Challenging Eurocentric economic history

Andre Gunder Frank challenges the inherited assumption that advanced commercial and financial institutions developed in Europe and were subsequently adopted elsewhere. He argues that much Western historiography relied on earlier authorities with limited investigation of economic life outside Europe. Direct evidence about Asian institutions is fragmentary, so his approach combines historians' testimony with inferences from the productive and commercial activity those institutions supported. He openly describes his selection as partisan and does not claim to provide an exhaustive institutional survey. His questions concern what economic activity existed, which institutions made it possible, how far those institutions were indigenous or long established, and how they compare between regions. The proposed answers include circumstantial evidence and arguments about what must plausibly have existed.