Catherine the Great or ReOrient

Catherine the Great: Life and Legend

Author: John T Alexander

One of the most colorful characters in modern history, Catherine II of Russia began her life as a minor German princess, until the childless Empress Elizabeth and Catherine's own scheming mother married her off to the Grand Duke Peter of Russia at age sixteen. By thirty-three, she had overthrown her husband in a bloodless coup and established herself as Empress of the multinational Russian Empire, the largest territorial political unit in modern history.
Portrayed both as a political genius who restored to Russia the glory it had known in the days of Peter the Great and as a despotic foreign adventuress who usurped the Russian throne, murdered her rivals, and tyrannized her subjects, she was, by all accounts, an extraordinary woman. Catherine the Great, the first popular biography of the empress based on contemporary scholarship, provides a vivid portrait of Catherine as a mother, a lover, and, above all, an extremely savvy ruler. Concentrating on her long reign (1762-96), John Alexander examines all aspects of Catherine's life and career: the brilliant political strategies by which she won the acceptance of a nationalistic elite; her expansive foreign policy; the domestic reforms with which she revamped the Russian military, political structure, and economy; and, of course, her infamous love life.
Beginning with an account of the dramatic palace revolt by which Catherine unseated her husband and a background chapter describing the circumstances of her early childhood and marriage, Alexander then proceeds chronologically through the thirty-four years of her reign. Presenting Catherine in more human terms than previous biographers have, Alexander includesnumerous quotations from her reminiscences and notes. We learn, for instance, not only the names and number of her lovers, but her understanding of what many considered a shocking licentiousness. "The trouble is," she wrote, "that my heart would not willingly remain one hour without love."
The result of twenty years' research by one of America's leading narrative historians of modern Russia, this truly impressive work offers a much-needed, balanced reappraisal of one of history's most scandal-ridden figures.

The Chicago Tribune - W. Bruce Lincoln

Alexander's carefully researched political biography at last gives Catherine her due as "the overburdened ruler of an immense and turbulent empire."

Interesting textbook: The New Deal or Lighting the Way

ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

Author: Andre Gunder Frank

This book outlines and analyzes the global economy and its sectoral and regional division of labor and cyclical dynamic from 1400 to 1800. The evidence and argument are that within this global economy Asians and 20 particularly Chinese were preponderant, no more"traditional" than Europeans, and in fact largely far less so. The historical documentation poses an 'emperor has no clothes' challenge to all received Eurocentric historiography and social theory from Montesquieu, Marx and Weber, or 20 Toynbee and Polanyi, to Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein.

The books's global economic analysis offers a more holistic theoretical alternative. 'The Rise of the West' was not due to any 'European Miracle exceptionalism' that allegedly permitted it to pull itself up by its own bootstraps as Weberians have contended. Nor did Europe build a 'European world-economy around itself" a la Braudel and thereby 20 as per Marx and Wallerstein [as well as Frank's own WORLD ACCUMULATION 1492-1789] initiating a European centered 'Modern Capitalist World-System' primarily by exploiting the wealth of its American and African colonies. Instead, Europe used its American silver to buy itself marginal entry into the long since existing world market in Asia, which was much larger, more productive and competitive, continued to expand much faster until 1800, and was able to support a rate of population growth in Asia that was than double that of Europe until 1750.

Then changing world economic/ demographic/ ecological relations and relative factor prices in the competitive global economy resulted in the temporary 'Decline of the East' and the opportunity for the also temporary 'The Rise of the West'. Europe took advantage of this world economic opportunity through import substitution, export promotion and technological change to become Newly Industrializing Economies after 1800, as is again happening today in East Asia. That region is now REgaining its 'traditional' dominance in the global economy, with the Chinese 'Middle Kingdom' again at its 'center.'

Harbans Mukhia

If challenging received wisdom is a trademark, this book is written as the mother of all challenges. The immense power of the book rests on the ability to provoke and force one to rethink many facets of history that have been taken for granted for a long long time. -- Harbans Mukhia

Saubhik Chakabarti

ReOrient's biggest virtue: it forces the reader to at least look differently at world history- This impressive and illuminating analysis 20 sets out to challenge the mother of all orthodoxies that Europe discovered capitalism and industrialisation and that what followed and is happening and will happen is essentially a fallout of this European preeminence. -- The Statesman

What People Are Saying

Jack Goody
This is a brave book, brave in the academic as well as the personal sense. It insists on a completely necessary reorientation of academic and political views. It will prove to be compulsory reading. (Jack Goody London Times Higher Education Supplement & St. Johns College, Cambridge)

Martin Lewis
ReORIENT deserves to become an instant classic. (Martin Lewis, Duke University)

Mark Selden
A book for the millennium ... can be a landmark book that shapes substantially the scholarship and understanding of the next generation of researchers. It should have an immediate impact. (Mark Selden, State University of New York)

Albert Bergesen
Frank gained his world wide fame by making an argument that caused a revolution in thinking about Third World Development. Well, the same thing is about to happen again, except this time the stakes are much higher. Now it is the theories of the endogenous nature of change in the West that is being challenged. The Wallersteinian world economy did not give rise to the world-system, Frank argues, but the Afroeurasian world system gave rise to the European world economy. To correct the historical fact is to challenge the theoretical scaffolding of everyone from Marx to Weber to Braudel to Wallerstein. Frank shows how [they] got it all wrong. This book is conceptually that important. A fundamental rethinking absolutely essential to understanding world history. (Albert Bergesen, University of Arizona)

Kenneth Pomeranz
This will be an extremely important book of sufficient originality and importance to have a major impact. It could not be more ambitious. (Kenneth Pomeranz, University of California at Irvine)

Bin Wong
The author redefines our baseline for assessing the 'rise' of Europe. I believe this book could become a benchmark study. (Bin Wong, University of California at Irvine)

Peter Perdue
Andre Gunder Frank's ReORIENT is a heroic effort to reconstruct our conceptions of the world economy in the early modern age. A brilliant theory - Frank's single-mided, relentless, and compelling organic model achieves coherence and has much to offer. (Peter Perdue, Massachussetts Institute of Technology)

Peer Vries Itinerario
Andre Gunder Frank's latest work ReORIENT:Global Economy in the Asian Age definitely is a book with a message. Its author sets out to challenge and overturns the ideas of such influential scholars as Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Rostow, Braudel and Wallerstein. As a matter of fact, almost everybody who has ever touched on the subject. (Peer Vries Itinerario, University of Leiden)