SUMMARY

In his article, Alessandro Stanziani takes his lead from recent discussions in comparative history on how to compare the history of Africa and China without the conventional circuit through Europe (Gareth Austin, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Bin Wong). The author suggests that eliminating Europe from the formula of historical experience of modern history may limit the historical analysis in its dimension of influence and interconnectedness in world history. Stanziani further suggests an approach that aims at both taking seriously the individuality of regional historical experience and looking at the global historical process. The most important part of this approach is the reciprocal comparison: what kind of questions historians can ask about the experience of modernization and industrialization in Western Europe if they start exploring cities, markets, and property in the periphery in their own contexts instead of asymmetrically comparing them with the normative model of Western history. Stanziani elaborates this approach on the basis of Russian economic history, critically scrutinizing the literature of modernization school and neoinstitutional school in economic history. Reversing mythological projections to the Russian preindustrialization economy and serfdom and deconstructing the symbolic language of underdevelopment, Stanziani contends that the origins of serfdom lay in the processes of structuration of Russian society and political power, that the system of the pre- and post-emancipation economy (partially based on communal landowning) could include economic growth and market-based relations, and that beginning in the eighteenth century, the Russian economy became an integral element of the world economy. Returning to the reciprocal comparison, the author asks whether historians should reconsider the history of capitalist modernity in Western Europe and North America given that private property and free labor were not necessary prerequisites of capitalist production and a market economy. From the viewpoint of comparative history, it would help to properly locate the emergence of phenomena such as dominant free labor and absolute private property in the relatively late period of the late nineteenth century, thus limiting the timeless ideal type of historical experience of the West and putting the comparison of the West and its periphery on the right track.