[1] Wittfogel, who was educated in German centers of sinology and joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1920, was dissatisfied with the debate on the Asiatic mode of production (AMP) that traced back to Montesquieu and Hegel.
Modern Europe, in Marx's classic formulation, was created by the conflict between the emerging bourgeois and industrial capitalist classes, on the one hand, and the Ancient Regime of feudal economy on the other.
Marxists in both the Soviet Union and in Western countries explored these questions as important in themselves, but with special heat because both liberals and conservatives in the West wanted to decide whether Stalin's Russia was an authentic communist system in Marx's sense or whether it was itself an example of oriental despotism.
[3] In the late 1920 and early 1930s, orthodox theorists in Moscow spurned Wittfogel's views because they differed from Stalin's and Chinese Marxists rejected them also because they implied that China did not have the capability to develop.
[citation needed] Beginning in the 1930s, Wittfogel pursued research projects that formed a background and preparation for Oriental Despotism and published articles presenting aspects of its argument.
He hoped that "historians, political scientists, deans, and college presidents will see it as evidence that ... 'most of the world' is just as important as traditional focus on North America and Western Europe."
He added that "the book makes impressively clear that there is a great mass of despotic practice in the most populous parts of the world that cannot be transformed magically by democratic catalysis."
[11] The British anthropologist Edmund Leach objected that most of the hydraulic civilisations of the past were in semi-arid regions where irrigation "did not require a despotic monarch to build vast aqueducts and reservoirs; it simply called for elementary and quite localised drainage construction and perhaps the diversion of river flood water into the flat lands on either side of the main stream."
He saw the earlier oriental despotism theorists and Wittfogel as "precursors, or manifestations of what would later be called the 'Orientalist' approach," which Edward Said accused of imposing this type of analysis on Islamic societies.
Wittfogel "does not write of Chinese government and society as a historian; the reader does not sense any awareness of the steadily cumulative development through the centuries which gave each age its own character."
[15] Gregory Blue of the University of Toronto commented that "despite its analytical sweep and evident learning, Wittfogel's model made it difficult to understand why government involvement in Chinese social life seemed to have been distinctly limited during the imperial era (221 B.C.E.
[17] Perry Anderson objected that the concept of the Asiatic Mode of Production was too broad to be meaningful: Anderson continued that “this vulgar charivari, devoid of any historical sense, jumbles together pell-mell Imperial Rome, Tsarist Russia, Hopi Arizona, Sung China, Chaggan East Africa, Mamluk Egypt, Inca Peru, Ottoman Turkey, and Sumerian Mesopotamia – not to speak of Byzantium or Babylonia, Persia, or Hawaii.” [19] Wittfogel's biographer Gary Ulmen replied to these criticisms that to focus on "hydraulic despotism" was to misunderstand Wittfogel's general thesis.
The appearance of Oriental Despotism in print further influenced anthropologists such as Robert McCormick Adams, Stanley Diamond, Morton Fried, Marvin Harris, Angel Palerm, and Eric Wolf.
[32] David Price, a scholar of Cold War social science, declared that Wittfogel's writings "become so mired in his personal anti-communist crusade that it can be difficult to disentangle his anti-totalitarian vehemence from his theoretical contributions."
[33] Gregory Blue called final words of the book — "not with the spear only, but with the battleax" [34]—the "Spartan view on how Greeks should fight Persian imperialism" that "represented a highbrow version of 'better red than dead.'"
[16] David Landes, a Harvard historian of comparative East/West economic and social development, struck back: the "hydraulic thesis has been roundly criticized by a generation of Western sinologists zealous in their political correctness (Maoism and its later avatars are good) and quick to defend China’s supposed commitment to democracy.