Positing a ‘not-yet’ to ‘backward’ peoples was a prevalent and distinctly ‘Histor-icist’ sentiment in Russia precisely at the time Trotsky was developing the theory of uneven and combined development. Pointedly, Trotsky rejected the Menshevik idea of ‘waiting’ for a bourgeois stage before a proletarian revolution could occur, and insisted on the ‘now’. The Bolshevik Revolution and strategy of permanent revolution are direct outcomes of this, while uneven and combined development was its methodological and theoretical foundation. This is espe-cially revealing given the centrality of the peasant – the supposedly nonmodern agent par excellence – in Russian social life generally, and the Bolshevik Revo-lution specifically. In the History of the Russian RevoRevo-lution, Trotsky’s explicitly characterises Russia’s revolutionary conditions in terms of the imbalance between town and country, and revolutionary agency in terms of the combina-tion of a newly formed proletariat and pre-existing peasantry. We can trace this back even further to Marx, who himself saw the potential for a communist revo-lution in Russia ahead of the capitalist heartlands due to the very prevalence and dominance of the peasant commune.197
The reason both Marx and Trotsky identified forms of divergence and differ-ences similar to those found in the postcolonial literature was because both were sensitive – with some important limitations198 – to the intersection of History 1s and History 2s. As we shall see, it is through the idea of ‘combination’ that Trotsky’s theory provides a nonstadial, multilinear understanding of develop-ment that explicitly denies essentialised and externally related dichotomies of pre-capitalist and capitalist. Similarly, we find in Marx an outright rejection of any
‘supra-historical’ application of his categories in Capital. This was because ‘events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results’. They could not, therefore, be explained ‘by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory’.199 The explicit disavowal of histor-icism in the writings of Trotsky and Marx should alert us to the possibility that postcolonialism and Marxism need not be seen as mutually exclusive endeavours.
With this in mind, we suggest that uneven and combined development provides a theoretical approach that may strengthen the broader aims of the postcolonial research programme. We make this suggestion because there remains a tension within postcolonialism that ultimately undermines its efforts in both fully subverting Eurocentrism and reasserting non-European agency into the history of capitalism. The tension is rooted in the parochial – dare we say ‘provincial’? – scope of its critique. That is, the subject rarely extends beyond the particular experience of modernity in specific localities, and particularly those experiences in the colonial modernities of the Global South. Chakrabarty notes that ‘Provincializing Europe is not a book about the region of the world we call “Europe”’,200 but is instead concerned with the generalisation of its forms and categories. Similarly, Chatterjee claims that ‘[t]he universality of Western modernity … is a product of its local conditions’, which is then subsequently
‘transported to other place and times’.201 And although Guha’s classic Dominance Without Hegemony provides a sharp critique of the liberal historiographies of bourgeois rule, it never provides an alternative substantive historical sociology of the European experience.
Consequently, each of these authors uncritically presupposes a discrete and hermetically sealed European history in which modernity was created before being subsequently expanded globally.202 As we have seen, and will see further, such an idealised view is an integral part of the myth of Europe as an excep-tional, pristine and autonomous entity that happened to be especially well suited to the endogenous transition to, and subsequent spread of, capitalism.203 Insofar as ‘the West is constituted as an imperial fetish, the imagined home of history’s victors’ and ‘the embodiment of their power’,204 many of the processes of developmental differentiation that created hierarchical imbalances between colonisers and colonised are occluded.205 The lack of any substantive engage-ment with the question of how capitalism emerged and developed in Europe is therefore a – perhaps the – critical lacuna of postcolonial theory, continually frustrating its abilities to offer a satisfactory non-Eurocentric theory and history of the modern epoch.
To modify Frederick Cooper’s call to arms: in order to truly ‘provincialise’
Europe we must dissect European history itself, and there is no more central myth to be dissected than that of narrating European history around the history of capitalism.206 As Kamran Matin argues, such a task ultimately requires ‘a general social theory, and not just a theory of modernity’, one ‘that goes beyond a mere phenomenology of capital’s expansion and comprehends capital itself as a product of the interactive multiplicity of the social’.207 In short, the foregoing analysis demands an ‘internationalist historiography’208 and theorisation of capitalism’s emergence and reproduction. This would, in turn, require that we
‘distinguish between the inflated, utopian self-presentation of capital as abstract and homogenous and the contradictions internal to historical capitalism that
produce a global, differentiated, and hierarchical space-time’.209 These are some of the main tasks taken up in the pages that follow.
Conclusion
As examined in this chapter, existing theoretical approaches to the transition from feudalism to capitalism have suffered from two particularly debilitating and interconnected problems. The first concerns their general inability to substan-tively theorise the coexistence and interaction of a multiplicity of societies as a distinct domain of ‘geo-social’ developmental pressures, behavioural patterns and causal dynamics (‘the problematic of the international’). The second relates to these extant approaches’ predominant, if not exclusive, focus on Europe as the
‘prime mover’ of sociohistorical change and transformation (‘the problematic of sociohistorical difference’). The two problems are interrelated in that the method-ological internalism or ‘domestic analogy’ fallacy that the first predicament gives rise to – implicitly or explicitly – lends itself to theoretical analyses that conceive the genesis and sources of capitalism as an exclusively European affair (historical priority), and/or extrapolate from the distinct developmental paths and modal-ities of European societies and project them onto the ‘extra-European’ world in a unidirectional manner (linear developmentalism). The European experience of capitalist modernity is thereby elevated to a universal stage of development through which all societies must pass in one form or another (universal stagism).
The false sense of universality that such forms of analysis have given rise to has been the bane of social theory’s existence since its inception.210
Whether the approach in question conceptualises the primary ‘unit of analysis’ as operating at the domestic or world level – as exemplified by Political Marxism and WST, respectively – the dilemma remains the same. By working outwards from a conception of a specific social structure (be it slavery, feudalism, capitalism or whatever), the theorisation of ‘the international’ takes the form of a reimagining of domestic society writ large: an extrapolation from analytical categories derived from a society conceived in the ontologically singular form.
This then erases what is arguably unique to any intersocietal system: a super- ordinating ‘anarchical’ structure irreducible to the historically variegated forms of societies constituting any given system.
This is a particularly debilitating problem for Marxist theories of socio- historical change, as one of the hallmarks of such theories is a claim to a holistic conception of social relations and systems, in which ‘social totality’ is conceived as being composed of interactive and co-constitutive parts; that is, one that theoretically interiorises the interdependency of each element within it ‘so that the conditions of its existence are taken to be part of what it is’.211 If such a claim is to be taken seriously, then the theoretical standing of ‘the international’ for
a historical materialist approach to the origins of capitalism requires a direct engagement with the question of what ‘the international’ is, understood and theorised in its own substantive historical and sociological terms.
One theoretical answer to this question, we argue, is offered by a reconstruc-tion of the concept of uneven and combined development. In contrast to WST and Political Marxism, uneven and combined development offers a way of theo-rising ‘the international’ without jettisoning a historically sensitive sociology.
Not only might this provide a way of uniting the externalist and internalist accounts offered here, it would also be able to capture and articulate the manifold excess of (intersocietally produced) determinations overlooked by both WST and Political Marxism. In its appreciation for the intersocietal and geopolitical, uneven and combined development also provides a way of capturing the multi-linearity of development that is so central to displacing Eurocentric accounts.
As such, it shares many affinities with postcolonial approaches. In particular, uneven and combined development provides a particularly fertile framework through which the sort of interconnections between History 1s and History 2s emphasised by Chakrabarty might be identified, explored and explained.
However, beyond Chakrabarty, the advantage of uneven and combined devel-opment lies precisely in its broader temporal scope. This uniquely positions it as a framework through which we might reconstitute the master categories of Eurocentrism – such as capitalism – on the very terrain they were purport-edly generated – that of Europe. We explore further the potential of uneven and combined development – theoretically and historically – in the pages that follow.