Guerrilla History - World Systems w/ Ariel Salzmann

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

A fascinating intelligence briefing on world systems theory, some of its thinkers and, some of the debates within the field!  This episode will hopefully help us in considering HOW we think about history, and how we analyze the driving force of events in the world.  We're joined by the esteemed Professor Ariel Salzmann, historian of Islamic and world history. Ariel Salzmann is a professor of Islamic and world history at Queen's University, and her research addresses theories of state formation, histories of Mediterranean communities and Muslim societies, the transformation of market systems and the making of global capitalism.  Her new book, The Exclusionary West: Medieval Minorities and the Making of Modern Europe,will be out in September: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-exclusionary-west/  Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember den, Ben, boo? No. The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to guerrilla history, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Hockamacki, joined by one of my usual co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Yeah, it's always nice seeing you. I feel like it's been a little while since I've seen you, but I'm always happy to see you here, and I really like to conversations that we have every time that we get together. Unfortunately, we're not joined by our

other regular co-host, Brett O'Shea, who is celebrating his birthday. So happy birthday, Brett. Congratulations on turning the ripe old age of whatever it is now, 24 or something like that. Happy birthday. We all wish you a good day and hope that you enjoy it with friends and family. But we do have an excellent guest to join us today. And instead of me introducing the guest, and I probably should have warned you ahead of time that you were going to do this at none but would you mind introducing our guest

since it is a colleague of yours? Oh, with pleasure. This is a great friend and colleague who I've known for, I don't know, a couple of decades or more at this point and I'm really delighted because she teaches a history of capitalism course

that I think we'll be talking about that issue today with her but she is Dr. Ariel Salzman from Queen's University's History Department, and she's author of a very interesting study on Ottoman State and state formation, and is also completing a study on exclusion in the history of the West, and as a world historian, has taught our world history pre-modern survey course for first years and all kinds of other topics like commodities and global history

and takes a very global materialist historical perspective that I think listeners will really benefit from. So I really want to welcome a friend and colleague Ariel Salzman. Thanks for coming on the show, Ariel. Thanks so much, Henry, and Adon. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. It's a pleasure.

And I've enjoyed listening to you speak on the Mudge List several times before. I always enjoy when Adnan, as well as the other people at, let me see if I can get the acronym, right, MSGPQU. Did I get that right, Adnan? That's right. Okay. Every time your colleagues there bring on Dr. Salzman, it's always a fascinating conversation. And it's really a pleasure to be able to speak with you now, Dr. Salzman. So the feeling is mutual.

Thank you very much. So we have a really interesting conversation. coming up today. As Adnan mentioned, you do a course on the history of capitalism. And we are also planning on talking a lot about world systems, world systems theory, or as Andre Guantifranc would put it, the world system without the hyphen and in the singular tense. So I think that we'll talk about that quite a bit during this conversation as well.

But instead of me, you know, just saying things that I'm thinking that we're going to talk about, why don't I just turn it over to you, Professor Salzman, and you can. start the conversation however you would like to, and we can just start bouncing off of each other after that. Okay. I've been teaching this course on the history of capitalism for a long time, and I keep getting, you know, different waves of students with different backgrounds, having gone through different analyses or what they assume to be capitalism or what they can assume to be the debates. But it brings me back to this moment, and Adnan and I were both teaching at NYU at New York University, when a colleague of ours decided to bring André Gunter Frank.

Andre Gunter Frank is very well known in left economics. He was part of dependency theory, which basically said that Latin America and the rest of the so-called third world, the global south, had been trapped in a basically attraction belt from capitalism and imperialism that harnessed all their resources almost without able to break free with no ability to break off into European capitalism or Western capitalism more generally. And so he had been part of that school, the monthly review crowd, some people might know the folks there, and he written some brilliant articles and discussions. And then he retooled and he decided, wow, this is.

really Eurocentric. Our version of capitalism to begin with is very Eurocentric. And he started reading broadly, and it took him first to China. And then at the end of his life, if you look on his website, because he was outside the academy at that point, he was actually working on Central Asia. And he would go way, way, way, way back. So he's trying to find the origins of a transition, but also the way that capital and global systems of commerce had built up by the year 1600. And he wrote a book that had just come out at the time that he gave the lecture that was called Reorient. Asia in the global age. I'm messing up the first title, the whole title, but it's Reorient.

And it was, for him, it was reorientation of his whole formation. of his whole formation as a classically trained economist, who then, after studying with the infamous Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago made a complete left turn and then, you know, joined this dependency theory school, spent a long time in Latin America. So, and he presented the basis for his new book, which basically said up till 1700,

the West was not. there. It was all Asia. It was all China. China was an industrial powerhouse, just churning out manufacturers. And it's only through, you know, a series of coincidences, but it actually was refueled by the Americas, because most of the silver from the Americas actually ended up in China. And it produced a very dynamic situation. Well, at the end of his lecture, most of the people in the audience were just stunned. Because whether they were left or centrist or whatever, they had grown up on this history of capitalism

that was all centered around the West, you know, and the Industrial Revolution that came out of England and was, you know, the product of European ingenuity, European, you know, everything, culture, property rights, all this accrued to, European civilization and had nothing to do with any other part of the world. You know, if anything, oh, yes, yeah, you know, we had a few plantations in the Americas and that helped out. But otherwise, the industrial revolution stood by itself and from there you get

the history of the world and too bad, too sad, you know, Asia, Africa, and the rest. And so, you know, there was this total disconnect and this back and forth. And what I started realizing was two things from that conversation. First of all, I was already, you know, in the mix of some of those discussions. But I think the biggest takeaway was how little people knew about the development of capitalism within Europe. It wasn't just that they didn't know anything about Asia or how dominant China had been in the global system at that age, at that period in time, 16th, 17th century. and according to a more recent historical study actually was coming out around the same time

and André Guantan Frank was having conversations with this scholar whose name is Kenneth Pomerantz. Basically, Pomerantz is arguing and has been arguing that the turning point in the world economy was really 1800. And the China and the West were on track, neck in neck as to who, which side of the world was going to industrialize first. And he had an answer for that. We can go into that.

But all that to say is that it is not a clear cut, you know, trajectory of the development of capitalism. And as Gunter Frank would go on to talk about this, it's not even clear when capitalism started. I'm going to hop in here for a second, professor. If you don't mind, because I think that before we even start talking about what is capitalism, when did capitalism start, where did capitalism start, getting some definitions on a couple of things that are going to orient the listeners as to how we're approaching this topic may be useful. So you mentioned dependency theory. It might be useful for the listeners if you first briefly explain what is dependency theory, what is world systems theory, what is core, what is periphery, just some of these basic terms. that are definitely going to come up in the conversation to come, because after that point, we're going to start talking about what is capitalism, where did capitalism begin, where was the surplus value created, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we're going to have a very long

conversation about this. So it might be useful for the listeners to at least be briefly acquainted with some of the terms and concepts that we're going to be talking about. Okay. So let's back pedal to, you know, the 60s and the original definitions that come out of Marx, right? And of course, for Marx, a lot of it was linked to the Industrial Revolution. Before that, there was commercial capitalism, commercial commerce, trade, there was imperialism. But it's really the Industrial Revolution. And even in Marxian theory, it's more of a change in scale and intensification than it is of a net difference between the type of market systems that preceded it. Fast forward, lots of debates within Marxian thought about this. And during the 1960s, especially, there was a great deal of ferment because why was that? Well, decolonization was happening and people were trying to plot out different plants, you know, of how to deal with a system that was already there around them and had extracted resources from them during the

whole colonial period and beyond. And so dependency theory came out of that discussion of how, you know, what was at stake? What were the sets of relationships? Were they changing? And dependency theory basically said that because of the prehistory of the way that capitalism harnessed, you know, or imperialism and capitalism together, it's hard to say cart and the horse in this particular case, because of that, that individual states were locked into a trajectory of dependence to the global economy. And then the question was how to break that. How to break that dependence. Because most of these countries, you know, it would be one or two resources, agrarian, extractive, and, you know, sugar, minerals of various sorts, diamonds here, rubber in central in Congo, and how to break that link and to reconfigure the domestic economy in order to create greater autonomy, you know, not necessarily.

socialism, but of course that would be the end game and all of this. So it was a system of analysis. And out of that came a variety of debates and discussions that took Marxist theory on another level. And one of those was the theories of an anthropologist who was working in Africa, whose name was Emmanuel Wallerstein. He hung out with a lot of the people he just died in 2019. He hung out with a lot of the people who were involved in liberation struggles, anti-colonial struggles. He had a set of partners. Terry Hopkins was one. He came out of McGill University, also an anthropologist. And they were really good friends with someone named Giovanni Arigi, who is now, his name is he died in 2009. And they started talking to.

having a discussion. And they ended up at Binghamton, what's now called Binghamton University, setting up a new center and rethinking capitalism in different terms. And the terms that they started thinking about capitalism were basically these. The capitalism still was a system that started in Europe

and building on a new sort of history of economic history. they came out of Europe, they decided that it started in the 16th century in Europe and that it evolved in stages and it had a series, and I'm not going to say they're concentric, but let's think of them as concentric, circles in which different parts of this evolving capitalist system benefited differentially from the other parts. the other intersecting circles. So at the very core of that was the core.

And originally, you know, they saw the core is not stable, but moving around depending all where the concentration of capital was. The original core, of course, Italy and then moved north. And the core depended on agrarian products coming from further afield in what they would call the semi-periphery and usually very close in terms of space. And then there was a larger world of the periphery where the world that was colonized, that would be colonized, and during the process of colonialism and imperialism, where that part of the world became basically the resource basket for the core and capitalism involved in this in this in this setting where of course

everything being unequal and you know it's it's talked about in other terms we talk about it in terms of mercantilism but they reformulated this as a long-term system that continues to this day with a core that moves around the world depending on where the locus of economic concentration is and the extractive capacities are. I hope that helps your listeners to think about that. So from dependency theory, and people have castigated what is called the world systems theory that was sort of developed by Wallersteins, Hopkins, and Origi that criticized it being sort of, oh, it's just about commerce and it's not enough about transformations on the

ground, where are peasants, you know, where are peasant revolts, you know, where is feudalism in this whole debate. And of course, you know, certain Marxian notions, feudal motor production, Asiatic motor production are sort of thrown out the window in this. So there was a lot of debate within, among Marxists, about whether this was a legitimate interpretation. And that, but it's continued until this day. There's a world system school in sociology. Actually, it's located in sociology rather than economics. And there are adherence and contributors to this theory that go on.

And it's evolved. The theory has evolved in different directions, some of which have gone in the direction of more environmental history. But that's something else we can talk about. So, Ariel, you've put a lot, up there on the table, and you've introduced this kind of historical sociology, historical political economy that gave rise to thinking about a world system having been created, you know, over the last 500 years with the emergence of what we're calling, you know, according to this

classic narrative capitalism. So the world systems theory was basically, it sounds like, from your description, a way of taking the Marxist analysis of the emergence of capitalism and trying to look at how that maps out onto the world. But you mentioned Andre Gunder-Frank's kind of revisionist and rather unbalancing kind of perspective in response to this world system theory coming out of dependency theory, then looking at it historically, that he suggested instead of a 500-year world system that emerges with the rise of capitalism and with the dominance of a kind of Western political power over the globe in an era of colonialism and imperialism that is described by that period of 500 years, that instead there wasn't just

some emergence of it 500 years ago, but argues for. for a world system that precedes the emergence of what we're thinking of capitalism or Western dominance. And so it totally reframes things. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that reframing and what some of the implications are in terms of his analysis, where it shifts the analysis. Okay. But I also want to put this, you know, being a historian, I apologize, put this, you know, in some sort of order. Because Gunter Frank, so Gunter Frank, we're in 1990, 1998. The world systems theory is being developed in 1960s and 70s, right?

So he is critiquing that, that previous reformulation of Marxian analysis. And between those two, there are other critiques that are coming out, or just about to come out, of world systems theory. as a sort of later iteration of Marxian analysis. And they start pushing, you know, and I think it has a lot to do with, you know, and it may seem to be off track, Orientalism, and the critique of Orientalism, the cultural critique that finds its way into Marxian analysis,

and it finds its way into material critique. And so there's this gradual recognition that I think is percolating through intellectual orientations that leads to this some sort of revision and critique of what essentially is from Marx onward, a very Eurocentric version of capitalist development, right? So it's not like Wallerstein broke with that. It's not like Brodell, from whom he's a great historian. broke from that. They're all very Eurocentric. And it's actually the cultural critique that I think influences the way that economists, critical economists and Marxian economists start looking around

and saying, whoa, wait a second, you know, maybe there's more to the story. And once we throw out the sort of traditional Marxian model, maybe we have to go further a field. And And in the case of Andre Gointer-Frank, and I think he's, you know, he lobs the Molotov cocktail into this, into this whole way of thinking because of his stature in leftist economics. And he engages in a long-term debate with Wallerstein, it's very personal on some levels, arguing that first and foremost, there's no sort of, there's no sort of way to place Europe in the center of this world in 1600. It doesn't start there, he says. It just doesn't. The second thing he starts to realize as he pushes the clock backward is that it's very hard to be a little bit capitalistic. That commercial capitalism and industrial capitalism are, you know, coexist their contemporaries all the way.

through this process, supposedly of industrialization, that feudalism, all sorts of other forms of extraction are there. And that when we trace the thread back of where were the first markets, you know, how was capital rationalized? And we're looking, especially at merchant capital, as opposed to agrarian capital, which Wallstein was doing, then you've got to go back to basically sumer, you know? And that's where the 5,000 years starts coming in and the sort of moving away from defining capitalism as a fixed notion to talking about either one or many systems that fed into the world as we know it today. The exploitation, differential wealth, and the prospects of the world's populations, given this inequality of wealth and access to everything,

and as we know now, obviously, to health care. So I hope that was a little more. Maybe Henry will tease out some more of this. Yes. Well, I mean, there's so much to say. I mean, there's so many ways that we could go with this. But I guess before I continue talking about world system, and Gunter Frank, I'm curious about one thing that, I mean, it's a totally an aside, so feel

free to be really brief on this. But, you know, we like segues and whatnot. And Adnan, I'd also like your opinion on this as well. We talked about Eurocentrism already. And of course, Eurocentrism is something that undoubtedly has been a hindrance to analysis, proper analysis, of the of world history, first of all, of the world interstate commerce system, the economy of the globe. This Eurocentrism that we've really been ingrained with for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years has been a major hindrance to analysis. But just, and again, this is an aside, there's been some really interesting discussions

that have been going on recently. And I can highlight a couple of pieces that were put out. from the review of the review of African political economy that looked at Marx and Lenin specifically and was arguing against dismissing them as being completely Eurocentric in their analyses. So there was a piece that came out a few years ago from Biko Agassino in Roque titled the Africana paradigm in capital, the deaths of Karl Marx to the people of African descent. And then there was a follow-up that just came out less than a month ago from Joe Pateman titled The Centrality of Africa and Lennon's Theory of Imperialism, which were both very interesting pieces. And I think do, I think that there is quite a bit in them that that is convincing that, you know, these thinkers that a lot of these theorists were basing their theories on actually did consider some of these future advanced.

that we would have in thought, things like without naming it, unequal exchange, things like, again, without naming it, the core versus periphery paradigm. But, I mean, Lenin's theory of imperialism really was based on this without naming it explicitly because the terms did not exist at that time. But at the same time, it's also true that then the people that took those theories that were being put out by Marx and Lenin. And of course, those theories that were advanced had a preponderance of evidence based from Europe, because that is the evidence that was available to them when they were making their theories, right? But those theories were then taken up by future theorists who then continued to only look at European contexts, even when more evidence from other

regions of the world came out. So again, this is an aside. Feel free to be brief on this, because I do want to get back to the main topic of conversation, but just out of curiosity. I think you're absolutely right. The fact is that one can take from Marx and Lenin, you know, various things. I think speaking as an Ottoman historian and someone specializing in that part of Asia that was not directly colonized by the West and was put in a sort of separate category by Marx called the Asia. mode of production. And it was sort of like a box that, you know, people in the region, people outside of the region try to, you know, get out of and understand. From my perspective, you know, Orientalism was a very welcome critique that highlighted that aspect of Marx. But there's no question that Marx saw, you know, even when he talked derisively, you know, and some parts of it

were sarcastic, you know, about China, and he, he was appalled by it, too, you know. I mean, in his journalistic accounts, you know, he's appalled by imperialism. And, but he saw this longer, you know, forward linking, forward thinking trajectory that, you know, that capitalism would eventually be defeated and imperialism with it, right? So, so it wasn't. you know, it wasn't anti-Chinese, anti-African as such, but it did raise questions when we look back in history, questions of origin that become also invested. You know, there are things that invests that are parts of cultural claims. And so capitalism and the origins of capitalism of market systems, a private property, and all these, you know, supposedly good.

good stuff, Hoolay's claims to them has cultural currency as well as intellectual, you know, purity and, you know, or, you know, political agendas tied to them. So, yeah, that's what I'll have to say about that. Adnan, is there anything that you want to add to that before I get us back onto track? Well, I mean, I think that is a track, you know, is to think. about this question here about the Eurocentrism of our explanations up to this point. And so one of the things it seems that's very intriguing about what Ariel's been talking about is not only expanding the scale of time in which you're talking about, capital accumulation,

operating in history and functioning in a kind of systemic way, but also expanding the geography, right, for where these effects or consequences, where you have to look. in history to see the sources of change within a dynamic, you know, global system. So I think that's useful. I mean, I think two things that Ariel said that I think would be worth thinking about a little bit more and hearing her on is one, she sort of said that even the explanations and understanding internally in the history of Europe for capitalism, and let's add the corollary that one of the other kinds of historical questions that have framed Eurocentric approaches and histories is, well, why did the West become a dominant, you know, kind of grouping within, you know, the history of the world in the last, you know, 500 years, when did that happen? How did that happen? And a lot of the theories, of course, were, you know, making all kinds of presumptions about the sources of this or the extent. of the hegemony and so on. So that all has to be critiqued. And maybe there is something to distinguish

between the history of capitalism as a whole and how we would understand that. And, you know, different periods of hegemony in history and its sources and bases. And one thing that the Eurocentric narratives, whether they've been, you know, kind of a certain form of Marxism or whether they've been these very right-wing kind of, you know, historiographies about the unique internal cultural values of Europe that spurred its, you know, dynamism and so on, that either, all of them seem to have kind of associated whatever, you know, occurs in the modern, you know, system of modernity as, you know, a product of some sort of trajectory that is located within Europe, but doesn't, you know, take into account the wider perspective.

or in the case that we've been talking about, a longer perspective. And so that's why I was asking about what are the consequences of changing that frame to a longer framework. And I'd like to hear Ariel talk a little bit more about that, but also, you know, so it's not only the time scale, that changes the way you look at things. Certain things that look like they're unique products of a particular time suddenly don't look so unique. And so you have to change your analysis. and then likewise the geographic kind of axis of it. If you're focused on explaining, oh, why did Europe become, you know, you may, you know, come up with explanations that aren't based in, you know,

the genuine facts that you are not viewing because you're not looking at what's happening in the rest of the world. You're only looking at it as an adjunct to some other system or process. So those are the kind of two axes. I think your question gets that in terms of the Eurocentric. is that there's a unique, Eurocentric sense of its own history that might be mythic and needs to be critiqued. And then, and likewise, it's geographically very narrow and is missing a lot of what's happening. If I may, if that wasn't a big enough question already, I'm going

to add another axis onto this. So, Adnan, you said, we need to not only broaden the scope, geographically that we're looking at history, as well as lengthen the period of time that we're looking at history. But I think that there's another fundamental block that there's quite some debate on within dependency theory itself is what is moving history. So we don't only have the how long and the how wide. We also have the why or the how question as well. So talking about some of these dependency theorists. We have Wallerstein, who, Professor Salzman, you already introduced. We have Samir Amin, who is a dependency theorist that I'm quite fond of myself, that say basically politics and ideology are the driving motive forces of history. Whereas we have good to Frank, who we've already

talked about quite a bit, at least somewhat in this conversation. He really narrows it down to capital accumulation as the motive force of history unto itself. even in the pre-capitalist period. So this is why I'm adding it on to this question, because Adnan is talking about, you know, broadening the scope of history, both in terms of geography and time. In terms of what Gundafranc is talking about, he sees capital accumulation as the motive force of history, even pre-capitalism. You know, he has this work, the 5,000-year world system where he's talking about how the process of capital accumulation is driving. it for that basically that entire period. So just another axis to throw in there on that question.

You have not only the time and the geography, but also the how or the why things are actually changing. Okay. So I think, you know, and I, you know, if we can, we can strike a very contemporary court, Thomas Piccatee, you know, has, has addressed this again about the ideology of capitalism and its self-justification. And, of course, that was the mission civilatrice of the 19th century. And, yes, you'll have all this self-justification. So, in a way, one can think of all of European history. You know, I'll say this as it is one big justification of global dominance, you know,

and not just the Whigish part of it. So just the whole imbalance. of what we know about Europe versus what we know about the majority of the world, you know. So, yeah, so the ideological is there. And I think, but I think the question here

is perhaps getting away from the term capitalism. And the more I teach about the history, I don't want to shock you in this, but the more I teach about the capitalism, the more I begin to think that this is not a very useful term.

And that, you know, it, and again, going back to the Marxian concept that, you know, that scale, that, you know, quantity changes into quality. And so, but how that quantity occurs that pushes, pushes the scale over into capitalism, I think that that becomes a topic that is increasingly difficult to address once we understand the two. two points that Annan was talking about. One is the geographical scale of accumulation, which is Samir Amin, accumulation on a global scale, right? And then we have the time lapse, which is when does this begin? When do that scale start shifting from one hemisphere to another and how? And here, you know, the timing, I think that becomes, for me, is becoming very interesting. is the way that in terms of accumulation and includes of global dominance,

several things intersect at different moments in history. And if I can just give a plug to my old professor, Richard Bullitt, whose book on, I think it's cotton, climate, and camels wrote a book on the 9th century about, it's about 200 years of history using very scant resources. Obviously, the resources that weren't available to Gunter Frangor to Marx, much less. And reconstructs a little moment in history

where everything in Turkish, Dink Oldu, everything came together. You know, climate came together, culture came together, technology came together, and there was this efflorescence of, commercialization of cotton in Iran, when you don't think about, you know, commercialization. The underground, the underground tunnel system was dug. Muslims came, became increasingly dominant.

There was a demand for cotton because, you know, traditionally Muslims have shunned other luxury fabric. So this expanding market for cotton, the Muslims also restored lands that, had been marginalized through these underground water systems, irrigation systems. And so increasingly, I'm seeing these sort of moments in history where things came together. And I think a bullet's a little example, it's a little example. It's still 200 years, you know, is very instructive. And more people are looking at, there's a new book out by de Groot, relatively new, on he's a historian of the Netherlands and the Dutch Golden Age.

And he looks at climate. And what was hell for the rest of the world called, you know, the little ice age was great for the Dutch. And they prospered during this moment. They had the right technology. They were in the right place at the right time. And, you know, what destroyed whole economies during this period and was particularly destructive for the Mediterranean, as we learn, this period from about 1,300 to 1,800, which is called the Little Ice Age, where climate, where temperatures plummeted by more than 1 degrees Celsius, certain regions became backwaters and other regions became cores to borrow the terminology of Wallstein and company. So, you know, it's, it's, again, I think one of the refreshing things about this debate

between Gunther Frank and Wallerstein. And as I said, it became like really personal, it was back and forth. No, you know, 500 years, 5,000 years. And I mean, come on. You know, he comes up with that term, like add another decimal to your thing. I mean, it's more exaggerated and sarcastic. But I think what's been so healthy about it is it's gotten us away from that rigidity of naming and started us thinking because it's impossible to get us out of that

narrow tunnel vision of seeing capitalism with a capital C as it's associated with this very specific trajectory that is Euro-centered and comes out of Europe, benefits Europe overwhelmingly keeps them on track whether we you know are whether they the narrative is celebratory or the narrative is critical it's still it's still there and it prevents us from seeing both the global shifts that occur you know over long periods of time and also and I think we were going to talk about this at some point the possibilities that occur in different moments in time and also different places. So I'll leave it there.

Yeah, briefly, before Adnan, I let you follow up with whatever you want. Just out of curiosity, so again, we can be brief here. This book by de Groot that you mentioned, I have not read it myself. Dagmar de Groot called Frigid Golden Age. Okay, so. Yeah. Yeah, my question about this, so the way that you explain it, the way that you summarize the work, makes me think of a lot of works that we have that I find quite problematic, which are

environmentally determinist or resource determinist in terms of understanding of history. So, I mean, the key and the most obvious example for most people of this would be Jared diamonds, guns, germs, and steel. Yeah. I'm just curious because I haven't read the book and I'm not familiar with that. Is this determinist in an environmentally a resource dependent way? and whether or not it is, do you also see that as like a big impediment

to understanding of the interconnections of different nations as well as imperialism generally because I find that to be a big problem in a lot of history accounts? Listen, Jared Diamond is a populist, popularizer of different things and he caught a wave and he's been riding that wave for a long time.

But the environmental history, I think, is at the forefront of economic history at this point. And it is very specific. It takes into consideration technology, you know, location. There's no, I mean, the Dutch are a perfect example of, you know, they don't succeed, right? So it's not, you know, and they don't succeed because of climate, but they do rise because of, they have that, the technology everything comes together at a certain moment in history it doesn't sustain it it doesn't determine it there could have been political decisions or lack thereof you know um that all of a whole range of contingencies these these don't these don't happen but i find that um this this is

definitely an area where um we can expand our understanding of capitalism we can understand our understanding of capitalism is a global phenomenon and how different parts of the world are able to do better at different times. So, yeah, I don't see, I mean, this is not environmental, this is not environmental determinism, and it is an economic history. And it, you know, it tells, I mean, some of the, as I said, some of the best economic histories of late, the sort of ones that are pushing the envelope, as far as I'm concerned, are people like Gregory Cushman. Again, talking, they're talking environment, guano, you know, bird shit, the opening of the Pacific, you know. And de Groot also talks about, you know, it's like, why are we talking about whales?

So the non-human animal component, you know, we know about that, you know, the fur trade in Russia, the fur trade in the Americas. I mean, think about whales. I mean, they were a huge source of everything, you know, oil, you know, before petroleum, et cetera. So, and Jason Moore has some nice sort of short anecdotes. He's also Environment World Systems guy who's now at Binghamton and has written a fantastic book. I really have to plug it. Very, very easy read, wonderful with Raj Patent. Tell called The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and it's a fantastic book.

But he talks about the yamas, the yamas, you know, these small camelid animals that were used, you know, by the thousands and destroyed in mining Potosi in Bolivia, you know, and the silver mines there. So, you know, there wasn't enough horses that Europeans could bring or enough donkeys. They used local, you know, animal life, domesticated. in animals. And without it, you wouldn't have hauled away all that silver. So I think there's environmental history is much more sophisticated. I mean, Jared Diamond does it a real disservice. He's not a historian. I have to say that. And it does a really disservice. And some of the best histories coming out of the economy are actually termed as environmental

histories or climate history. But I think climate is now putting the discussion on another timetable. And that's very important. And the fact that climate shifts, some of which are global, many of which have regional variations, affect different regions very differently, has nuanced this discussion in a whole other way.

And it's very materialist. I mean, we're talking about the environment and we're talking, you know, It might not be capital accumulation as such, but it's the material environment in which human beings are trying to extract that surplus or transform in some way. Yeah, I think you said something that might confuse or be provocative and intriguing, you know, for listeners, which was about how you think increasingly perhaps kind of the analytical category or the historical category. of capitalism isn't necessarily the, you know, most useful way to understand this. Maybe you could expand a little bit on what that means, that, you know, how does this look to a historian like yourself who teaches a class called History of Capitalism?

Like, what does it mean then to, you know, how else do you frame or imagine what's happening in the world and, you know, how hegemony is working, how exchange is working, you know, if you get rid of that concept of just the narrow understanding of the label of capitalism, what then are you really able to focus on and to see what becomes clear if you don't have to decide whether it fits this kind of conventional idea of trying to find out the history of when capitalism started and so on. What does that allow you to do? Listen, I think the utility of a world named capitalism

is that we have something to talk about and we have something to debate and there are a series of explanations, right? And I think, but increasingly, I see it giving diminishing returns precisely because what really needs to happen And I think, you know, economists do this and to some degree, you know, many social scientists, they'll work that paradigm, right? And I think we've gone a very fast and loose way of talking about capitalism being everywhere, everything, and yet have lost the big debates that in some ways, you know, opened up by Gunter Frank and Wallerstein, but have closed because people haven't pursued them.

I think we could refine the term, but it's gotten so abused, and on one side, and then the other side, it's been so, you know, it's been taken as such dogma, you know, and unfortunately some of the, you know, the leftist, you know, orthodoxies have contributed to that. This is capitalism. This is not capitalism, you know, and then what falls out of that are policies and this and that. And that's, you know, in many cases, some cases has proved to be disastrous. in other cases has led to street battles, as I know in Turkey about defining whether Turkey was capitalist or not capitalist or the Ottoman Empire was an Asiatic motor production versus a feudal motor production. So I think there's a way in which that terminology, you know, has been at one time at once stymie of a debate. On the other side, as long as that debate was, you know, really rigorous. and people really engaged it. And that way, even though my critique of world systems remains, and I sort of would position myself more on the side of the Gunther Front, I appreciate the fact that the world systems folks keep going.

Because I think you have to work a paradigm to really get, you know, and very consistently have some consistent terms. And it is a sort of, you know, it's a social scientific inquiry as opposed to the type of inquiry and descriptive studies that have been coming out that have called themselves histories of capitalism or call themselves histories of the industrial, alternative histories of the Industrial Revolution. But, you know, are what Goetain, the famous scholar of the medieval Jewish, records called

econographic. They're sort of describing economic phenomenon, but they're not really locating it within a very consistent definition of what they call

capitalism. So I think there's a use for capitalism as a concept as something that we can debate and discuss and try to define. But it's countered by the capitalism, because comes a reified category and the sort of more, you know, fashionable discussion of capitalism

that's happening all across the academy with everyone coming up with a new idea about, you know, American capitalism, guns in capitalism, guns in the Industrial Revolution that is so uneconomic in the way that it's being approached. It's much more just a sort of cultural, historically rich, nuanced sort of description of certain type of economic activity without really getting to the heart of, you know, what is... Well, I guess that's why I was asking about it, is less about like the problems of the way it's being used, then if you don't have to adhere to that kind of conceptual apparatus, both on either poll that you were describing of either this very permissive non-materialist, more culturalist kind of way of describing versus the narrow, very specific mode of production kind of analysis, that if you don't deal with those because they're not really going to be accurate or, you know, useful in understanding, you know, history on a global, long scale as you're interested in doing.

I guess what I'm more interested is less those concerns than what does one focus analysis on? Is it really a history of inequality and exploitation? Is it a history of various different forms of accumulation and the consequences of accumulation? It seems like that these would be interesting to have a kind of rigorous sense of a more global historical sense because one of the advantages, I guess you would say, you know, one of the advantages of the world system theory or, you know, even of the Eurocentric, more narrow Marxist theory, is that, well, at least in identifying capitalism as a particular mode of production that emerges in history at a particular time that's described by regime of wage labor as kind of, you know, a requirement for the way it defines it, is that at least it gave you know some kind of a sense of where do you target you know energy in and analysis in seeing the end of such an exploitative system is that well okay you just got to get rid of the commodity you know commodification of labor where surplus value is derived and then you could you know um socialize the

gains of production or you know so that was like what is was attractive in this is that you know when you're talking about liberation and social struggles for equalities, well, it gave you something, right? So I guess my question is, is where do you locate this now? Because one of the, you know, concerns if you see a 5,000 year system that emerges with cities and markets, you know, in what we often consider prehistory, and if it's just subsequent history is reformulations and, you know, different moves for where the core and the periphery, you know, are, that it doesn't give people a horizon for what it is that needs to change in order to bring in a sustainable environmentally, you know, and socially, you know, equitable kind of system, right?

So I'm wondering what you think about that kind of problem. I mean, yes, there is a need for a sort of handle, you know, on this kind of, economic order, you know, however we define the economy, this economic order that has basically swallowed us up, you know, and swallowing the planet up. But at the same time, and I clearly I teach it and I teach it as a problem, you know, as a problem of terminology, as a problem of origins. Sometimes I teach it, you know, before 5,000 BC. And, you know, James C. Scott's book against the grain. James C. Scott is a famous anthropologist of Southeast Asia, actually, and he's written some brilliant works. But this latest one is very interesting, you know,

and sort of goes back to the origins of habitus and nomadic versus settled populations, etc., etc. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, all these things, I think, are ingredients. And perhaps the, in terms of, analysis, I think, what the, the newer ways to address capitalism have harnessed our greater awareness of these other features global, that there's, you know, it's a very, it's necessary to understand that, you know, even, you know, in the traditional narrative with Columbus sailing over the Atlantic that his compass was Chinese and his his navigational techniques were Arab and Muslim, right? So there's this accumulation that occurs on route that has to be acknowledged. There's another side of this too that really points to the relationship between capitalism

and environmental degradation. And here I would cite the way. work of Robert Marx, who writes on China and South China, on a very long deray, talks about 500 years, and shows how commercialization, not capitalism, which we see it, you know, in a more pristine sense or, you know, European capitalism coming into the Chinese market, how it's already working terrible impact on the indigenous populations of South China as North Chinese, Han Chinese move into the South,

and how it destroys the environment and the wildlife and, you know, transforms the environment without, you know, silk is commodified, rice is commodified, but no capitalism as such. So I think it's constantly, you know, I think that's one of the great things about Marx. I don't think, you know, he would have been satisfied if he saw all this new literature to say, okay, you know, I mean, there are certain things that I continue to teach about. Marks, whether it is the commodity and thinking about the commodity and the fetishism of commodity, certain modes of analysis that he derived from a particular stage and a particular location of observing the economy at work in this transitional phase, where he's seeing the origins of this industrial economy and seeing it dovetail with expanding imperialism. And these are things, these are so valuable for our critique and our understanding. But, you know, the empirical

basis of which we're constantly transforming. And we can come back to that original definition and then start tweaking it and tweaking it. And then it becomes more useful. So, you know, going back to Picquette, you know, I mean, in terms of policy, you know, what should we be talking about, you know, and he's very historical. I mean, he's a group of economists that have got a huge database. These aren't just, you know, some, you know, a few, you know, things from the, from the treasury, you know, floating monetary, you know, analysis. I mean, this is like long-term analysis of wealth accumulation in the early 20th century, late 21st, in the early 21st and late 20th century to show how accumulations working on a global scale in terms of, you know, populations themselves.

I mean, he's talking about, you know, in terms of policy, a 90% wealth tax, inheritance tax, as the only way to address the type of inequality that we have today, which isn't narrowly concentrated. That's the difference, you know. How many, I mean, we used to talk about how many millionaires there were, right? Now, middle class are millionaires, most of them, in house, in the United States, and even in Canada and in Europe. Just their housing values, you know, what they've inherited as a house is half of that, right? So now we're talking about billionaires. So how in this way in which, you know, capitalism has perpetuated itself by a limited amount of redistribution,

but substantive enough to sustain it ideologically and politically, and this is as true in China as it is in the United States, you know, and that's the big, you know, policy of, you know, the Chinese is really to build up that middle class, consuming middle class that is, you know, vested in this particular, you know, variant of capitalism. So, yeah, so we constantly got to re-evaluate it because it didn't end. It didn't end when we hoped it would.

It wasn't overthrown regionally or globally. And it's like a terrible weed that keeps, you know, cropping up over and over and over again. So some part of our analysis, we got wrong, you know. And so it's time to go back over it. Again, for listeners and people who want to discuss and see this debate, or some of it in a very long time frame and more nuanced in terms of the environment, again, I really recommend that book by Raj Patel and Jason Moore called The History of the World and Seven Cheap Things. And just one last comment here. Jason Moore suggests that in merging capitalism with our environmental history, he's got a big debate with the Anthropocene folks. The Anthropocene, of course, is a term that's becoming more widely accepted.

And it was brought forward by environmentalists and environmental historians to designate basically the world's since the Industrial Revolution that has radically transformed the environment and should be looked at as a new geographic, geological age in the history of the world, right? Moore says, no, we should call it the capital O.C. Because it's not human beings per se, every human being. It's a certain group of human beings harnessed to a certain type, a mode of economic exploitation that is in the course of completely destroying our planet. And so it should be called that.

I have a comment on that, however, and I think he's more to the point. It's the cheap-o-scene. Actually, it might be better than the capital scene in terms of the way that it rolls off your tongue. Anyway, I leave it there and look forward to some comments and critique. I love that last point that you made and that more makes about it being the capitalosine

rather than the Anthropocene, as such, in terms of what we need to be looking at for understanding the degradation of the environment. And this is a point that I've been making for a long time is that, you know, we have a lot of neo-Malthusians out there. And in other cases, just outright eco-fascists who, you know, they pinpoint the rise of global population as the source of environmental degradation, whereas anybody that takes more than, I don't know, 30 seconds to think about it, should be able to understand that it's not the growth of global population as such that's contributing to environmental degradation,

at least to a large extent. It is capitalism as a system that's contributing to environmental degradation, particularly in production and consumption. And we know that it's not, the production consumption in the global economy is not spread equally amongst people in the globe. Therefore, we know that raw growth and global population is not necessarily going to contribute to climate change in the way and environmental degradation in the way that we think that it does. It's the overproduction and overconsumption of commodities, particularly when these commodities are produced in environmentally destructive ways and use environmentally resourced heavy

materials, that's really the problem that we have. But that's just my comment on that. I know that we've been going for a while, but there's at least one more topic that I'm really hoping that we have time to spend some time on, which is hegemony. I think that discussing hegemony in the context of the conversation that we're having right now was quite important. And the role of hegemony is something that we've been discussing in previous episodes of the show. listeners, if you're interested in those specific episodes, I can think of at least two recent ones where we were talking about hegemony, which was our most recent episode with Immanuel Ness, where we talked about the potential role of China as a counter-hegemon to the United States,

as well as our conversation, our crossover episode with journalist Danny Haifong, where we were talking about the U.S.'s hegemony and potentially the end of U.S. hegemony. And Adnan, I know that you also have been talking about hegemony on the Red Nation. I had listened to both parts of that conversation that are friends at the Red Nation released with you, where you were talking about hegemony as well, particularly in the second part of that conversation. So, listeners, if you want to check out those conversations, that's where you can find them. But Professor Salzman, to turn it into this conversation, hegemony plays a really big role in the understanding of world systems.

it plays a really big role in the understanding of capitalism writ large. And I know we've already discussed whether thinking about capitalism as a system as such is historically relevant or not. But I think the understanding hegemony and coming to grips with how hegemony and rivalry changes over periods of history is really important to understanding history. So without putting, you know, closing the question in really any way, let me leave it nice and open for you to address the role of hegemony. in this conversation that we've been having and any commentary that you would like to have about hegemony. This allows me to give a plug for one of my favorite historians

who's also a pre-modern historian, Frederick Chabin Lane, F.C. Lane, who's the great Venetian scholar of Venetian history. And he's also, you know, people don't give him credit as such. I mean, Charles Tilly, the great historical sociologists used, his work extensively in writing his book, or the beginnings of his origin of his book, coercion, capital, and European states. And I think what Lane has taught us that we still have yet to take wholly into the economic history realm is the role of power and the way that power

translates into profits. And of course, what he was looking at was sea power and the way that the Venetian Navy was able to control at least part of the Adriatic for part of the time and that basically you had this economy of scale that was created by sea that you couldn't replicate on land. You needed less people to control it. You could extract surplus in the form of customs or movement of goods without paying taxes, et cetera, et cetera. And he talks about the profits from power. And that, I think, is a discussion that we need to have more about in terms of what hegemony is. And the way that hegemony, in terms of military hegemony, as an economic force in the world, is being transformed, of course, as we speak. And what I

usually end, the book I end with in my course is Shoshana Zuboff's new book called surveillance capitalism. And so I think this whole dynamic is radically changing what we mean by hegemony. It's also radically changing what we mean by space. So participation, control, you know, and we know, you know, how the internet may be controlled or shut off and channeled. So, you know, we and how, you know, all the internet and a lot of it is just a spin-off or in tandem with the military industrial complex. They are working together. So it's becoming, you know, it is this seamless thing. But on the other side, and this is something, is that hegemony has changed. And my example here, something

that is very painful to me personally, I mean, you know, because I have friends from the region, it's very painful to me as a still American citizen whose tax dollars and whose government destroyed that country several times over again is what we see happening in Afghanistan. That I think the new hegemony is very different than the Cold War hegemony, the old Cold War, not the new Cold War. The New Cold War hegemony is very different. Yes, there are troops on the ground, there are tanks facing off,

but there's also this way in which whole parts of the world can be written off. Can just, I mean, in the old Cold War, hegemony had to have boots on the ground. The new Cold War, it's not necessary, and entire spaces can be left, Somalia, you know, of course, Afghanistan can be left in total destruction. And the populations can be written off.

They don't count. So hegemony has reconstructed itself on several new axes, both extractive. I mean, they'll, you know, the West and the East or wherever will make, you know, pathways, hegemonic pathways into Afghanistan, if it's a question of extracting resources. They'll build a little corridor, right? A belt in whatever railroad, a road across Asia that can be selective and assert hegemony. But it's changing. It produces a profit and a rent. That's what FC Lane talked about, that power produces a rent. And it produces it in different ways.

And the technologies, the coercion and control change, and that's part of it. What's interesting in this era, however, if I can just continue on that line, is how hegemony is to some degree detached from economic dominance. And how, you know, the U.S., which spans, what is it? more than the next, you know, 100th nation states in military is also declining economic power. I'm not saying that China isn't building up its army or that Russia hasn't continued. I mean, China has more, you know, a million than India as well in terms of their soldiers. But it's, it's, this disjuncture, I think, may be unique in history. maybe, maybe. I don't know British, you know, whether we can compare it with British. But I think

these are the kind of analyses and comparisons that should be happening. You know, if we're really talking about understanding where we can transform the system. Well, I think you're absolutely right, Ariel. I'm so glad you brought it to that kind of analysis of what's changing in the contemporary system of global hegemony. Because I do think it, you know, many of these economic historians have, I think, noted that this is a pretty unique situation. I think Michael Hudson, for example, had some line I saw recently from one of his works about how we are in a very strange era where this is the first attempt at imposing a kind of global hegemonic order on by a, you know, by a power that is a total debtor power and has, you know, very weak. economic bases on most, you know, what we would consider the industrial or other kind of commercial, you know, measures that it's a declining kind of economic power in various ways.

But that the way the hegemony is working is with these new kind of technologies, a changed sort of geography, all of those things that you referenced in terms of the Internet and the intersection with military and surveillance is that, you know, that this is a hegemony that has over levered or leveraged very high into its military power as the only mechanism for maintaining a kind of coercive capacity to structure a world system that allows, you know, its debt, you know, in trade and consumer debt, etc., to sort of float. You know, life, you mentioned, you know, a middle class person with these inflated housing, you know, values is considered a kind of millionaire. This is all a kind of projection of a system, it seems, where U.S. military advantage and the fact that it is invested in one area, really, which is surveillance, military power, and military technology, and where it only has one decisive advantage over its competitors is in this. is that kind of long historical, maybe, you know, some people have Red Lane and they figured, well, this is the only way we can keep going is we invest in the one area where we can get the rents of empire, you know, through power, military power, and so on. So that, I think you're

right that that is a unique kind of situation. So the prospects for how that could be unraveled will be interesting. And we did talk with Emmanuel Ness about, um, this question of China as an emerging counter, hegemon, potentially what that will do to U.S., the structure of the way the U.S. has, you know, bargained or gambled on its dominance. You know, it hasn't done it through, you know, changing its economy in some new productive ways or, you know, it's just done it in the most unproductive way, which is, you know, military power, military technology, and trying to exert influence that way. So I think that that is, you know, and I think the other point that I really want to ask you to maybe expand a little bit on is exactly that about surplus populations in the global geography, is that, you know, used to be that they would be a reserve army of labor somehow, but that's not the case now.

These are, and I've seen other analyses that talk about surplus populations, essentially, that they are just quarantined and their fate has nothing, you know, no concern in the overall calculus. And with these sanctions regimes that we see is that, you know, the imposition and just what Biden just did with, you know, Afghanistan in terms of seizing and deciding to distribute some of Afghanistan. reserves, money that belongs to the Afghan people, but that they can quarantine a whole country through a sort of sanctions regime and then expropriate, you know, their wealth and resources that happen to be, you know, in, you know, in, yeah, exactly. So anyway, I just wondered if you had more that you might want to say about how that's working. You know, I think I think one has to read Lane again to understand that relationship because basically, you know, it's U.S. overreach that's, you know, building up China, really. You know,

China is the main beneficiary of this, you know, as perceived as an alternative, but also repressing some of the populations that, you know, China would have to do anyway, you know? I mean, I think one of the reasons that, you know, that the U.S. could walk away from Afghanistan, is it because it's left it on the border with Russia and Russian, former Soviet Central Asia and China? You know, it's a little border up there with China. It's your problem now, folks. You know, we're just going to dump this mess that we created, you know, and the surplus population. But one of the other things that's happening and that has accelerated tremendously during the pandemic, is the mechanization of production all over the world.

And the same industries that were, you know, taking advantage of these huge scale in China production. For example, German industries are all moving back to Germany now and without the workers. So, you know, where they required 100,000 workers in China and they could get them and the fabric, you know, factories were built up overnight, you know, in those miraculous, you know, dynamic ways of building in China. And they're all broken down and they're moved back. And now, you know,

the sneaker companies and everybody else has these huge halls filled with machines and five workers. So this is happening in a very fast clip because of the pandemic. And because of the precariousness of, you know, and of labor because they get sick now, you know, they get pandemics, they get diseases. So, yeah, this is what's also happening at the same time as, you know, that the surplus populations, quote, unquote, are being produced outside, but also inside. So, yeah, you know, it's, you know, in the best sources, musks are, you know, circling the globe and their new spaceships. Yeah, well, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, well, that film Elysium, you know,

I don't know if you've seen that film. Oh, well, I mean, it kind of gets that exactly that where you have environmental devastation in, you know, um, you know, in the world and the elite has relocated to this, uh, kind of orbiting space, uh, you know, area where, you know, they might use some of the people from below when they need them, but most of the time they're just there suffering in their miserable, you know, a situation and

you know, that's... It's a new gated community. Exactly. It was like a... Did you see that film Wild Palms that? Did you ever see that? No, I didn't. Yes, it was a version of this, so, but on the earth. But yeah, it's sort of like a stellar gated community

kind of situation. Yeah, no. In any case, but I think I don't know, Henry, if you have anything you want to add at this point, but I thought those were very important conclusions to bring this kind of analysis of the history of capitalism to being able to appreciate some of the shifts and changes in our contemporary environment and circumstance. Oh, for sure. I've really enjoyed the conversation and I feel like I've gotten a lot out of it and it stimulated

a lot of thoughts, both in terms of my preparation for the interview really got me thinking about a lot of things in the conversation itself. So why don't we conclude by going around the horn one more time with just briefly either, you know, final thoughts that the conversation stimulated or whatever happens to be on our mind right now or whatever we want the listeners to get as a takeaway, however you want to wrap up. So I guess I'll go first then. Adnan, you can follow me and Professor Sultzman.

You can have the final word as we wrap up here. So my closing thoughts on this is that. listeners, I think that we need to understand that whether you think, as Samir Amin does, that politics and ideology are the motive force of global history or whether you think André Guantre-Cunta-Frank is more correct with his capital accumulation is the driving force of global history. I think that what we need to understand is that regardless of what's driving history, that history is interconnected. History has these connections. We have this system, whether you or not you would consider yourself a systems theorist or a dependency

theorist, we have to understand that history does have these connections and that without understanding these connections and understanding how various states in some cases or sometimes extra state powers, sometimes within states, how they are able to use and abuse other countries, other states, other groups of people in the world, that oftentimes is what allows us to really understand how history is moving and also allows us to understand perhaps how we can try to affect history going forward. By understanding the connections of the world, by understanding how capital is connected in the world system, we are able to better understand how we can try to push beyond the system that we're currently in. And I know that this is something that

we had talked about earlier, Adnan, this is a point that you had been bringing up, is when we're looking at there being a global system, and as Gunter-Frank would say, a 5,000-year global system, and as the other system stearist would say, you know, 500-year global system, at times it seems like overwhelming, right? You know, we're in this 500 to 5,000-year global system. And I don't think that anybody that's listening to the program is really satisfied with the system that we're currently living in. But we have to understand the connections within the world in order to understand where we can push, what buttons we should push, how to make a more just world and how to make a more just system. So those are just some of the things that we're pinging around in my

head as we have this conversation is that, you know, people just need to understand this and they need to look at it from this perspective because this is not the perspective that you get when you read, you know, your high school history textbooks where everything is very isolated, isolated history events. We don't have this interconnectedness of history. So that's just the things that we're bouncing around my head. Adnan, any final thoughts from you? Well, I think we've had a pretty thorough conversation. So I don't have too much more, you know, to add about it other than that, you know, I think what I'll be thinking about as a consequence of this conversation preparing for it a little bit is to think a little bit more about how to appreciate and study some, you know, what Janet Abu Lurod, who we didn't talk about but is a key figure in these debates and who wrote a wonderful book before European hegemony about the kind of 13th century epoch of the world system as she saw it, is the way in which you can't just study one region in isolation and understand something that you

were just alluding to, Henry, but is to think about how these processes are interactive and how a non-Western perspective rebalances are understanding and appreciation better of the changes that take place in history. So I'm going to definitely be thinking a little bit more about that and about that particular moment, since that's the era I study, and I want to go back to kind of thinking about, you know, how do you integrate the histories and stories of interchange, of intersection, of interaction at all these levels of culture, politics, and economy in the wider Mediterranean world and how that's just one node within a wider Afro-Eurasian system during that period and, you know, how that might change our perspective. So that's something that I'll, you know,

take out of this, out of this conversation. But I think the last point is just where we ended up in our conversation and where is kind of thinking about what's happening in our current world and what narratives and analyses we need really to grasp this. And that's one thing that I think is really beneficial from a longer period of examination and a wider geography is that then we can appreciate those agents and causes in our own time, I think, in a more sophisticated way, which is, I think, what we're going to need since, I think, as Ariel mentioned earlier, clearly our previous analysis had flaws because it didn't lead to the kinds of changes we hoped for expected and so we have to rethink some of you know i mean that's what's known is that if

capitalism is an appropriate kind of frame of analysis it's clearly a dynamic system that has been changing and our analysis of it and of the world that we're inhabiting has to be updated as well and frankly we don't have a lot of time to do it we were talking about environmental factors and that's been one problem of the analysis before is that these are not externality. So we need an integrated way of thinking because time is short. History may be long, but our future could be short. So we have to rethink this thoroughly and effectively if we're to find way avenues for our social struggles now and in the near future. Yeah, I want to thank both of you because, you know, I'm teaching this course right now, but, you know, my students don't have the same frame of reference that you do

or your audience does. So it's a very nice, refreshing way for me to retool and rethink what I'm doing with them and what I'm doing with my course. But I think one of the things I want to end with, and I do teach also courses on commodity, on history, not the history of commodity, the history of commodification, really, and consumerism as an ideology and as a definition of these classes that have come into being as a sort of byproduct of, you know, the way that capitalism reinvents itself and allows for a slightly larger group of people to have what they seem to be sharing in the benefits is that I think this is a very important awareness that we have to have of the role of these classes that have been brought into this new, this relationship with capital.

and their role, that it becomes, you know, and I'm not talking about, you know, every consumer is an agent of change, or that, you know, if you buy, you know, one pair of Tom's shoes, sorry if I'm citing a commercial product that you're two other people will benefit somewhere in the world in the global South. But I think there has to be an awareness because this is, this is now the strategy, really. I mean, this is China's strategy. I'm sure Russia has a very similar into building up a middle. class. Nationalism is part of it. But it's also part of, you know, a creating of a larger web of complicity in sustaining this system. You know, it's larger than it's ever been. It's not smaller. I mean, the working class is smaller. The people who are discarded, you know, from the system are smaller. But there's an ever larger group of people who are linked into the system in a way that they think is beneficial for them. It's sustaining certain lifestyles. And that continues to grow. And I think we have to think about the role that beyond a small elite play in sustaining the system and the ideologies, including nationalism, that work to dissimulate the sort of

effects or, you know, conceal the effects, which are ultimately going to affect, you know, 99% of the world population, human and non-human. So I just ended there and perhaps start thinking about agency again, you know, what is agency in this age in different ways. As I said before, I absolutely love the conversation and hopefully we can bring you back at some point in the future to talk with you again because, like I said, said, every time that I've heard you speak, I really enjoyed the conversations that you've been a part of. So it would be an honor and a pleasure to have you back on in the future. So listeners, we're going to wrap up this conversation. Again, our guest was Professor Ariel

Saltsman, who is a historian at Queen's University alongside, of course, our host, Adnan Hussein. Professor Saltzman, can you tell the listeners anything that you would like them to direct that you would like to direct them to so that they can follow you or your work? Actually, you know, so limited interface with the Internet, but, you know, my current work is going in a variety of directions and I should have a book out with Hearst and will have economic content, but it's mainly going to be focused on the history of exclusion of the West and how it is part of the political as well, political and economic system, which we now have is global system. So that's one thing. But I would encourage people to read something that I

didn't write, but I wish I had, which is Raj Patel's and Jason Moore's A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, because I think it encapsulates a lot of the new thinking about what capitalism is and what it's done on so many different levels. excellent i hope that you're prepared for the fact that when your book is coming out that we will be back in touch with you about coming back on so be be prepared for that uh adnan how can the listeners find you in all of the work that you're doing well uh you can follow me on twitter at adnan a hussein hus a ian and you can also listen to the other podcast i host and we've had uh ariel salzman on as a frequent guest um on it called the mudgeless m a j l i

and if you're interested in the Middle East, Islamic world, Muslim diaspora, Islamophobia, those kinds of questions and concerns are our regular fare there. And I just want to add my hearty thanks to Ariel for coming on and being generous with their time to talk about these important issues that she's so well-versed in teaching and reading in this area about the history of capitalism. And I agree completely. Hopefully we can have you on again sometime real soon. Thank you. Thank you. And listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. That's H-U-C-K-1-995. You can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla-Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-E-R-I-L-A-U-Sk. That's how you can best keep up with what we're producing and putting out as well as from each of the co-hosts, what we're

individually doing as well. So be sure to follow Gorilla underscore Pod on Twitter. If you would like to support the show monetarily, which helps us keep the lights on for our little production here. After all, we are completely independent and entirely beholden to you, the listeners. You can support us by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla being spelled G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A. Until next time, listeners, Solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.