spread of capitalism (or modernity). This conventional account, which informs many
disciplines and is deeply ingrained in popular understandings, is one which presumes
that capitalism began in Europe and later radiated outwards through trade, armies and the
like. The intellectual task is, then, by definition to identify what was (or came to be)
distinctive about Europe15 – what cluster of economic or religious or cultural or other
characteristics, lacking in other parts of the world, enabled Europe to become, in Daniel
Defert’s phrase, ‘a planetary process rather than a region of the world’.16
For some time now, there have been alternative accounts of the development of capitalist
modernity, ones in which the development of capitalism and modernity is not a tale
of endogenous development in Europe, but of structural interconnections between different
parts of the world that long pre-dated Europe’s ascendance – and that, according to
some accounts, provided the conditions for that ascendance.17 Others, also dissenting
from the conventional account, have not sought a grand alternative explanation, but have
rather sought to show that the ‘great divergence’ between the West and the rest happened
much later than the conventional narrative would have it, and due to historical exigencies
rather than any trait or cluster of traits exceptional to Europe; once meaningful comparisons
are made, the factors commonly thought to be unique to European history can be
seen to have been present in parts of Asia.18 What is significant for my purposes is not
which, if any, of these accounts of the development and growth of capitalist modernity is
accurate, but rather that the conventional account of the rise of capitalist modernity has
been challenged by those who have noted that trade was not confined to inter-European
trade, that the conquest of the Americas – and the influx of gold and silver which
followed – was a factor in the development of capitalism in Europe, and that the supply
of raw materials from the colonies, and the existence of captive colonial markets for
European manufactured goods, also played a part – in short, that Europe’s relations with
the world outside Europe may be relevant.