World-Systems at Fifty

IThe radical social movements of the 1960s-Black Power, national liberation and socialist movements, protests over the Vietnam War, Maoism, the women's movements, and student protests-all fundamentally ruptured dominant narratives of capitalist modernity and changed the way we see the world today.But geopolitical locations determined how these questionings of capitalist modernity were differently accented.The European New Left revisited the post-war debate between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy on the origins of capitalism in the 1970s, in what became known as the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dobb 1946;Hilton 1978), and it was followed by another on agrarian class struggles and the emergence of capitalism (Ashton and Phiplin 1985).These intra-European disputations (even if Kohachiro Takahashi was allowed in) remained within the straitjacket of nation-states with little reference to the extra-European world.Even in E. P. Thompson's (1966) magisterial account of the formation of the first English industrial proletariat, there is no reference at all to decimation of the textile industry in India on which it was predicated.Indeed, the Mode of Production debate in India, from the late 1960s to the 1980s-discussing whether production relations in agriculture were "semi-feudal," capitalist, or "colonial" (Alavi 1975;Patnaik 1990;Nadkarni 1991)-"absurdly" took the English experience of working-class formation as the ideal-typical case and "searched for its analogues in the very place upon whose ruin its formation depended" (Satia 2020: 265).More generally, the anchoring of historical change within national frameworks dominated studies on Asia and perhaps stemmed from an Orientalist attention to civilizations-Brahmanic Hinduism, Chinese, Islamic, Buddhist.The much larger scalar magnitudes of populations in Asia than in other continents meant that despite establishment of European-style universities, there was very little circulation of scholars between colonies even within the same colonial empires.Education in the languages of Europe remained confined to a tiny, colonized elite and set largely