Re Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

Andre Gunder Frank asks us to ReOrient our views away from Eurocentrism–to see the rise of the west as a mere blip in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world. In a bold challenge to received historiography and social theory, he turns on its head the world according to Marx, Weber, and other theorists, including Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel, and Wallerstein. Frank explains the rise of the west from 1400 onwards in world economic and demographic terms, with a sweeping historical perspective that places it in clear conjunction with the decline of the east around 1800. European states, he says, used the silver extracted from the American colonies to buy entry into an expanding Asian market, which already flourished in the global economy by means of the very productive commercial and institutional mechanisms that were supposedly unique to Europe. Then, as the east entered into decline phase of the cyclical world economy, the nations of the west resorted to import substitution and export promotion in the world market to become New Industrializing Economies. That is precisely what East Asia is doing today, Frank points out, to recover its traditional dominance in the world economy, the "center" of which is once again moving to the "Middle Kingdom" of China. Anyone interested in Asia, economic and social history, in international relations, in political economy, and in socio-economic theory cannot afford to ignore Andre Gunder Frank’s exciting reassessment of our global economic past and future.