Spectrum Journal of Global Studies Vol.8, No.1 Introduction: Book Symposium on ‘How the West Came to Rule’: Why the Disavowal of Eurocentrism is Insufficient Gurminder K. Bhambra This is an important book on an important topic; the significance of the issues it raises are attested to by the vigour of the responses it has generated. It is hard to dislodge longstanding disciplinary formations and sometimes difficult to see how they continue to operate even when being disavowed. It is especially difficult when disciplinary formations are associated with canonical figures, such as Weber or Marx. From at least the time that Weber first set out the need to account for the ‘world historical’ significance of the ‘Rise of the West’, social scientists have been focused on variants of that question – from normative attempts to account for the ‘miracle of Europe’ to, more descriptively, seeking to account for the ‘miracle in Europe’. Both forms of the question, however, maintain an exceptionalism of the West as something that needs explanation in its own terms, thereby incorporating Eurocentrism into the understanding of the ‘capitalist modernity’, which was the very ‘world historical’ outcome that Weber believed to be bequeathed by Europe. Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nı̇şancioğlu offer an alternative to that question by seeking to understand how the West came to rule. They take on board postcolonial and other critiques of European exceptionalism by organising their response around the ‘extra-European’ geopolitical conditions and forms of agency that they see as associated with capitalism’s emergence. The assumption at the very outset, however, is that the West came to rule as a consequence of the emergence of capitalism and that its emergence was also associated with aspects of history in other places. While drawing on the work of postcolonial critics and scholars who have long made the argument for ‘provincializing Europe’ (see, for example, Hall 1992, Chakrabarty 2000, Dirlik 2003) their use of such critique seems to be more an attempt to rescue the theoretical framework to which they are committed – that of uneven and combined development – than to take the critique on its own terms and see what theory of capitalism might emerge as a consequence. Specifically, it is difficult to see how the drawing in of histories located in other places to make sense of what happened in Europe truly escapes the charge of 1