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Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age
Andre Gunder Frank asks us to ReOrient our views away from Eurocentrism―to see the rise of the West as a mere blip in what was, and is again becoming, an Asia-centered world. In a bold challenge to received historiography and social theory he turns on its head the world according to Marx, Weber, and other theorists, including Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel, and Wallerstein. Frank explains the Rise of the West in world economic and demographic terms that relate it in a single historical sweep to the decline of the East around 1800. European states, he says, used the silver extracted from the American colonies to buy entry into an expanding Asian market that already flourished in the global economy. Resorting to import substitution and export promotion in the world market, they became Newly Industrializing Economies and tipped the global economic balance to the West. That is precisely what East Asia is doing today, Frank points out, to recover its traditional dominance. As a result, the "center" of the world economy is once again moving to the "Middle Kingdom" of China. Anyone interested in Asia, in world systems and world economic and social history, in international relations, and in comparative area studies, will have to take into account Frank's exciting reassessment of our global economic past and future.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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About the author
André Gunder Frank
66 books44 followersAndré Gunder Frank was Professor of Development Economics and Director of the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. His publications include Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967) and Reflections on the World Economic Crisis (1981).
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
November 30, 2025
Old review
I do not judge a book by its cover. But I DO judge a book by its methods (and methodologies), and by the plausibility of the author’s intelligence as measured not merely in the round, or in the totality of his or her conception, but in the burrow holes of each paragraph, each sentence, each clause. And as soon as I smell a rat or a fraud, I toss the book. I can get its “overall” second-hand and that’s usually good enough. At least, so experience has taught me.
Frank is another one of those academic charlatans that crowd that halls of modern Academe – many of whom seem especially to gather under the skirts of post-Braudelian world-systems theories. Anyone who can cite Martin Bernal and J.M. Blaut as two groundbreaking scholars, isn’t worth spending another 20 minutes on. In fact, at every turn, he cozies up to the latest trend setters which, in the Humanities today, means almost invariably with the latest fraud-setters. Sorry if that sounds too harsh for some.
Then – not surprisingly – instead of ploughing into actual history – he has to spend yet another 50 excruciatingly pretentious pages on methodology – ‘humanocentric’, ‘holistic’ – all rubbish, in my mind.
But the smoking gun came at 39ff., where he admits that some will criticize him for writing big-picture stuff where he doesn’t really know much about any of the details at first hand. This, he thinks, is slanderous! He is proud, damn it!, of his ignorance. It’s those dastardly microhistorians who have spread these false reports about! It is he, who after 2500 years, has first discovered the truth – and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let any little details get in his way! Indeed, his third wife (as he tells us in the Preface) fully supported him in this position. It is not, he assures us, the “dearth of knowledge”, of which he readily boasts, that is at fault – it is the “all-too-common failure to do ‘horizontally integrative macrohistory’ that results in the narrowness if not the very dearth of historical knowledge.” In other words, what the profession needs is more, not less fluff.
The same accusation was laid at the doorstep of Martin Bernal. Bernal, as is well known, got his academic teeth cut doing early 20th cen. Chinese history. That's what he was trained in (Chinese Socialism prior to 1907). When he then suddenly decided to write big, fat (but surprisingly glib) multivolumed histories of everything from Homer to ancient Egypt (his father, J.D., had also been something of a quack, writing a large multivolumed Marxist history of Science – gravity as proof of class-warfare between the masses!), topics about which he knew little or nothing at first hand -- and worse…., about which he had no experience in the CRITICAL handling of sources. Well..., it turned out, of course, that his truly revolutionary conception of the origins of Greek culture were based on specifics that specialists called into question at every turn. But whenever an expert in Greek history raised a point about Bernal’s treatment about some point in Greek history, Martin would change the subject to the Afro-asiatic roots of Greek loan words; and when a linguist would take issue with that, Bernal would suddenly veer into Roman trade routes – always skimming the secondary literature on which he relied à rebours, so to say. And when the total scheme came into question – and he was told that there was no real evidence to support his contentions, his response – and I kid you not – was – well, it may not be true, but it does have “competitive plausibility”, and in the epistemological world we live in today, that is enough and MORE than enough. Therefore, I win…!
I had the opportunity once to drive Martin to the airport – and let me say that he was really a lovely guy – and I had the chance to start to practice my trademark’d dialectic on him – probing the analytical roots of his thinking, especially his thinking on method, on the epistemological aspect of his claims, and so forth… and it took me about 7 minutes to determine that he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about with this “competitive plausibility”, and that he was just winging it – safe in the knowledge that by talking mainly to Classicists about ancient Egypt and to Egyptologists about Plato, and to Afrocentrists about Winckelmann…, and as there were never any dialectical types (no one who ever read Susan Stebbings, in other words) in these audiences, that no one would ever catch him.
And almost no one did.
And so it was. Indeed, just a few months ago a leading proponent of Bernalism announced in my presence… “Well, we now know that Martin was right! He was wrong on the details, of course…but he was right! The Greeks DID have contact with Egypt, because we found some Egyptian vase fragments in a Greek burial site…”. When I pointed out to him the Bruce Trigger had pointed out that the presence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian pottery fragments at Egyptian and Mesopotamian sites proves nothing at all about diffusion, this man agreed… and then just kept talking…
Why let a few nasty details slow you down, brother...
Well – anything good in this book (Frank) is taken at second-hand from the secondary literature, and all the big-picture stuff he adds (and which is his own contribution) is worthless – EVEN IF IT PROVES TO BE RIGHT. Because with the methods that Frank relies on, he can’t take credit even if he does accidentally stumble over something true.
Anyway – I’m done with this “The California School” of world-systems theory – phooey! A bunch of fakes.
(P.S. Janet Abu-Lughod, whose book I DO admire -- it is second-hand, but smart --, is not a “student…from [an] Afro-Asiatic background" (p31) – as Frank must know, since they knew each other personally. She was a Jewish lady named Janet Lippman from Newark, who got her name (and so her revolutionary bona fides) from marrying a Palestian guy, whom she subsequently divorced.)
I do not judge a book by its cover. But I DO judge a book by its methods (and methodologies), and by the plausibility of the author’s intelligence as measured not merely in the round, or in the totality of his or her conception, but in the burrow holes of each paragraph, each sentence, each clause. And as soon as I smell a rat or a fraud, I toss the book. I can get its “overall” second-hand and that’s usually good enough. At least, so experience has taught me.
Frank is another one of those academic charlatans that crowd that halls of modern Academe – many of whom seem especially to gather under the skirts of post-Braudelian world-systems theories. Anyone who can cite Martin Bernal and J.M. Blaut as two groundbreaking scholars, isn’t worth spending another 20 minutes on. In fact, at every turn, he cozies up to the latest trend setters which, in the Humanities today, means almost invariably with the latest fraud-setters. Sorry if that sounds too harsh for some.
Then – not surprisingly – instead of ploughing into actual history – he has to spend yet another 50 excruciatingly pretentious pages on methodology – ‘humanocentric’, ‘holistic’ – all rubbish, in my mind.
But the smoking gun came at 39ff., where he admits that some will criticize him for writing big-picture stuff where he doesn’t really know much about any of the details at first hand. This, he thinks, is slanderous! He is proud, damn it!, of his ignorance. It’s those dastardly microhistorians who have spread these false reports about! It is he, who after 2500 years, has first discovered the truth – and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let any little details get in his way! Indeed, his third wife (as he tells us in the Preface) fully supported him in this position. It is not, he assures us, the “dearth of knowledge”, of which he readily boasts, that is at fault – it is the “all-too-common failure to do ‘horizontally integrative macrohistory’ that results in the narrowness if not the very dearth of historical knowledge.” In other words, what the profession needs is more, not less fluff.
The same accusation was laid at the doorstep of Martin Bernal. Bernal, as is well known, got his academic teeth cut doing early 20th cen. Chinese history. That's what he was trained in (Chinese Socialism prior to 1907). When he then suddenly decided to write big, fat (but surprisingly glib) multivolumed histories of everything from Homer to ancient Egypt (his father, J.D., had also been something of a quack, writing a large multivolumed Marxist history of Science – gravity as proof of class-warfare between the masses!), topics about which he knew little or nothing at first hand -- and worse…., about which he had no experience in the CRITICAL handling of sources. Well..., it turned out, of course, that his truly revolutionary conception of the origins of Greek culture were based on specifics that specialists called into question at every turn. But whenever an expert in Greek history raised a point about Bernal’s treatment about some point in Greek history, Martin would change the subject to the Afro-asiatic roots of Greek loan words; and when a linguist would take issue with that, Bernal would suddenly veer into Roman trade routes – always skimming the secondary literature on which he relied à rebours, so to say. And when the total scheme came into question – and he was told that there was no real evidence to support his contentions, his response – and I kid you not – was – well, it may not be true, but it does have “competitive plausibility”, and in the epistemological world we live in today, that is enough and MORE than enough. Therefore, I win…!
I had the opportunity once to drive Martin to the airport – and let me say that he was really a lovely guy – and I had the chance to start to practice my trademark’d dialectic on him – probing the analytical roots of his thinking, especially his thinking on method, on the epistemological aspect of his claims, and so forth… and it took me about 7 minutes to determine that he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about with this “competitive plausibility”, and that he was just winging it – safe in the knowledge that by talking mainly to Classicists about ancient Egypt and to Egyptologists about Plato, and to Afrocentrists about Winckelmann…, and as there were never any dialectical types (no one who ever read Susan Stebbings, in other words) in these audiences, that no one would ever catch him.
And almost no one did.
And so it was. Indeed, just a few months ago a leading proponent of Bernalism announced in my presence… “Well, we now know that Martin was right! He was wrong on the details, of course…but he was right! The Greeks DID have contact with Egypt, because we found some Egyptian vase fragments in a Greek burial site…”. When I pointed out to him the Bruce Trigger had pointed out that the presence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian pottery fragments at Egyptian and Mesopotamian sites proves nothing at all about diffusion, this man agreed… and then just kept talking…
Why let a few nasty details slow you down, brother...
Well – anything good in this book (Frank) is taken at second-hand from the secondary literature, and all the big-picture stuff he adds (and which is his own contribution) is worthless – EVEN IF IT PROVES TO BE RIGHT. Because with the methods that Frank relies on, he can’t take credit even if he does accidentally stumble over something true.
Anyway – I’m done with this “The California School” of world-systems theory – phooey! A bunch of fakes.
(P.S. Janet Abu-Lughod, whose book I DO admire -- it is second-hand, but smart --, is not a “student…from [an] Afro-Asiatic background" (p31) – as Frank must know, since they knew each other personally. She was a Jewish lady named Janet Lippman from Newark, who got her name (and so her revolutionary bona fides) from marrying a Palestian guy, whom she subsequently divorced.)
Want to read
September 5, 2018dutifully add textbooks to make sure I will not read them shortly after
October 1, 2012
Although Frank has a noble goal, his research methods undermine his project. No primary research, and no definitions for the few terms he uses after discarding so many others as 'Eurocentric'. This book is rife with problems.
February 23, 2009
Frank's thesis is simple - throughout most of history the global economy has been driven by China, and the current Western-oriented world economic situation is but a minor aberration, probably a temporary one. This is one of those books that at first seems to challenge common knowledge, but then argues its case so well that it seems as though we've known what he's saying all along. Columbus, after all, did not "sail the ocean blue" on a whim, but because finding an all-water route to Asia was a vital economic necessity for Europe's growth. Adam Smith acknowledges this when, in the "Wealth of Nations," he refers specifically to China as "a much richer country than any part of Europe," and discusses the importance of the silver brought in from the New World as a means for Europeans to buy Asian products. Even Karl Marx paid homage to the "wealth of the Orient."
Frank is a monetarist economist and an adherent of the Braudelian school of history (an updated Marxist analysis), so his perspective is largely materialist-driven. This makes his theory all the more challenging for those who believe in the importance of the individual in creating history, and he brings a large amount of data to support it. Anyone concerned about the final outcome of the current "global" economic crisis (less so in China and Vietnam!) should read this book and seriously consider what it has to teach.
Frank is a monetarist economist and an adherent of the Braudelian school of history (an updated Marxist analysis), so his perspective is largely materialist-driven. This makes his theory all the more challenging for those who believe in the importance of the individual in creating history, and he brings a large amount of data to support it. Anyone concerned about the final outcome of the current "global" economic crisis (less so in China and Vietnam!) should read this book and seriously consider what it has to teach.
April 4, 2008
Andre Gunder Frank was truly remarkable for his intellectual integrity and willingness to follow the facts-of-the-matter as he found them. After spending a life opposing capitalism and working for socialism, he came to believe that both concepts were necessary to set aside and that a new conceptual framework was required to explain current and ancient history. ReORIENT is his last major contribution to overturn accepted wisdom. The book re-centers China to its rightful place as a determining force in world history.
See this issue of the Journal of World Systems Research for more on Andre Gunder Frank: Journalhttp://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol2/v2_r... of
See this issue of the Journal of World Systems Research for more on Andre Gunder Frank: Journalhttp://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol2/v2_r... of
October 14, 2008
Global historical capital bullion flows? YES! This is one of the most innovative and status-quo-challenging explanations of the modern period of economics I've had the chance to read. Full of points and arguments, many of which at least seem to stick; some don't quite work. If you're interested in global finance in a very huge scope context, read this book.
October 9, 2009
Good idea, major snoozefest. Plus, the book was one big block quote. That's what I do when I write papers. ;)
May 3, 2020
Deeply provocative. Frank wants to reorient the whole social theory and history on economic growth and the origins of capitalism. The book can be hard to digest sometimes, but it is worth every page in the end.
Thumbs up: much literature and information on Asian history. Frank's inserts the not much considered Asian history to the big debates of the origins of capitalism and the great divergence. It really makes you think and question a lot (isn't that the main goal of any history book in the end?) He even admits when he was very eurocentric and questions the Eurocentrism on every page.
Thumbs down: The very bright side of the book is it's dark side. The gigantic argument looses inside itself. Sometimes Frank stretches the capabilities of his social theory to the extreme. In the chapter 4 he wants to prove so badly that Asia was superior to Europe on everything between 1400 and 1800 that makes us to rise one eyebrow more than once. Also, considering this was the heart of his argument, the chapter is not that well documented and a bit thiner, comparing with his two argumentative/ theoretical chapters (first and last). The other thumbs down is his tone. A bit too much on his militant side. He wants to prove a point so badly that sometimes resembles a student union representative destilating irony on everybody who thinks different.
In summ, for me its a 4 star because I was deeply provoked by his big argument and impressed by his erudition (and good sense of humour sometimes). I used some parts with my economics students and it worked very well.
Thumbs up: much literature and information on Asian history. Frank's inserts the not much considered Asian history to the big debates of the origins of capitalism and the great divergence. It really makes you think and question a lot (isn't that the main goal of any history book in the end?) He even admits when he was very eurocentric and questions the Eurocentrism on every page.
Thumbs down: The very bright side of the book is it's dark side. The gigantic argument looses inside itself. Sometimes Frank stretches the capabilities of his social theory to the extreme. In the chapter 4 he wants to prove so badly that Asia was superior to Europe on everything between 1400 and 1800 that makes us to rise one eyebrow more than once. Also, considering this was the heart of his argument, the chapter is not that well documented and a bit thiner, comparing with his two argumentative/ theoretical chapters (first and last). The other thumbs down is his tone. A bit too much on his militant side. He wants to prove a point so badly that sometimes resembles a student union representative destilating irony on everybody who thinks different.
In summ, for me its a 4 star because I was deeply provoked by his big argument and impressed by his erudition (and good sense of humour sometimes). I used some parts with my economics students and it worked very well.
September 12, 2008
Do we find ourselves surprised by the seemingly sudden rise to economic and political power that China has attained in such a short amount of time? Andre Gunder Frank delineates that indeed we should have very much anticipated this natural course of action. Had we done our Asian history, we (as he methodically and explicitly documents) would have seen this coming a mile away. Western history, fraught with facts of pioneering of the Industrial Revolution in England, scientific methods and advancements, and social awareness are argued to not have claimed western Europe as their origin. It was and still is in fact Asia, particularly China with its history that vastly predates the Western world in the advancement of industrial, scientific and social breakthroughs. As a child of the Chicago school of economic thought, (almost a part of Milton Friedman's 'Chicago Boys')he quickly viewed their folly and began researching the methodology and social structures of the Orient to better define its current burgeoning exploits. This is most definitely a scholarly work that will question how you view the Western-birthed history of textbooks we grew up in, with the reality of Chinese economic and political explosion. Before long, you may find yourself understanding that China is simply taking its historically rightful position with the rest of the world power(s).
March 21, 2008
Andre can always be a little exaggerated and silly, but the basic argument of the book is correct and is a good addition to (rather than substitute for) the growing volume of lit on this subject. Basically, China and East Asia's recent rise is not something new but rather a return to what things were like prior to the damage of European colonialism. As the cliche goes, China just had a couple of bad centuries, but NOW their back!
May 4, 2014
Un libro post colonialista de pies a cabeza. Sin embargo me gusta que critique con hechos históricos a Marx por su eurocentrismo para comprender el capitalismo y a los teóricos del Sistema Mundo.
Sin duda un must para comprender el contexto de Asia y África en la economía mundial que se ha comprendido mal, por no entenderse como una situación holistica.
Sin duda un must para comprender el contexto de Asia y África en la economía mundial que se ha comprendido mal, por no entenderse como una situación holistica.
October 23, 2007
ReORIENT = ReTHINK history from a perspective other than our common Eurocentric viewpoint. Great book. Teaches us to view history from a different point of view by examining the silver trade between europe, the new americas, and asia. Fascinating books.
February 20, 2016
The scholarship may be sound, but the presentation is terrible. Apparently an elder scholar with established credentials can get away with hundreds of exclamation points and an abundant use of the word "however" to begin his sentences.
July 27, 2011
It will turn your notions of Western superiority on their head.
November 4, 2022
Good argument for a more holistic view of global development. Solid writing about the Chinese silver economy and the impact it had on the global economy. His writing sort of falls apart and gets a bit S T I C K Y in the end
February 10, 2025
A review on this claimed this at times "read like the diary of a Kamikaze pilot," and I find that a very apt way to put this work. Though Gunder Frank's ferocity made this a fun read, at least for the introduction, it does not aid his scholarship- which is sloppy and does not hold up to any scrutiny.
August 12, 2011
Frank is arrogant. He talks about himself and his "genius" a lot. He takes silly shots at Europe. I don't mean to disparage reasonable ones, which are in this book, I mean ones about how Europe was nothing before it started to exploit the east. This might be true to a degree, but I'd also like to point out that Newton, Galileo, and Montesquieu were European men. If anything this intellectual flowering is what put Europe over the edge since it created the means for western technology to surpass the Asian cultures. All of this being said, Frank is a terrible writer. He cannot hide his disgust with Europe. In fact I bet his home is decorated in an Asian style. He probably listens to Japanese drums and proclaims it superior to Beethoven. In conclusion he is a quack, barely respected by other scholars (Pomeranz) trying to do the same thing: make us westerners understand the importance of the world outside of Europe and America. Only, this is NOT the man to enlighten us, rather he'll annoy you with his pride, bad writing, and half-baked ideas on European inferiority. To those who think this book will turn ideas of European "superiority" on its head I mean this in the most negative way possible: you are weak minded and will fall for anything.
February 1, 2016
argues that Europe did not dominate 1 global system until 1800 and generally attacks eurocentrism in various historical debates (rise of capitalism, etc). Sees access to silver in Americas as the only reason Europe able to "rise"
Currently reading
September 8, 2009denser than a PhD thesis
Want to read
May 14, 2010February 15, 2011
Materialist sketch/recontextualization of "Rise of the West" narrative.
October 25, 2012
East/West trade is an old story -- and this book details the literal money exchange and flow in the different centuries between the two hemispheres. Fascinating....
March 6, 2017
China was the center and stronger than European countries in terms of economy.
August 11, 2016
You know that book speaks certain truths that angers many people?
This is the ReOrient
This is the ReOrient
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews