ABSTRACT
With considerable justification, Karl Marx and many later writers believe that a decisive factor in the nineteenth-century expansion of Western civilization was the distribution of commodities produced by capitalist factories. Marx (1959: 11) says, “Cheap commodity prices are the heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls and forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. . . . It compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeoisie themselves. It creates a world after its own image”. Nowadays, students of society seldom accept such simplicity in their explanations. None the less, most recent theories recounting the economic factors of modernization prominently include, as a causal mechanism, the distribution and sale of Western products in non-Western societies. The more sophisticated theories no longer rely exclusively on the difference in price between factory-made products and handicraft goods. Instead, they emphasize such factors as the restructuring of market relationships (e.g. Smelser 1963), the establishment of primary trading cities (e.g. Murphey 1969) and the subordination of non-Western producers (e.g. Frank 1967) – all of which are subsidiary to the creation of a world marketing system (Wallerstein 1974; Eisenstadt 1973). Despite such insightful and justified elaborations, one of the causal mainsprings by which this process of Western expansion began remains the non-Western consumption of Western goods.2
