Provincializing the First Industrial Revolution

In 1967 Marshal Hodgson (the godfather of global economic history) wrote these percipient words: “Without the cumulative history of the whole Afro-Asian Oikumene of which the Occident had been an integral part, the western transmutation would be almost unthinkable”. Alas, the recommendation by this eminent scholar of Islam to re-conceptualize what his essay refers to as “The Great Western Transmutation” within the wider spaces, longer chronologies and cultural frameworks of the long and interconnected history of Afro-Eurasia was not taken forward until Eric Jones published the first edition of the European Miracle in 1981.[...]