Fluent Essays

I need 5 annotations, which are just some thoughts about the content. Only 3-5 sentences for each annotation. There are 100 pages, so make sure that each annotation is from a different part of the readings. And tell me which page and which paragraph you have the annotations for. The Myth of the European Miracle M ost European historians believe in some form of the theory of “the European miracle.” This is the argument that Europe forged ahead of all other civilizations far back in history— in prehistoric or ancient or medieval times— and that this internally generated historical superiority or priority explains world history and geography after 1492: the modernization of Europe, the rise of capitalism, the conquest of the. world. Most historians do not see anything miraculous in this process, but the phrase “the European miracle” became in the 1980s a very popular label for the whole family of theories about the supposedly unique rise of Europe before 1492. The phrase acquired its new popularity mainly from a book by Eric L. Jones which appeared in 1981, a book simply entitled The European Miracle.1 The historians do not agree among themselves on the question <why the miracle occurred: why Europe forged ahead in this perhaps miraculous way. Is it because Europeans are genetically superior? are culturally superior? live in a superior environment? Is it because one special, wonderful thing happened in Europe, or happened to Europeans at a special moment in history, giving Europeans a decisive advantage over other societies? Nor do the historians agree about when the miracle occurred or began. Did it occur back in the prehistoric age in what some still call the “Aryan” or “Indo-European” culture? in the late-prehistoric “European ‘Iron Age*?” Did it begin with the Greeks? with the Romans? in the early Middle Ages? in the late Middle Ages? Did it happen continuously throughout history— a series of miracles— each pushing the Europeans farther and farther ahead of the rest of humanity? 50 T H E M Y T H O F T H E E U R O P E A N M I R A C L E The historians debate these matters, the questions “why” and “when,” but not the question “whether”— whether a miracle happened at a ll Or, to be more precise, they do not even consider the possibility that the rise of Europe above other civilizations did not begin until 1492, that it resulted not from any European superiority of mind, culture, or environ­ ment, but rather from the riches and spoils obtained in the conquest and colonial exploitation of America and, later, Africa and Asia. This possibil­ ity is not debated at all, nor is it even discussed, although a very few historians (notably Janet Abu-Lughod, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein) have come close to doing so in very recent years.2 My task in this chapter and in Chapter 3 (“Before 1492” ) is to show that Europeans indeed had no superiority over non-Europeans at any time prior to 1492: they were not more advanced, not more modern, not more progressive. Then in Chapter 4 (“After 1492” ) I will show how colonial riches brought about the rise of Europe and led to Europe’s ultimate hegemony over the world, showing also that Europe’s internal characteris­ tics do not explain 1492— do not, that is, explain the origins of colonial­ ism. There seem to be two basic ways to argue that the myth of the European miracle is wrong, that Europe did not surpass other world civilizations before 1492. The best way by far is to look at the facts of history, and demonstrate that the evolutionary processes that were going on in Europe during and before the Middle Ages were essentially like the processes taking place elsewhere in the world in terms of rate and direction of development. I will try to demonstrate precisely this in Chapter 3, which compares the medieval landscapes of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and shows how a transition from feudalism and toward capitalism was occur­ ring in many parts of the Eastern Hemisphere just prior to 1492. But the myth of Europe’s unique “rise,” its “miracle,” is so deeply embedded in European historical thought that an ordinary argument from the facts probably would not be persuasive. As we saw in Chapter 1, the dominant theory has been defended by generations of historians, with practically no dissenting argument; it is supported as well by many other ideas which are accepted as unquestioned truth in European culture; and it fits in with and supports the interests of European countries (and corporations) in their dealings with the non-European world. For these reasons, I have decided to use another kind of argument— to demonstrate the fallacies in the dominant theory— as a sort of ground-laying for the empirical argument. In the present chapter I will examine the most common arguments used by historians today to support the theory of the European miracle, and 52 T H E C O L O N I Z E R ’ S M O D E L OF T H E W O R L D will try to show that they are unconvincing. This task is rendered somewhat complicated, for a small book like the present one, by the sheer number of different arguments currently in circulation and the number of historians who are writing books and articles on the subject of, and in support of, the theory of the European miracle. How, then, to proceed? I will advance by stages. First I will present a brief discussion of the ways in which historians have tended to argue the myth of the European miracle in recent decades, and I will show how a critical, revisionist point of view has begun to appear. Next I will lay out, in a kind of menu or classification or checklist, the most important arguments in support of this myth that are being put forward today, and I will try to show, for each argument in turn, how unconvincing it really is. In the third stage, I will summarize the empirical argument against the “miracle” position in two parts (the topics of Chapters 3 and 4, respectively): the evidence that Europe was not ahead of Africa and Asia (at a continental scale of attention) prior to 1492, and the evidence that colonialism after 1492 accounts for the selective rise of Europe. MYTHMAKERS AND CRITICS The idea that Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other civilizations prior to 1492 was the central idea of classical Eurocen­ tric diffusionism, as we saw in Chapter 1. Therefore we do not have to consider the origins of the European miracle theory: it is our inheritance from earlier times. However, after World War II the doctrine assumed a distinctly modern form. First of all, the racist arguments had been decisively rejected: no longer was it argued that non-Europeans are genetically inferior to Europeans and that it is this inferiority that explains why they lagged behind in history. Historians now generally accepted the idea that European historical advantages reflected facts and happenings of much earlier times. European superiority was a matter of prior arrival by Europeans at a stage of development that all other people could aspire to reach in the future: a matter, therefore, of priority, not innate superiority. Second, there was a rapid increase in historical scholarship concerning the non-European world after 1945, grounded in rather pragmatic political and economic interests, and emanating in part from government- and foundation-sponsored “foreign area studies programs,” but this scholarship nonetheless added greatly to the knowledge available in Western coun­ tries concerning non-Western history. The new knowledge was fairly quickly put to rather limited use: some of the wilder fables were discarded but the basic ideas about the non-Western world did not significantly change. Third, and most importantly, the postwar world came to embrace T H E M Y T H OF T H E E U R O P E A N M I R A C L E 53 the crucial new theory of “modernization,” the theory that the diffusion of European ideas, things, and influence would bring about the economic development of the non-Western world in the coming Age of Develop­ ment. This theory had important effects on history writing. Modernization as History The theory of modernization addressed the present and the future but it was fundamentally historical. Its basic principle was the notion that whatever had led in the past to European superiority could now be diffused out into the non-European world and assist that world to more or less catch up. As we saw in the last chapter, this new doctrine went through two phases of development, the first in the post-World War II period of decolonization, the second— an intensification of the diffusion effort— after the rise of socialist countries in the Third World, and particularly after the Cuban revolutionary victory in 1959. A number of historical works appeared in the 1960s as part of this intellectual process. Their central purpose was to show that the European pattern of development, including most particularly the development of capitalism, had been somehow the one, the natural course of human progress, and many of these volumes quite explicitly drew the ideological conclusion that the proper, natural course of future development in the Third World would be to follow this natural European pattern (but not, of course, slavishly). The most influential of these works was Rostow’s 1960 volume, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. This book was a plain assertion that Europe’s past formula for develop­ ment, up to and including capitalism, was the only workable formula for non-Europe’s future development. Rostow married world history to world development in a single diffusionist argument.3 But there was a problem. Precisely what had caused the unique rise of Europe? Now we must return for a moment to the classical diffusionist period. European historians of the prior century were unanimous (I think) in their acceptance of the fundamental idea that Europe has been naturally and uniquely progressive. For most of them the basic force underlying the process was unquestioned: some drew on their religious otheis WAt on HegeVs fcvolvvxxg “spvtvt” ^ others appealed to a Smithian or Utilitarian idea of individual human activity and purpose, and still others invoked the natural environment, or demographic behavior, or class struggle, or something else, but I think it likely that all of them held a common conception of an underlying force of Progress, a basic directional force like the Solar Wind, in relation to which partial facts (economic, psychological, environmental, and so on) 54 T H E C O L O N I Z E R ’ S M O D E L OF T H E W O R L D were epiphenomenal or merely symptomatic. After World War II, however, a profoundly different set of basic beliefs became the norm. Now the problem of explaining the rise of Europe was seen as a total problem. That is, all of the phenomenon, including its most fundamental dynamics, required explanation, or, stated differently, had to be put into an explicit model in which explicit variables or “factors” were identified. There were, doubtless, many reasons for this new— or rather newly popular— approach, among them the maturation of the discipline of history itself, the loss of faith (in this age of chaos) in the idea of inevitable progress, the general secularization of European thought, and the development of social science disciplines.4 But whatever the overall explanation, what emerged was a set of historical models, some new, others (like Weberianism) refurbished, that explicitly tried to explain the “European miracle” in terms of specific causal factors. This was the signature of the modern form of diffusionist history. The effect of the modernization perspective was not, by any means, dominant in all of historical scholarship, but it was so in writings that sought to explain the larger transformations of European history, and particularly the problem of explaining the medieval changes that brought about the rise of capitalism and modernity— the “European miracle.”5 We will review many of these explanatory propositions later in the present chapter. The Critique The modernization approach was quickly challenged because it gave no real role to non-Europe, past and present, save as an essentially passive recipient of diffusions from Europe. For the period before 1492, it claimed that the significant evolutionary processes took place in Greater Europe. For the period from 1492 to World War II, it claimed that evolutionary processes continued to effloresce mainly in Europe and that colonialism brought the fruits of this progress to non-Europe. For the present and the future, progress for non-Europe (the Third World) would consist of the continued spread of innovations, mainly through mechanisms basically inherited from the colonial era. These propositions were distinctly unpop­ ular among intellectuals of the Third World, and the rapid development of Third World scholarship in this postcolonial period led rather quickly to the emergence of a critical, even rejectionist, body of thought, includ­ ing a new historiography. The basic thinking went about as follows: For the precolonical era, it was necessary to resurrect one’s own history and find out how it had contributed to the history of the world. (Colonialist history dismissed precolonial history for some colonies and distorted it for others. Therefore, T H E M Y T H OF T H E E U R O P E A N M I R A C L E as Amilcar Cabral said with deep irony, when the colonies gain their independence, they re-enter history.6) For the colonial era, the belief that colonialism itself the was source of all progress was patently untrue and colonial history had to be rewritten to show how it had led to poverty rather than to progress. On a world scale, new models had to be developed to show that colonialism, far from diffusing modernization to non- European societies, had diffused a mixture of good and bad innovations, which, for much of the world, had been a process not of development but of underdevelopment.7 This body of thought came to be known as “underdevelopment theory” in Africa and Asia and as “dependency theory” in Latin America. Out of it came the first serious critique of Eurocentric historiography. One can trace the origins of this critique to earlier writings by a small number of historians, most of them colonial subjects, often writing in exile. Their main theme was a documentation of the negative effects of colonialism on a particular place and people. Some of the writers— among them W. E. B. DuBois, R. Palme Dutt, K. M. Panikkar, M. N. Roy, J. C. Van Leur, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Eric Williams— developed arguments on colonial processes at a world scale, and on the role of colonialism in the postmedieval and modern rise of capitalism and Europe. James showed that Caribbean slaves had played a role in the development of capitalism not fundamentally different from that of the working class in Europe. Williams’s work ultimately had the strongest impact on Eurocen­ tric history. He showed that the wealth from slavery and the slave plantation had been the crucial factor in the amassing of capital for the Industrial Revolution in England. This argument was the first major demonstration that non-Europe had played a central role in moderniza­ tion itself, and a sizeable literature has grown up among European historians arguing about, and generally trying to counter, what is now generally called “the Williams thesis.”8 During and after the period of decolonization this critical historical literature expanded greatly, and a large number of scholars began a direct attack on the diffusionist history of the colonial period. Much of this work will be discussed in later chapters. Here I want to make several concrete points about the critique. First of all, a number of historians from the European world (Bernal, Frank, Wallerstein, and others) joined Third World historians as central figures in the movement. Second, while the critique focused a good deal of attention on the pre-1492 period, showing that development had taken place in non- Europe—for instance, Sharma and Habib documented the development of feudal and postfeudal society in medieval India—for a long time very little scholarly attention, within this critical tradition, was focused on 56 T H E C O L O N I Z E R ’ S M O D E L O F T H E W O R L D pre-1492 Europe; the first major work that dealt with this problematic— from a non-Eurocentric point of view, that is—was Amin’s 1974 volume Accumulation on a World Scale.9 This is perhaps understandable since most of the critical historians were themselves from the Third World, not from Europe, and European history was not often a major interest. Yet it was anomalous nonetheless. The core of the modernization doctrine in history was, after all, the argument that Europe had begun to modernize before other regions and before it established colonial control of other regions. Thus, to refute the basic thesis one would have to show (as I try to now in this book) that pre-1492 Europe was not uniquely progressive. Of course, part of this argument consists of demonstrations that other regions were progressive. But part of it must consist of refutations of the various “miracle” propositions, those that claim to find in ancient or medieval Europe some special quality of progressiveness. There is another, quite curious anomaly in the relative lack of attention to pre-1492 Europe by historians in this critical tradition, the tradition associated with underdevelopment or dependency theory and the critique of colonialism. This has to do with the curious relation between Third World scholarship, much of which is Marxist, and the Marxist scholarship of the European world. European Marxists were among the main critics of colonialism and among the main contributors to dependency-underdevelopment theory. Marxist theory also inherited from former times a strong anticolonial flavor and a profound skepticism regarding the theories propounded by nineteenth-century mainstream European historians.10 Yet, oddly, most European Marxist historians writing about pre-1492 Europe have tended to argue in favor of the uniqueness-of-Europe doctrine. Mainstream European historians have also contributed to the critique of the central Eurocentric doctrine. This is not an anomaly. Scholars try to pursue the truth and accept it whether or not it accords with their ideological or cultural preferences. To some extent they succeed. Thus a number of European scholars specializing in non-Europe have uncovered some of the most important evidence against the Eurocentric model of pre-1492 world history. The work of the Dutch historian J. C. Van Leur in the 1930s, concerning the economic history of South and Southeast Asia is a classic example of this antisystemic scholarship.11 Another example relates to Chinese history. Half a century ago Duyvendak uncovered truly crucial facts about China’s long-range voyaging in medieval times. Later, Needham and his associates produced a series of studies about the history of Chinese science and technology that had a profound impact on the Eurocentric model and (as we will see) forced Eurocentric historians to abandon a large piece of their argument concerning the supposed unique­ T H E M Y T H OF T H E E U R O P E A N M I R A C L E 57 ness of medieval European technology. Other Western scholars, like Wheatley and Elvin, delving into the empirical history of China with indifference to ideological questions, have produced other sorts of evi­ dence about China’s progressiveness in ancient and medieval times.12 All of this damages the miracle theory, although, as we will see later in this chapter, Eurocentric historians have found ways to repair most of the damage. The critique of Eurocentric history is a very large subject, and our concern in this volume is with just one part of it: the critique of European miracle theories about the world before 1492, and related theories which treat early modern world history as though non-Europe, and colonialism, were merely marginal to evolutionary processes. On these issues the critique has not progressed very far. I will give a few examples of important recent contributions, and others will be cited throughout this book. Janet Abu-Lughod’s recent (1989) book, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, is a seminal study that demonstrates (I think conclusively) that Europe was not more progressive and not more ad­ vanced than other civilizations in A.D. 1350. Having made this demonstra­ tion, she offers only a tentative and partial explanation for the selective rise of Europe, and decline of the Orient, after 1350. She suggests that the divergence took place in the period between 1350 and 1492. (I argue in this book that the divergence occured only after 1492, with the beginnings of massive accumulation in the Western Hemisphere, a windfall that did not accrue to non-European civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere, and so gave Europeans their first and decisive advantage over these other civilizations. See Chapter 4 below.) Samir Amin has argued in various recent works that Europe was not more advanced than Africa and Asia at the end of the Middle Ages, but rather was more unstable: because of its marginal location at the edge of the hemispheric zone of civilization, medieval class society was less fully seated, less stable, less indurated in Europe than elsewhere, and so Europe changed toward capitalism more readily.13 This argument, although it does not grant any “miracle” to pre-1492 Europe, nonetheless allows one of the old beliefs to stand: that Europe was more dynamic than non-Europe during the Middle Ages. Martin Bernal’s new book Black Athena appears to have little connection to the subject of the present volume, yet his arguments are very closely connected indeed. Bernal shows that European historians have created a myth about ancient Europe according to which African and Asian origins and innovations are written out of history: the goddess Athena was African. Bernal’s work undercuts the still very popular theories about ancient Europe’s supposed uniqueness, and also exposes the ethnocentric and ideological roots of much of the European scholarship that underlies 58 T H E C O L O N I Z E R ’ S M O D E L OF T H E W O R L D the classical diffusionist model.14 Edward Said’s 1979 volume, Orientalism, a seminal critique of this process by which Eurocentrism and conservative ideology has dominated European scholarly writing about the Near East and Asia, is also important and quite relevant to our argument here. Other such works will be referred to as we proceed.15 The Countercritique In recent years there has been an outpouring of writings that strongly defend the traditional Eurocentric view, upholding the European miracle theory in some of its various forms: we discuss many of these writings in this chapter. In the same stream of writings there are counterattacks against the more specific theories that question the traditional European views about slavery, colonialism, and the like (see Chapter 4), views that treat these processes and events as marginal in social evolution. And new theories (or modified forms of old theories) about the precise reason for the uniqueness of Europe are being put forward and discussed. I have a hunch that this is a scholarly movement that resonates with the new political attitudes concerning the Third World. In any event, the decade of the 1980s saw a number of writings of this sort and they appear to embody a rather conscious counterattack against the critical history discussed above.16 Some of the writers in this new literature are very self-consciously engaged in such a counterattack. A number of them are Marxists and are insisting that the true, the original, the correct Marxist doctrine recognizes the priority, past and present, of Europe. Robert Brenner, for example, boldly argues that capitalism was invented by northwestern Europeans, with no help from others, and therefore (600 years later) we must acknowledge the continued priority of Europe. A number of other Marxists, like Perry Anderson and Bill Warren, argue similar positions.17 Among mainstream historians th e . most dramatic event was the appearance in 1981 of Eric L. Jones’s The European Miracle. This book is a remarkable recital of a goodly share of the colonial-era ideas about the precocity of Europe and the backwardness and irrationality of non- Europe. More remarkable still is the positive reception this book has received among many scholars, as though most of these old doctrines had not long since been disproved. Another movement at present is an attempt to find qualities present in ancient and medieval European culture, and absent in other cultures, which were the reasons for European development: qualities in the European family, the European political system, the European mind, and so forth. This movement is actively resurrecting the turn-of-the-century T H E M Y T H OF T H E E U R O P E A N M I R A C L E 59 views of Max Weber about Europe’s supposed “rationality” and the like; indeed, most (not all) of these scholars can be thought of as Weberians and many of them define themselves in that way. I will discuss Weber’s views later in this chapter, along with the views of some modern Weberian scholars, among them Michael Mann and John A. Hall. In the next section of this chapter I will try to extract the most important of these newer views proclaiming Europe’s pre-1492 “miracle,” and I will try to show that these views are mistaken. THE MYTH The myth of the European miracle is the doctrine that the rise of Europe resulted, essentially, from historical forces generated within Europe itself; that Europe’s rise above other civilizations, in terms of level of development or rate of development or both, began before the dawn of the modern era, before 1492; that the post-1492 modernization of Europe came about essentially because of the working out of these older internal forces, not because of the inflowing of wealth and innovations from non-Europe; and that the post-1492 history of the non-European (colonial) world was essentially an outflowing of modernization from Europe. The core of the myth is the set of arguments about ancient and medieval Europe that allow the claim to be made, as truth, that Europe in 1492 was more modernized, or was modernizing more rapidly, than the rest of the world. This is a myth in the classical sense of the word: a story about the rise of a culture that is believed widely by the members of that culture. It is also a myth in the sense of the word that implies something not true. In the following discussion I will unravel the fabric of this myth and show that the strands of belief that compose it are very feeble.18 The number of distinguishable belief statements that make up this myth are, I am sure, uncountable. One of the many reasons the myth is so durable is the fact that the basic generalization, the doctrine of the miracle, is supported by such a great variety of individual beliefs that historians of a given era can disprove some subset of these beliefs and yet the supporters of the myth can merely shift to other beliefs as grounding for the myth. A more fundamental problem has to do with the way beliefs are licensed. Beliefs tend to gain acceptance if they support the myth, and are either rejected or denied attention if they do not do so. One part of this problem of belief licensing (and relicensing, delicensing, etc.) poses a particularly, perhaps uniquely, serious difficulty for efforts to critique the 60 T H E C O L O N I Z E R ’ S M O D E L OF T H E W O R L D miracle theory. Many of the beliefs that support this theory are implicit, not explicit; that is, they do not enter into the scholarly discourse of historians, and sometimes they do not enter even into conscious discourse in general. (Recall the discussion of implicit beliefs in Chapter 1.) Many of these beliefs we learn as children. Others seem self-evidently “reasonable” because they accord with deep values of the culture, or with other, accepted beliefs (historical, practical, religious, and so on). Thus, the conviction that ancient and medieval Europe was more progressive than other civilizations is supported by explicit beliefs, but these lie in a matrix of implicit beliefs—unquestioned and usually unnoticed— about the pro­ gressive Europeans who “were our ancestors.” By contrast, the matrix of implicit beliefs about historical non-Europe includes ideas of alienness, savagery, cruelty, cannibalism, deceitfulness, stupidity, cupidity, immod­ esty, dirtiness, disease, and so on— a matrix firmly supporting the general belief that non-Europe cannot have been progressive. Examples of these sorts of implicit beliefs, both positive and negative, will appear as we proceed. One kind of explicit belief about European …