The theory of uneven and combined development offers a potentially useful perspective in overcoming the many problems and pitfalls of the Eurocentric analyses characterising so many extant theoretical approaches to the origins of capitalism. As our employment of ‘unevenness’ and ‘combination’ suggests, we must go beyond any ‘historicist mode of thinking’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty terms it, that conceives of development as the ‘secular, empty, and homogenous time of history’.61 Hence, against Gurminder Bhambra’s criticism that uneven and combined development theoretically reproduces the strong stagism of Enlightenment thinking,62 it rather presupposes stagism in order to scramble, subvert and transcend it.63 The notion of ‘stages’ is deployed precisely to counter stagist thinking, as Trotsky continually emphasised in his diatribes against the Menshevik position that the socialist revolution in Tsarist Russia had to wait for the bourgeois stage to complete itself. More radically still, Trotsky’s polit-ical strategy of ‘permanent revolution’ represented ‘a fundamental rejection of the notion of stages as such in the definition of a qualitatively new type of revolution’.64
Underlying Bhambra’s critique, however, is a more fundamental point about the concept of ‘development’ itself. This might be reformulated in terms of the following question: Can any conceptualisation of human change and transfor-mation from the perspective of development (uneven, combined or whatever) escape certain historicist assumptions? This point is brought out in Meera Sabaratnam’s searching critique of various historical sociological approaches to IR,65 including the theory of uneven and combined development as formulated by Justin Rosenberg.66 Although she claims that the theory makes a ‘critical contribution to wrestling the notion of “development” away from a methodolog-ically nationalist’ foundation, it nonetheless remains an ‘unsatisfactory solution to the issues created by using the idea of “development” as a natural benchmark for understanding human societies and their relationships’.67 As the ‘central problematic of capitalist modernity’ and the ‘founding question of historical sociology as a project’, the concept of development comes packed with a number of normative assumptions about what is meaningful and (causally) significant in understanding human societies.68 The problematic of ‘development’ thus tends to conceptualise the polities of the Global South as ‘subordinate articula-tion[s] of a normalised capitalist modernity that finds its full expression in the contemporary West’. This reproduces a ‘developmentalised framing of human history’ and ‘a politics of “developmentality” in the space of former empires’.69 However, we consider Trotsky’s notion of ‘combined development’ useful precisely because it subverts many of the normative and historicist assumptions
that Sabaratnam argues are inherent to the category of development. Indeed, the concept of combination denotes that there has never existed any pure or ‘normal’
model of development; each and every society’s development has always been
‘overdetermined’70 by its interactions with others, creating a plurality of varie-gated sociological amalgamations. The very unevenness and combination of historical development thus resists any kind of ‘stylised and abstracted’ concep-tions of European history – or any history, for that matter – that can be used as the privileged ‘benchmark’ to normatively judge or comparatively contrast with others.
What is more, the course that European development took throughout the historical periods we examine below was continually conditioned by non-European structural determinations and agents. The multiple histories of non-European societies and the ‘causal’ processes emerging from them were, from the very outset, inscribed in the generative grammar of modern European development. In this sense, any notion of a ‘normalised capitalist modernity that finds its full expression in the contemporary West’ is a pure myth. Each and every instantiation of capitalist modernity – from England to Germany, to Japan, to Bolivia, to Senegal – was, so to speak, a ‘bastard birth’.71 Indeed, if we are to take Marx’s ‘absolute historicism’ (in Gramsci’s sense of the term)72 seriously, ‘pure’ developmental forms do not exist. This destabilises norma-tive claims about any singular developmental model – whether it be England’s economic development or France’s political development, to take just two oft-cited examples in comparative studies – as the benchmark or standard by which other developmental trajectories are to be judged.73
This in turn has radical implications for how comparative historical socio-logical analyses can be pursued fruitfully. It requires a methodosocio-logical shift to something akin to Philip McMichael’s notion of ‘incorporated comparison’, in which specific instances of sociohistorical development are dialectically related to one another as constitutive moments of a broader world-historical process.74 The ‘whole’ thereby crystallises via a comparative analysis of its ‘parts’
as moments of a differentially developing, interactive ‘self-forming’ totality.75 Hence, ‘variations in the actual process whereby the same historical develop-ment manifests itself in different countries’, Antonio Gramsci wrote, ‘have to be related not only to the differing combinations of internal relations with the different countries, but also to the differing international relations’.76
Following the above analysis, one might find a potential contradiction in our employment and juxtaposition of such concepts as ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’,
‘modern’ and ‘archaic’, so central to Trotsky’s works. Such terms are indeed intrinsically problematic as conventionally used and understood in popular and scholarly discourses. According to Baruch Knei-Paz, Trotsky’s own use of the term ‘backwardness’ was not intended as a ‘moral judgement’, but instead sought to demarcate a ‘clear social and historical uniqueness’ which the terms
‘less developed’ or ‘under-developed’ do not convey.77 Of course, this is easier said than done.
Irrespective of how Trotsky employed the terms, our own use of such cate-gories as ‘advanced’ and ‘backward’ is of a rather specific kind. They denote asymmetrical relations or imbalances of power ((geo)political, economic, ideolog-ical), within and between societies, in the ways and forms by which ruling classes reproduce themselves. For example, a social formation such as the Habsburg or Ottoman Empire during the 16th century might be considered more ‘advanced’
than, say, the emerging capitalist societies of the United Provinces or England, since the modalities of ruling class reproduction in the former were relatively more powerful, strong and stable. This was not only because of the geopolitical and military power differentials between these two sets of feudal-tributary and nascent capitalist societies, but also possibly due to the ‘staying power’ of their dominant ideologies and political institutions. Our conception of these terms thus rests on the standards set by the dominant mode of production of the epoch.
By analogy, the concept of ‘class’ also refers to power differentials (ruling and ruled, exploiter and exploited), expressed as a sociopolitical or economic – and not a normative or developmental – hierarchy. In the capitalist mode of production, for example, the capitalist class is not temporally or normatively more ‘advanced’ than the working class. But it is more ‘advanced’ in terms of its possession of power; if it were otherwise, the capitalist class would be incapable of oppressing and exploiting subaltern classes. Thus, we employ the categories of ‘advanced/backward’ in this sense (unless otherwise stated) to capture the various asymmetrical and uneven power relations.78 As such, our reconceptuali-sation of the terms shares some affinities with Sabaratnam’s proposed alternative concepts ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ or ‘possessing/dispossessed’. Whichever categories one prefers, they all allow for, as Sabaratnam puts it, ‘a relational understanding of material conditions in the world without labelling them as deviant from the model of modernity’.79
Where we see an advantage in the use of uneven and combined development, however, is in its potential to extend the historical scope of analysis beyond the capitalist mode of production (in which categories of rich-possessing/poor-dis-possessed are markers of power hierarchies), to non-capitalist contexts, and the very making of capitalism itself. For while the categories of ‘advanced’ and
‘backward’ only take on their full force under specifically capitalist conditions, their empirical referents (asymmetrical and uneven power relations) undoubt-edly held in preceding epochs. This was illustrated in the widespread awe and fear that the more ‘advanced’ Ottoman Empire conjured in the minds of so many 16th-century Europeans (see Chapter 4). Hence, in order to truly subvert the
‘pristine’ and ‘pure’ self-image of European capitalism that Sabaratnam identi-fies as so problematic, we need a conceptual framework that is not beholden to the capitalist epoch.
Such a historical extension of uneven and combined development would appear crucial to claiming its non-Eurocentric credentials. For, as John M.
Hobson suggests, the concept of uneven and combined development, insofar as it is exclusively identified with capitalism, is no less guilty of conflating ‘the inter-national’ with exclusively ‘intra-European relations’, falling prey to the typical Eurocentric assumptions of ‘Western priority and Eastern passivity’.80 Similarly, Bhambra suggests that for all of theory’s focus on societal difference, its very origins remains wedded to a Eurocentric conception of capitalism derived from the Enlightenment conception of stadial development.81 For Burak Tansel, so long as uneven and combined development is considered specific to capitalist modernity, and this capitalist modernity is attributed to European origins, then the theory appears no different to the diffusionist claims of modernisation theory and WST.82 In short, without problematising the origins of capitalism in Europe, the non-West remains excluded as an empirically significant yet theo-retically secondary entity.83 For uneven and combined development to simply invoke intersocietal processes is therefore not enough. It must also be capable of establishing an alternative conception of the making of capitalism, one that includes the historical (and theoretical) significance of non-European soci-eties as active agents in the process. We turn to this question of the historical generalisability of uneven and combined development next.