Horizontally Integrative Macrohistory
Context
Chapter 5 of the book by Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient
.. "proposes and pursues a "Horizontally Integrative Macrohistory" of the world, in which simultaneity of events and processes is no coincidence. Nor are simultaneous events here and there seen as differently caused by diverse local "internal" circumstances. Instead, one section after another inquires into common and connected causes of simultaneous occurrences around the world. Demographic/structural, monetary, Kondratieff and longer cycle analysis is brought to bear in different but complementary attempts to account for and explain what was happening here and there. Such cyclical and monetary analysis is used to help account in the 1640s for the simultaneous fall of the Ming in China and of revolution in England, rebellion in Spain and Japan, and other problems in Manila and elsewhere. The French, Dutch Batavian, American, and industrial revolutions in the late eighteenth century are also briefly examined in cyclical and related terms. Another section inquires whether the so-called "seventeenth century crisis" of Europe was world wide and included Asia; and I explore the important significance of a negative answer for world economic history. Observation of the continuation of the "long sixteenth century" expansion through the seventeenth and into part of the eighteenth century in much of Asia is used also to pose the question of whether there were very long, about 500 year long, world economic and political cycles."