The Eastern Origins of the Rise of the West and the “Return” of Asia

With the current interest in China (and India) proliferating within the Western Academy, this article claims that what we are witnessing today is not the rise but the “return” of China (and India). Many academics assume that the West has been the dominant civilization in the world economy in the last 500 years and that the current “rise” of China threatens to knock the West off its perch. However, this article provides an alternative take to this cherished axiom of Eurocentric world history by inverting the standard belief that the West pioneered modernity and then expanded outwards to remake the world. Thus, I argue not only that globalization preceded the rise of the West but that it was Eastern-led on the one hand and that it enabled the Western breakthrough into modernity on the other. This, in turn, rests on my claim that Chinese development stems back not to 1978 but to 960 ce as the Sung Dynasty emerged and subsequently undertook a quasi-industrial miracle. Moreover, between 1450/1492 and ca. 1830 China lay at the centre of the nascent global economy, fanning the integration process alongside other key non-Western regions such as India and West Asia/North Africa. And, while the West was the dominant player after ca. 1830 down to the turn of the third millennium, nevertheless, what we witness today is the return of China to the centre of the global economy whence it came

Beneficence and Welfare: Notes for the Comparative Study of “Doing Good” Practices (‘amal Khayr) in the Islamic World

International audienceLeaning on a transversal analysis of the role that charitable practices and actors play in social policies’ transformations in different Islamic contexts, this chapter addresses four analytical issues one need to address in order to understand these reconfigurations. Firstly, it underlines how religious ethos and moral economies are key processes when researching "doing good" practices and social policy, even more in Islamic contexts. Secondly, it addresses the importance of contextualization of the social processes we study, with an eye toward identifying both singularities and circulations. Thirdly, this chapter shows the necessity to take into account both the one who gives and the beneficiaries/recipients (whatever labels they can have in different situations), who are far from being apathetic. Therefore, rather than calling for new typologies, we call for a relational analysis of contemporary "welfare mixes" (Destremau, 2018), as these aid/kheyrie/welfare actors act within different ethical and moral frameworks, temporalities, scales, and institutional cultures

The Sociology and Anthropology of Secularism: From Genealogy/Power to the Multiple Manifestations of the Secular

Inspired by the seminal work of Talal Asad, important studies, both within and outside anthropology, have pointed to secularism as a modern ideology resting on a distinction between \u201csecular\u201d and \u201creligious\u201d domains whose genealogy can be traced back to specific developments within early modern European history. Instead, emerging new sociological scholarship suggests investigating \u201cmultiple secularities,\u201d namely the many ways in which the boundary between these secular and religious spheres has been marked in non-European settings. After exploring these two scholarly approaches to secularism, the chapter relies on a few studies in historical sociology to single out the emergence of a separated \u201csecular\u201d sphere within bureaucratic culture in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the sixteenth century. It will be argued that although the \u201creligious\u201d and the \u201csecular\u201d were certainly intertwined within the Empire, a distinction between the two existed largely before European expansion in the MENA region. In this way, the chapter questions the common view that sees secularization as being mainly a Western import and points to the Ottoman state\u2019s administrative and economic machine as a fruitful domain for exploring the secular/religion distinction in Muslim-majority contexts