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The Eastern Origins Of Western Civilisation
''The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation'', written by the political scientist John M. Hobson in 2004, is a book that argues against the historical theory of the rise of the West after 1492 as a "virgin birth", but rather as a product of Western interactions with a more technically and socially advanced Eastern civilization. The text reinterprets Eurocentric ideas of Europe's contributions to world development. For example, it provides evidence that a complex system of global trade existed long before Mercantilist Europe, that social and economic theories in the Enlightenment came from encounters with new cultures rather than with Greek and Roman heritage, and that modern European hegemony resulted from situational advantages rather than from inherent superior traits. Key ideas * Many inventions critical to European progress were Chinese innovations. * Europeans appropriated many Eastern resources such as land, labour and markets through imperialism. * European powers d ...
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Zheng He
Zheng He (; 1371–1433 or 1435) was a Chinese mariner, explorer, diplomat, fleet admiral, and court eunuch during China's early Ming dynasty. He was originally born as Ma He in a Muslim family and later adopted the surname Zheng conferred by the Yongle Emperor. Commissioned by the Yongle Emperor and later the Xuande Emperor, Zheng commanded seven expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433. According to legend, his larger ships carried hundreds of sailors on four decks and were almost twice as long as any wooden ship ever recorded. As a favorite of the Yongle Emperor, whom Zheng assisted in the overthrow of the Jianwen Emperor, he rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy and served as commander of the southern capital Nanjing. Early life and family Zheng He was born Ma He () to a Muslim family of Kunyang, Kunming, Yunnan, during the Ming dynasty of China. He had an older brother and four sisters. Zhe ...
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Mercantilism
Mercantilism is an economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. It promotes imperialism, colonialism, tariffs and subsidies on traded goods to achieve that goal. The policy aims to reduce a possible current account (balance of payments), current account deficit or reach a current account surplus, and it includes measures aimed at accumulating foreign-exchange reserves, monetary reserves by a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies frequently led to war and motivated colonialism, colonial expansion. Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time. It promotes government regulation of a nation's economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. High tariffs, especially on manufactured goods, were almost universally a feature of mercantilist policy.John J. McCusker, ''Mercantilism and the Econom ...
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Victor Lieberman
Victor B. Lieberman (born 22 July 1945) is an American historian of early modern Southeast Asia and Eurasia. He presently serves as the Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Asian and Comparative History at the University of Michigan, where he began teaching in 1984. That year he published a seminal work, ''Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c.1580-1760'' (Princeton University Press), which profoundly impacted scholarship on mainland Southeast Asia through an analysis of alternating governance patterns in 16th- to 18th-century Burma. Totaling some 1500 pages, his more recent two-volume study ''Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830'' (Cambridge University Press) argued that in terms of basic dynamics, chronology, and trajectory, patterns of political and cultural integration in mainland Southeast Asia over several centuries resembled those in much of Europe and Japan, and to a lesser extent, i ...
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Kenneth Pomeranz
Kenneth Pomeranz, FBA (born November 4, 1958) is University Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1980, where he was a Telluride Scholar, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988, where he was a student of Jonathan Spence. He then taught at the University of California, Irvine, for more than 20 years. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. In 2013–2014 he was the president of the American Historical Association. Selected publications Books *'' The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy''. Princeton University Press, 2000. John K. Fairbank Prize 2001. Joint winner, World History Association Best book of 2000. *''The world that trade created: society, culture and the world economy, 1400 to the present''. M. E. Sharpe: 1999. *''The making of a hinterland: state, society and economy in inland north China, 1853-1937''. University of California ...
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Jack Goody
Sir John Rankine Goody (1919–2015) was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984. Among his main publications were ''Death, property and the ancestors'' (1962), ''Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa'' (1971), ''The myth of the Bagre'' (1972) and ''The domestication of the savage mind'' (1977). Early life and education Born 27 July 1919, His parents were Harold Goody (1885–1969) and Lilian Rankine Goody (1885–1962). Goody grew up in Welwyn Garden City and St Albans, where he attended St Albans School. He went up to St John's College, Cambridge to study English literature in 1938, where he met leftist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. Military service Goody left university to fight in World War II. Following officer training, he was commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Re ...
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Roy Bin Wong
Roy Bin Wong (; born 1949) is a Chinese economic historian at UCLA. He was the Director of the UCLA Asia Institute from 2004 to 2016. He received his BA from the University of Michigan, and received his MA and PhD from Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high .... Works * ''China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience'' (Cornell University Press, 1997) References External links Roy Bin Wong's Page at UCLAR. Bin Wong Examines Asia's Place in World History Columbia University 1949 births Living people University of Michigan alumni Harvard University alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty Economic historians 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers 21st-century American e ...
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Jack Goldstone
Jack A. Goldstone (born September 30, 1953) is an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the "California school" in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th ce ...
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Samir Amin
Samir Amin ( ar, سمير أمين) (3 September 1931 – 12 August 2018) was an Egyptian-French Marxian economist, political scientist and world-systems analyst. He is noted for his introduction of the term Eurocentrism in 1988 and considered a pioneer of Dependency Theory. Biography Amin was born in Cairo, the son of a French mother and an Egyptian father (both medical doctors). He spent his childhood and youth in Port Said; there he attended a French high school, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalauréat. It was at high school that Amin was first politicized when, during the Second World War, Egyptian students were split between communists and nationalists; Amin belonged to the former group. By then Amin had already adopted a resolute stance against fascism and Nazism. While the upheaval against British domination in Egypt informed his politics, he rejected the idea that the enemy of their enemy, Nazi Germany, was the Egyptians' friend. In 1947 Amin left for Paris where he obt ...
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James Morris Blaut
James Morris Blaut (October 20, 1927 – November 11, 2000) was an American professor of anthropology and geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His studies focused on the agricultural microgeography (geographical activity of villagers), cultural ecology, theory of nationalism, philosophy of science, historiography and the relations between the First World, First and the Third World. He is known as one of the most notable critics of Eurocentrism. Blaut was one of the most widely read authors in the field of geography.Kent Mathewson; David Stea''In memoriam: James M. Blaut (1927–2000)'' ''Annals of the Association of American Geographers'', 93(1), 2003, pp. 214–222 Life and career James Morris Blaut was born on October 20, 1927, in New York City. He attended the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School. He entered the University of Chicago in 1944 at the age of sixteen, as part of the program for advanced high-school students, and achieved two bache ...
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Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptized 1723 – 17 July 1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer in the thinking of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Seen by some as "The Father of Economics"——— or "The Father of Capitalism",———— he wrote two classic works, '' The Theory of Moral Sentiments'' (1759) and ''An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations'' (1776). The latter, often abbreviated as ''The Wealth of Nations'', is considered his '' magnum opus'' and the first modern work that treats economics as a comprehensive system and as an academic discipline. Smith refuses to explain the distribution of wealth and power in terms of God’s will and instead appeals to natural, political, social, economic and technological factors and the interactions between them. Among other economic theories, the work introduced Smith's idea of absolute advantage. Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Gl ...
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McGill University
McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, 1801–1895.'' McGill-Queen's University Press, 1980. the university bears the name of James McGill, a Scottish merchant whose bequest in 1813 formed the university's precursor, University of McGill College (or simply, McGill College); the name was officially changed to McGill University in 1885. McGill's main campus is on the slope of Mount Royal in downtown Montreal in the borough of Ville-Marie, with a second campus situated in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, west of the main campus on Montreal Island. The university is one of two members of the Association of American Universities located outside the United States, alongside the University of Toronto, and is the only Canadian member of the Glob ...
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Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' (1955–79), and the unfinished ''Identity of France'' (1970–85). He was a member of the Annales School of French historiography and social history in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a student of Henri Hauser. Braudel emphasized the role of large-scale socioeconomic factors in the making and writing of history. He can also be considered one of the precursors of world-systems theory. Biography Braudel was born in Luméville-en-Ornois (as of 1943, merged with and part of Gondrecourt-le-Château), in the département of the Meuse, France.Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ''Fifty Key Thinkers on History'' (London: Routledge, 2000), 17. At the age of 7, his family moved to Paris. His father, who was a natural mathematician, aided him in his studies. ...
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