Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 Review

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(More customer reviews)Among teachers and students of world history, this book is already considered a classic. It is not so much a book about people, places, and events, as it is a book about processes and networks in a non-Eurocentric 13th century Old World.
Welcome to a world whose hub is India. To the east Southeast Asian gold and spices and Chinese silks and porcelain. From the west come carpets, dye, incense, gold, silver, and slaves from the Persian Gulf and Red Sea - gold, ivory, and slaves from East Africa. To the north, the Mongols control Central Asia and the Silk Road that Marco Polo takes to China. However, much like "westernization" is sometimes used as a concept in modern history, this was a time of "southernization" in an Asia-centered world connected by monsoon winds. Way out on the periphery of an overlapping Mediterranean network lie Genoa and Venice. Indeed, if Europe were mentioned at this time, most literate people would think of Constantinople - not medieval Western Europe, but the postclassical Byzantine Empire.
*Before European Hegemony* is obviously a `not for everyone' history book. Nevertheless, the reason that I gave it 5 stars is because I consider it the most accessible `world systems' history - and also because of the maps of overlapping trading networks which are probably known even better than the book. I can recommend the book to teachers (and students) of AP and college-survey world history courses without hesitation, or any reader whose tastes run to historical scholarship.

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In this important study, Abu-Lughod presents a groundbreaking reinterpretation of global economic evolution, arguing that the modern world economy had its roots not in the sixteenth century, as is widely supposed, but in the thirteenth century economy--a system far different from the European world system which emerged from it. Using the city as the working unit of analysis, Before European Hegemony provides a new paradigm for understanding the evolution of world systems by tracing the rise of a system that, at its peak in the opening decades of the 14th century, involved a vast region stretching between northwest Europe and China. Writing in a clear and lively style, Abu-Lughod explores the reasons for the eventual decay of this system and the rise of European hegemony.

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