Decline in History: The European Experience (review)

This book sat for a long time provoking me with its title: "decline," "European" experiences of. Can there be a history of decline as such, I wondered, and if so, what would mark out European declines from others—apart, that is, from their happening in "Europe," whatever that means? Can decline be isolated from or at least shown to be something over and above the rises of others? In a globalizing world set to force more and more distinct social formations into some kind of relative decline, it seemed an intriguing field to explore.

While I am not sure that Thompson's book succeeds in demonstrating the distinctiveness of its subject under either of the title's lead epithets, it certainly does provide much thorough, well-grounded, and ingenious analysis of cases of decline in Europe, or rather in Mediterranean Europe, which it relates to the overall northward shift of the axis of wealth and power in the early modern period (an instance of the global movement expounded by Michael Mann). By comparison with Braudel, who makes decline an afterthought to the rise of Mediterranean empires and treats it largely on the basis endogenous explanation —with more than a hint of very traditional notions of rise, decadence, and decline—Thompson achieves subtler analyses of the processes occurring in these declines, blending endogenous and exogenous factors in his explanations. Thompson's first recourse on finding Braudel unsatisfactory is Wallerstein: the grand master of post-Braudelian, global-level exogenous explanation for the rise of a modern world system. But Wallerstein too is soon left behind on the grounds that he does not distinguish the crucial role of the luxury goods markets in early capitalism. This marks a departure from the logic of a sequence of modes of production, which Wallerstein adapted from Marx.

But it does not move the analysis away from the notion of the economic and political development of one social formation competing with those of others. Rather, because the role of luxury goods provides a key to the rise of northern—especially Dutch—commerce vis-à-vis declining areas of southern Europe, for Thompson it demonstrates the plausibility of intra-European explanations for the declines that interest him. From that point on, exogenous explanation does not necessarily imply exogenous to Europe, then. Instead, making intermittent but crucial use of Mann's concept of areas that are "interstitial" between politico-economic orders, Thompson relates the early modern "declines" in the Mediterranean area to shifts that took the central patterns of trade and accumulation in Europe away from the eastern-Mediterranean axis (running through Arabia to Asia and its spices) and toward the Atlantic-northern one. We follow Italian (Sicilian, Venetian, Milanese, Genoan) and Iberian (Portuguese, Spanish) declines through stages of adaptation or, more often, maladaptation to the northern movement of the axis.

The difficulty of formulating declines as a topic is evidenced in the book's delay in reaching its first case. We are a third of the way through the book before the stage is set for the first decline, that of Byzantium. This turns out to be, indeed, a fine instance of a death foretold but staved off through many moments of interstitiality, for the Hellenic half of the Roman Empire survived for centuries on the strength of its location between Europe and the growing Arabic commercial world—so long as better organized military rivals and better equipped commercial ones did not step in to spoil things. But even this story, though illustrative, is not central to Thompson's account of early modern European declines, which the book then moves on to.

Given the predominance of rises in historical analysis, it is hard not to assume, as Braudel and Wallerstein both do to a degree, that decline is merely the underside of whatever forces lie behind some rise. Sooner or later, Braudel implies, rise encounters its ecological...