Table of Contents

Preface 7

1 Modernity and Religious Interpretations 11

I Modernity 13

II Modernity and Religious Interpretations 25

III Political Islam 57

2 Central and Peripheral Tributary Cultures 93

I Introduction 95

II The Formation of Tributary Ideology in the Mediterranean Region 105

III Tributary Culture in Other Regions of the Pre-Capitalist World 141

3 The Culture of Capitalism 149

I Introduction 151

II The Decline of Metaphysics and the Reinterpretation of Religion 157

III The Construction of Eurocentric Culture 165

IV Marxism and the Challenge of Actually Existing Capitalism 189

V The Culturalist Evasion: Provincialism and Fundamentalism 195

VI For a Truly Universal Culture 205

4 Towards a Non-Eurocentric View of History and a Non-Eurocentric Social Theory 217

I The Tributary Mode of Production: The Universal Form of Advanced Pre-Capitalist Societies 221

II European Feudalism: Peripheral Tributary Mode 233

III Mercantilism and the Transition to Capitalism: Unequal Development, Key to the Miracle of European Particularity 239

IV Eurocentrism and the Debate over Slavery 249

V Eurocentrism in the Theory of the Nation 255

VI Actually Existing Capitalism and the Globalization of Value 259

Notes 280

Index 283