(3): central assertion is that world of humakind is a totality -- inquiries that disasemble this totality into bits falsify reality ('nation', 'society', 'tribe', etc.) [seems like a banal point -- but the excellence of this book lies, really, in his commitment to substantiating this simple point with a very rich history]
(4): against boundedness
(6): marxism against teleology -- we have to account for developments in mateiral terms (no such thing as the 'immanent drive to success', of a bounded region).
(8): against the 'disciplinizaiton' of sociology
(8-9): nice critique of sociology's main postulates -- the uniting flaw is the attempt to think of social relations as not simply autonomous, but even as causal in their own right.
- that relations between individuals can be abstracted from the economic, political, ideologcial context in which they are found (and instead treated sui generis)
- that social order depends on the growth of social relations (on 'density)
- formation of such ties depends on a common moral order, moral consensus
- development of social relations constitues a society, which is the seat of cohesion (cohesiveness means that society has a stable internal structure
(12): Parsons took Weber's 'gesellschaft' and gave it a 'positive' spin
(17): methodologically, holism will consist in a move away from separate 'cases' to an integrated process (laws of motion that span many different cases)
(18): important -- it's worth noting explicitly that the claim of 'totality' is contingent, not unconditional. in other words, it depends on showing substantive interactions amongst societies. doesn't preclude the claim there might well exist societies that can be thought of developing as 'bounded' units, certainly. situations in which 'societies' lived on the margins, unaffected; BUT the crux of the claim is that the vast majority of what social scientists have understood as 'bounded' units ('nations', 'tribe', etc.) have not, in fact, been bounded. in sum, it's not an abstract statement of ontological fact, as much as an empirical claim about the scope of social forces that have influenced the development of individual societies. and the evidence is the history he tells.
(21): 'universal history'? -- Wolf suggests that "there was no universal history": but what this means, really, is that there are now 'laws of motion' that transcend all modes of production; what it doesn't mean, however, is that you can't ascribe laws of motion across space/time (the claim, of the po-marx types, would be that this is only possible for capitalism, not for pre-capitalist MoP -- Wolf's history shows that this is emphatically false, I think).
(23): important--with Marx, against Weber/Frank/Wallerstein -- (1) profits don't become capital, without some serious change in social relations of production; (2) charges them with under-interrogating the periphery--there is a range and variety of these modes of existence, and the way in which they were shaped.
(31): world in 1400 as an arcihpelago of agricultural areas, connected by trade routes
(32): long-distance exchange routes possess ancient routes--but movement tended to favor luxury goods, when we're talking about long-distance trade
(33): 1000-1400: age of the pastoral nomad (Turk, Mongol, Arab, Berber) -- protection rents on the trade routes (though, once conquerers, they couldn't govern on 'horseback')
(36-37): outline of Ottoman class structure: ulema, askeri, merchants, moving to tax farming + ayans
(38): Ibn Khaldun's cycles (against Goldstone, rooted in a real-material observation of class conflict--not lack of eschatalogical element, for God's sake)
(40): Africa south of the Sahara was an 'integral part of a web of relations' -- networks of exchange that far transcended European integration at this point [again, can make explicit, though, that this is an empirical claim]
(41): and E. Africa
(48-49): 'caste' in India ('untouchable' concentrated in densely populated and irrigated regions of the Indo-Gangetic plain)
(50): in the context of political decentralization, caste was the 'poor man's solution to Empire' -- maintained linkages across units
(52-53): hydraulic requirements of Chinese agriculture influenced development of the Chinese bureaucracy
(58): 'lord of Malacca has hands on throat of Venice'
(60): 'politically-enforced' exchange in the Andes (rather than merchants, etc.) -- had to do with the nature of zone-based production, he's arguing
(71): in short--'everywhere in 1400,' populations existed
(71): no such thing as a 'precontact' present -- doesn't even depict the situation before European expansion, and certainly doesn't allow us to make sense of the world, post-expansion
(74): universalizing--the use of 'labour-in-general' (not quite abstract labour, i don't think) allows us to think about all organized human societies in a common/universal way (and--let's be explicit--not just capitalist societies. this is done, of course, through the concept of a mode of production.
(76): three modes of production--capitalist, tributary, kin-organized (saying that he's being deliberately parsimonious)
(76): relationship between mode of production (political-economic relationships) and society (totality of interactions). [he's not entirely clear how strong a claim he wants to make--I think it would be quite strong, clearly]
(77-79): capitalist mode of production -- nice contrast with Weber, Tilly, Wallsertein (wealth is not capital until it ocntrols means of production--what it means to say, basically, that 'capital is a social relation')
(79): tributary mode of production -- extraction of surplus based not on dull compulsion, but on political and military coercion
(81): important discussion of Asiatic vs. Feudal distinction -- here making a strong claim about levels of abstraction. because of the empirical fact that the operative variable really is state strength (and that societies typically thought of as Asiatic differed on this score, and societies thought of as Feudal differed on this score), he argues that they're better thought of as 'political variables' that distinguish one tributary society from another [what i mean is that there is a specific 'abstraction' claim, here--this is a single mode, rather than two. put differently, the operative dynamic that is different in the two is not a mode-defining one]
(82): trade can happen in a tributary society -- circulation of the surplus, etc. [question, of course, re: the degree to which this happened--most people didn't participate, i imagine]
(82): 'civilizations' were cultural interaction zones pivoted on a hegemonic tributary society
(83): ideological limits to resistance movements
(84-85): tributary elites had difficult relationships with merchants, often acting as fetters
(85): key statement of distinction between Wolf/Marx and Weber/Wallerstein/Frank (capitalism as a qualitatively new phenomenon, not quantiative accretion of merchant activity)
(87): slave labour has never constituted a major independent mode of production -- but has played a subsidiary role in providing labour under other modes
(88): kin-ordered mode of production -- social labour locked up and organized through kinship
(94): *can very well become inegalitarian under conditions of scarcity
(96): *and also under the impact of other modes (examples of slavery and the fur trade) -- this explains 'chiefdoms'
(98): redistribution in these societies is not just egalitarian, but actually a mechanism for clas-formation
(100): doesn't want to make an evolutionary argument [but surely some form of evolutionary argument, however weak, is necessary?]
(104): q-begging claim re: italian states' success? or contingent?
(109): the 'crisis of feudalism'
[full notes stop here]]
(133-134): *pathogens insufficient to explain the wiping out of the native population of the Americas--the disruption of elaborate trade networks b/c of slavery and forced labour produced malnutrition and dislocation that enabled the genocide
(145, 148): *'republicas de indios' -- not repositories of pre-Hispanic past, but refugee communities (involving the creation of a local nobility, etc.)
(161): *w/ fur trade, warfare pattern among populations changed in intensity/scope, etc. , as they battled to supply them
(193-194): *in sum--fur trade brought illness and warfare
(196): 80% of all slaves came to NW betwen 1700 and 1850
(199-200): vs. Eric Williams, suggests that slavery be called 'principal dynamic element', but that we don't go as far as Williams
(202): slaves in Scotland
(202): indentured servitude
(203): 'ideological explanation' for Why Africa?
(203): not N. America because of ease of resistance
(206, 208, 230): *enormous effect of slave trade on African societies--stregnthened existing states, and spurred state formation in other cases
(234, 237): eureopeans did not dominate production/commerce in South and South-East Asia as they did in Africa and Americas (exception of British in India)
(243): when State was strong, giving jagirs; when weak, using zamindars
(245): evolution of Company man from 'merchant' to bureaucrat/soldier-administrator
(247): private property rights with PSettlement
(250-251): ryotwari unleashed indebtedness
(252): moving away from 'liberalism' post-1857, towards racism
(255): bullion drain
(256): *repurcussions for Chinese peasanty of the trade (Brenner question, here, though)
(257): description of the triangular trade -- India helping them balance the books
(257): not enough, of course -- until the advent of opium
(261): *India made possible British advocacy of 'free trade' -- which in turn helped German and American industrialization
(266-267): late 1700s, capitalism becomes dominant MoP in procuring social labour
(268): why Europe? 'adv. of backwardness' type
(268-270): but a good description of the English transformation [four reasons]
(274): only 23% of textile work force were adult men
(275): the 'factory'
(276): 'resistance to work' (penal workhouses, etc.)
(285): *changes in NA American tribes
(286-287): Egypt
(290): India as an early example of 'peripheral industrialization' (up until it lost out to Japanese competitoin) [good example of Whiggish idiocy]
(291-292): railroads as 2nd industrial revolution, in mid 1800s
(297): articulation of MoP
(297): imp--again, vs. Frank/Wallerstein--can't collapse everything into the 'capitalist world-system' (with everyone as bourgeois or proletarian). collapses concept of capitalist mode of production into concept of capitalist world market (not any better than Ibn Khaldun, or Smith)
(300-301): against Lenin's imperialism
- centralization leading to more competition
- most capital being exported to other capitalist countries
- trade and the flag relation was more indirect
(313): (1st) G Depression --> Scramble for Africa
(317): the 'fall of the planter class,' rise of the agricultural plantation
(330, 335): *w/ decline in slavery, a 'crisis of the aristocracy'
(336): with this, the creation of a rural proletariat (in Cuba, here)
(349): *Shaka the Zulu -- new political entity, conditioned by Boer and English competition
(352): imp-- growth of capitalism brought about a qualitiative change int he commercial networks connected with it -- networks now served capitalist accumulation [claim about strong form of integration]
(354): for mainstream sociology, the birth of the w-class was a worry -- 'disorder', etc.
(358): 'working classes' [differentiation within]
(362): three waves of migration: (1) towards industrial centers in europe; (2) Europeans overseas; (3) contract laborers of diverse origins to the expanding mines/plantations
(368-369): Indian and Chinese labor in the E. Indies, mid- to late- 1800s
(379): against granting explanatory power to heterogeneity -- what matters is the class character of this heterogeneity (must be located in the nature of social labour allocation, the labour process).
(381): 'constructedness' of race -- ethnicity is not 'primordial', but historical product of labour market segmentation under capitalism
(384): restatement of 'totalty'
(384): no one whose history is still 'cold'
(387): need, correspondingly, to rethink the category of 'culture' -- notion of specific and integral cultures is a specific project. instead, 'fluidity and permeability' of cultural sets
(388): nice passage on the nature of ideology -- meaning is developed and imposed by human beings; construction is a 'social process' that cannot be understood as the working out of an internal cultural logic
(390): imp-- 'ideology as making sense of a field of force' generatd by a mode of production
- - - - -
[1] it's worth noting explicitly that the claim of 'totality' is contingent, not unconditional. in other words, it depends on showing substantive interactions amongst societies. doesn't preclude the claim there might well exist societies that can be thought of developing as 'bounded' units (though his first chapter is basically making the argument that, even in 1400, this is not the case)--certainly, though, there might well be situations in which 'societies' lived on the margins, unaffected. BUT the crux of the claim is that the vast majority of what social scientists have understood as 'bounded' units ('nations', 'tribe', etc.) have not, in fact, been bounded. in sum, it's not an abstract statement of ontological fact, as much as an empirical claim about the scope of social forces that have influenced the development of individual societies. and the evidence is the history he tells (pg. 18).
another way of thinking about this whole question is quantitative/qualitative determination of what produces non-boundedness -- (1) is it a certain amount of interaction that prohibits analytic of boundedness? (2) is it the simple fact of interaction (so long-distance trade)? or (3) is it some kind of combination of both--as in, 'boundedness' is basically off-the-table, but the character of the 'non-bounded' frame we will use is influenced by the nature and degree of interaction
[this leads to the thrust of his objection to Wallerstein and Frank -- see [3] below. leaving the 'periphery' unspecified]
[2] 'universal history'? -- Wolf suggests that "there was no universal history": but what this means, really, is that there are now 'laws of motion' that transcend all modes of production; what it doesn't mean, however, is that you can't ascribe laws of motion across space/time (the claim, of the po-marx types, would be that this is only possible for capitalism, not for pre-capitalist MoP -- Wolf's history shows that this is emphatically false, I think). [should clarify the differences between him and a Charkabarty, for example -- see p. 74, as well, where he discusses the use of MoP in the abstract]
[3] viz-a-viz Frank/Wallerstein (pg. 23, pg. 85, pg. 297)
[4] the Asiatic/Feudal distinction. he's making a specific claim about how this does not signify a difference in relations of production/force of production, but rather in the political variable of state strength. thus, this is better thought of as a distinction internal to the MoP discussion.
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