From the Steppes to the Sea: Asian Roots of Capitalism
for the last chapters of Global Asia book and grant applications
An abundance of scholarship has now demonstrated that the globalization of capitalism is not the result of the global diffusion of a specific ideology or economic system but rather the result of historical processes of spatially expansive territorial capital accumulation in spaces of mobility connecting countless places around the world with increasing intensity over hundreds of years. In Asia, those spaces of mobility travel from the steppes to the sea and produced capitalist social power relations of productivity and inequity first in coastal environments where the circulation and accumulation of commercial capital in and around sea ports created dynamic territories of mobile capitalist power relations traveling inland, overseas, and eventually, around the world.
CAPASIA: The Asian Origins of Global Capitalism
“Modern Inequality and Early Modernity,” Comment on Articles by R. Bin Wong and Kenneth
Pomeranz for AHR forum.