can only be understood as a ‘historical contingency’. More precisely, IHS,
underpinned by PM, reveals that the origin of capitalism had noth-ing to do with the
maturation and combination of some superior human qualities linked to favourable
commercial, environmental or technological factors, but was the unintended
consequence of social and geopolitical struggles 3 that emerged only in England during
the early modern period (Brenner 1985a). Furthermore, continental European states did
not follow their Albion counterpart with a time lag as is often presumed. In its stead,
capitalist property relations began to spread to the states of continental Europe only
from the 19th century onward and as a protracted process compelled by the geopolitical
pressures engendered, directly or otherwise, by the power of England’s capitalist
economy (Wood 1991, pp. 159–160).4 The implica-tion is that by emphasising the
‘contingent’ emergence of capitalist social relations, PM does not assume capitalism as
always present in pre-capitalist history; therefore, it does not construct spatial
hierarchies according to the degree of development of pre-existent commercial abilities,
technological inventiveness, entrepreneurial skills, geopolitical contributions and so on.
As such, PM leaves no reason to think of the non-West in terms of a set of
‘civilizational’ hierarchies based on the relative pres-ence or absence of the generic
‘preconditions’ of capitalism (Duzgun 2017a).
Second, in the spatial hiatus opened between England and continental Europe a
further possibility for a non-hierarchical reading of the non-Western world crystal-lises.
Namely, an appreciation of the contingent emergence of capitalism in England and its
externally driven development in continental Europe refutes the image of capitalism as
an organic and necessary category of socio-economic development in the West as well
as the non-West. In other words, once we dispense with the tran-shistorical conceptions
of capitalism’s origins, we recognise that the early modern West and the non-West,
despite several nuances within and between themselves, were marked by fundamentally
similar forms of socio-economic organisation at

3
Here, ‘contingency’ in no way means mere ‘accident’ or ‘luck’ of a purely external and non-sociologi-
cal nature (for a critique of approaches that explain the rise of Europe through a series of fortunate ‘acci -
dents’, see Bryant 2006). Rather, it is a social phenomenon which is related to the open-ended character
of intra- and inter-class struggles and can be explained by analysing the variations in the degree of self-
organisation of the ruling and producing classes (Brenner 1985a, p. 36).
4
Obviously, the developmental dynamics of early modern continental Europe, especially that of absolut-ist
France, is the topic of a long-lasting debate. For views within IR and IHS that emphasise (explicitly or
otherwise) the non-capitalist nature of absolutist France, see Teschke (2005), Matin (2013) and Shilliam
(2009b); for a contrasting view see Anievas and Nisancioglu (2015). For an empirical and theoretical
assessment of these two rival positions, see Comninel (1987), Miller (2012), cf. Heller (2009).
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

least until the end of the 18th century. ‘Tributary’ social forms, based on ‘redistri-
bution’ and state-based appropriation of peasant surpluses, remained the basis of human
economy, rather than a mere appendix to it, both in the West and the non-West (except
England) (Lacher 2015). The ‘economy’ or the ‘market’, both in the West and the non-
West, were organised as networks of patronage, hence, organised through the
hierarchical allocation of political rights and privileges. It was one’s position in the
political and geopolitical structure, rather than exchange and produc-tion per se, that
gave access to the means of life. Neither in the West nor in the non-West did merchants
act as pre-given agents of capitalism, for their reproduction did not depend on investing
in production, specialisation, cutting production costs, and so on. Instead, they strived to
better integrate themselves into the processes of politi-cal and geopolitical
accumulation. Thus, ‘accumulation’, both in the West and the non-West, necessarily
took political and geopolitical forms (Brenner 1985a; Teschke 2003). Obviously,
Europe’s modern states eventually proved more efficient in (geo) political accumulation
than some of their larger non-European counterparts; but ulti-mately the West and the
non-West were species of the same genus (Lacher 2015). There was no ‘Asian mode of
production’, nor was there a more-or-less singular proto-capitalist ‘Western’ path to
modern development (ibid.). Instead, as Eric Wolf argues, ‘continental European
development up to the 19th century was characterized by forms of tributary organization
similar to those that we typically find in non-European states’ (quoted in Lacher 2015).
5 By the same token, the subsequent tran-sitions to capitalist modernity in the West and
the non-West neither presupposed the earlier presence of non-capitalist social forms nor
led to a merely quantitative exten-sion of their ‘economy’. Capitalism was imposed
from ‘above’ both in the West and the non-West, which required a fundamental
transformation of the existing social relations, institutions and moral codes in both
milieux.
Third, once we register the fundamentally similar nature of the West and the non-
West, we are able to provide a historically specific and non-hierarchical conception of
the ‘international’. As different state-society complexes are no longer seen merely as
‘good’ or ‘bad’ copies of (proto)capitalism, their interconnection and combina-tion does
not presuppose the gradual accumulation of hierarchically allocated pre-conditions of
(or impediments to) capitalism. Rather, the centuries-long assimila-tion and
appropriation of resources, technologies and ideas between the West and the non-West,
despite being enormously transformative, did not result in a quali-tative break from
previous modes of organising human relations and social power, i.e. the ‘international’
led to spatio-temporally differentiated yet essentially similar forms of ‘tributary’ rule
and appropriation. IHS, thus construed, does not utilise the

5
Indeed, several scholars acknowledge that socio-economic differences between the West and the non-
West did not signify the existence of a ‘modal’ difference. That is, in both the West and the non-West,
the producer was not separated from the means of production, thus the extraction of the surplus product
had to be obtained by ‘non-economic’ means (e.g. Haldon 1994; Amin 2009). This is surely an impor-
tant insight (which is originally derived from Marx), yet, in my view, these accounts remain wedded to
an implicitly presentist explanation of the transition to capitalism (based on the commercialisation
model), thereby suffering from the circularity and hierarchy that afict the conventional models of his-
torical change.
\ Duzgun

‘international’ to fill in a preconceived and hierarchical framework of the transi-tion

to capitalism, but seeks to specify the precise nature and concrete outcome of
international interactivity. As such, it provides us with a deeper understanding of
the generative nature of inter-societal relations: it allows enough space to rethink
and re-historicise the constitutive impact of non-Western agency on the origins of
the modern social and international order without flattening socio-historical
differences and reproducing hierarchical readings of world history.
Fourth, once we depart from the evolutionary conceptions of the origins and
expansion of capitalism, we begin to recover the globality of ‘modernity’. Whatever is
meant by ‘modernity’ and whether one chooses to emphasise the ‘bright’ or ‘dark’ side
of it, in most HSIR/IHS scholarship modernity is used to refer to a mixed bun-dle of
transformations and innovations emblematic of the transition to the ‘modern’ world,
such as capitalism, Enlightenment, secularism, individualism, exclusive ter-ritoriality,
citizenship, political equality, nationalism, private property and industri-alisation
(Buzan and Lawson 2015, p. 71; Matin 2013, p. 22). The point is that, once we recover
the historical specificity of the capitalist market, this blanket conception of ‘modernity’
collapses, i.e. we discover that capitalism cannot be easily subsumed under modernity
(or vice versa). We find out that, while ‘capitalist modernity’ ini-tially and contingently
developed in England in the post-medieval period, which led to the birth of at least
some capitalism-related aspects of ‘modernity’ such as abstract individuality, culture of
productivity, political representation of the proper-tied elite and industrialisation, the
rest of the project of modernity, and above all, the best of Enlightenment principles
(such as demands for radical/universal equality, a critical stance towards all kinds of
authority and a commitment to universal human emancipation) had nothing to do with
the dictation of any internal capitalist dynam-ics (Wood 1997).6 Instead, they were the
result of the millennia-old accumulation of universal human struggles and knowledge.
That is, the idea of equality, freedom, humanism, science, universities, towns, arts,
literature, private property and a drive towards (and reactions against) political and
cultural centralisation, conventionally considered to have provided the context for
European Enlightenment and moder-nity, were found throughout human societies, ‘not
always in the same form but often recognizably comparable’ (Goody 2004, p. 266). The
principles that permitted mod-ernisation have been developing in the urban societies of
Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere, and in most cases the West was not even the
inventor of these phenom-ena (e.g. Isakhan and Stockwell 2011; Goody 2004; Halperin
2006; Schulze 1996). True, it was ultimately capitalism that gave modernity in the West
an unprecedented competitive edge vis-à-vis its non-Western counterparts. Yet, pre-
existent forms of modernity had nothing to with the development of capitalist social
relations; to the

6
Of course, ‘Enlightenments’ around the world found much inspiration in the works of British philoso -
phers and scientists such as Bacon, Locke and Newton. Yet, the ‘improvement of property’ and the
‘ethic of profit’, the key concepts of the so-called British Enlightenment, never took root in and beyond
conti-nental Europe during the early modern period. Rather, multiple Enlightenments developed, which
sub-stituted the improvement of property for the improvement of the ‘state’, ‘humanity’, the ‘people’ or
the ‘nation’ (see Wood 2002a, pp. 188–189).
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism: International…

contrary, for capitalism to be born, modernity, as it previously existed, had to be

undone in many respects both in the West and the non-West.
The implication is that with the temporal-geographical pairing of capitalism and
modernity no longer holding, there remains no inherent reason for analysing the
geography of early modernity through a pre-given West versus non-West binary.
And if capitalism was neither a universal point of departure nor a necessary des-
tination point for modernity, the non-Western world cannot be seen merely as the
inferior partner, if not the silent victim, of ‘Western’ capitalism, but also as crea-
tive agents who formulated novel modern orders and subjectivities, thereby actively
shifting the conditions of global modernity. By emphasising the fundamentally
similar nature of early modernities (except England), PM thus provides IHS with an
alternative non-hierarchical conceptual foundation on which a ‘global history’ of
early modernity can be built. Put differently, if capitalism was a contingent rupture
in human history, whose origins cannot be understood as a cumulative and com-
bined process, ‘modernity’ and the modern international order, at least in some
respects, were the result of the uneven and combined accumulation of this universal
and fundamentally similar non-capitalist past. As such, modernity minus capitalism
can serve as a common denominator through which to retrieve the silenced histories
of the non-West in the constitution of the modern international order. The concept
of modernity, freed from the straitjacket of capitalism, can be used to overcome the
biases and exclusions of conventional IR theory without the methodological falla-
cies that haunt other approaches to IHS.

Conclusion

One broad implication for a truly non-Eurocentric IHS emerges from this discus-sion.
That is, a non-Eurocentric understanding of world history depends firmly on our ability
to overcome methodological presentism. The failure to do so not only reads capitalism
back into history, turning it into something ready to burst forth sim-ply as the forces of
production or commerce advance, but also imprisons our imagi-nation of international
hybridity and multiplicity in an all-absorbing conception of capitalism. Furthermore,
without a decisive break from presentism, theorising an anti-Eurocentric IHS remains a
stillborn attempt. For conceptualising the problem of the origins of capitalism in terms
of the incremental and long-run accumulation of the ‘preconditions’ of capitalist
development leads to the hierarchical re-categorisa-tion of the non-Western world
according to their ‘contributions’ to the rise of West-ern capitalism. To borrow a term
from Reus-Smit (2016), a ‘deep Eurocentrism’ remains in place, despite the existence of
contending anti-Eurocentric narratives.
All this hints at the need for and possibility of an alternative basis for an anti-
Eurocentric IHS, i.e. an IHS that departs from a ‘continuist’ interpretation of the origins
of capitalism to a ‘discontinuist’ one, i.e. from a transhistorically cumulating capitalism
towards a conception of capitalism as a qualitative and contingent break in human
history. PM contributes to precisely such an epochal conception of capital-ism: it breaks
with presentism and internalism (both theoretically and historically), and as such, it has
the potential to give a new boost to the original IHS project,
\ Duzgun

as well as reframe and rethink the question of Eurocentrism. IHS, underpinned by

PM, becomes able to recognise that neither in continental Europe nor in the non-
Western world was capitalism a (geo)politically feasible way of organising social
relations during the early modern period. The non-Western world no longer appears
as an ‘aberration’ from or an imitation of a generically defined ‘Western European’
path to capitalism. Non-Western societies were neither ‘bad’ copies of capitalism,
nor are they valued only insofar as they contributed to the (imagined) origins of
‘European’ capitalism. Emphasising capitalism’s contingent emergence and geopo-
litically driven expansion enables a historical narrative in which we can keep Eng-
land responsible and accountable for the origin of capitalism, while re-activating
the agency of non-Western peoples in the making of the modern international
system (cf. Sajed and Inayatullah 2016, p. 204). As such, IHS can now begin to
rethink the co-constitution of the West and the non-West in a way that eschews
linear and hier-archical readings of world history. IHS now stands on a stronger
foundation, better equipped to capture the heterogeneously constituted origins and
outcomes of (early) modernity.
A critical dialogue between PM and IHS also generates crucial implications for
the broader field of IR. Since the post-positivist turn in IR, several attempts have
been made to challenge the mainstream approaches’ reification of structures and
processes of international relations. Yet, critiques of mainstream theories have
failed to provide an alternative international theory that systematically overcomes
the inside/outside ontology pervasive in the field of IR. IHS in general and UCD in
particular were born/revived as precisely such attempts to formulate a unitary
theory of domestic and international relations. However, as I have shown above,
UCD’s potential to contribute to the formation of an international social theory is
precluded by the persistence of methodological presentism among its proponents.
PM rehabilitates this weakness, equipping IR with a sociology of the international
that is both non-internalist and non-presentist. Such a critique and reconstruction of
(critical) IR theories, in turn, paves the way for a more accurate and non-
hierarchical theorisation of the origin and development of the modern international
order, hence contributing to a deeper understanding of the ‘international relations of
modernity’. PM offers a new way of recovering the interconnections and differences
within and between the West and the non-West, which, in turn, can serve as a
means of restoring the history of the modern international system as a more
inclusive, polycentric and interactive terrain.
My argument also deepens the present debates over the analytic reach and con-
tent of the idea of uneven and combined development. These debates have been so
far limited to the question as to whether UCD can be utilised as a transhistorical
theory of the international or is applicable only to the capitalist period (e.g. Matin
2013; cf. Ashman 2009). The article has sought to go beyond this debate by draw-
ing attention to a hitherto overlooked methodological problem, i.e. presentism, in
the current applications of UCD. UCD, transhistorical or otherwise, is conceptually
unfit to illuminate the specific problem of the question of the origins of capitalism. I
have argued that by checking UCD’s presentist inclinations, PM lends UCD greater
consistency in terms of its methodological and normative claims, thereby helping it
deliver the full potential of the original IHS project.
Against Eurocentric Anti‑Eurocentrism

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Eren Duzgun finished his PhD at York University, Canada, in June 2016 and currently works as an
Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Kyrenia, Cyprus. His work has been
published in European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Euro-pean
Journal of Sociology and Review of Radical Political Economics.