Readers who have followed this blog over the years will be familiar with Samir Amin (see other posts on his books for more). First of all, shout out the publisher Pambazuka Press & Fahamu, an African non-profit publisher, led by Firoze Manji (who I had the honor to spent time with when I was at Carleton). This book pulls together essays that Samir Amin wrote, largely in 1990s, with linkages to history. Amin works to reframe or resituate global history, making arguments that have become much more mainstream since. These ideas, like his contributions on eurocentrism and on underdevelopment, have had broad influence (many who use these ideas often do not know the role that Samir Amin played in developing them since he started publishing about them in the 1960s. Most of these essays are freely available online. A few notes:

“China was not only the most important centre over the whole period, but the one whose development was the most continuous, in spite of the disorders that occurred in the inter-dynastic periods. The population of China was 70 million inhabitants at the beginning of the Christian era (28 per cent of the world population at the time, which was 250 million). It grew regularly to reach 200 million in 1700 (which was still 28 per cent of the world population, estimated at 680 million). Between 1700 and 1800 the demographic trend accelerated and the Chinese population reached 330 million, representing 35 per cent of the world population, estimated at 950 million. Over the course of this long period, China was the most advanced in all fields. It had the greatest agricultural productivity per capita, the largest number of towns that provided a base for an educated administrative population, with skilled artisans. It was considered by everyone as something of a model…” (p. 50-51)

“Capitalism is not a more advanced technological level, nor a mode of production strictly defined. It is, like every other society, a whole in which the facets are multiple. Capitalism has therefore produced a culture, its culture, just as the tributary system produced its own. That I use the singular here –the tributary system, the tributary culture – is meant to emphasise that, beyond the variety of their forms of expression, these cultures share basic identical characteristics, which I have described as tributary alienation. In the same way, the culture of capitalism is defined by its own form of alienation, mercantilist alienation. ’Moneytheism‘ has replaced monotheism. The ’market‘ rules like the ancient God. I am therefore talking about the capitalist culture and refuse to be drawn into the pervasive vulgar definition of ‘Western culture’, joint product of Eurocentric affirmation for some (the winners of the system) and thereafter reverse Eurocentrism (the losers).” (p. 155-156)