History: concepts, methods, and applications

¶ … accordingly, is not only an account of the human past, but also a projection of its future; a vision of an end determined and dominated by the West. History is a modern effort at the creation meaning - a reflection over the 'destiny' of the Western man. But, history is the ideological mainstay of life and the ruler of its disciplines. Nowhere are these thoughts more apparent than in James M. Blaut's book, Eight Eurocentric Historians.

Eight Eurocentric Historians was the second installment in a trilogy on Eurocentrism. First came "The Colonizer's Model of the World" (Guilford, 1993), a broad statement of the problem. The final installment would have been "Decolonizing the Past." Offering an alternative model of history, it would have given what Blaut called the "people without history" their proper due. The list of eight Eurocentric historians include the arch theorist of Western rationality (Max Weber), the advocate of technological determinism (Lynn White Jr.), the guru of Marxist dispersion (Robert Brenner), the evangelist of the 'European Miracle' (Eric L. Jones), the advocate of modern social power (Michael Mann), the champion of European 'Powers and Liberties' (John A. Hall), the bureaucrat of Euro-Environmentalism (Jared Diamond), and the guardian of Pax Americana (David Landes). Common to these Eurocentric reflections are, of course, the perceptions and apprehensions of the 'lords of the humankind'; those who believe that theirs is the best of the worlds, and who therefore 'want to freeze history right where it is here and now.' Decisively, Blaut describes the four kinds of "Eurocentric" ideological claims, he summarizes, support all Eurocentric explanations of the power and riches of Europe (or the West):

Religion: Europeans (Christians) worship the true God and He guides them forward 2 through history.2.

Race: White people have an inherited superiority over the people of other races.3.

Environment: The natural environment of Europe is superior to all others.4.

Culture: Europeans, long ago, invented a culture that is uniquely progressive and innovative.

This book challenges one of the most pervasive and powerful beliefs of our time concerning world history and world geography. This is the doctrine of European diffusionism, the belief that the rise of Europe to modernity and world dominance is due to some unique European quality of race, environment, culture, mind, or spirit, and that progress for the rest of the world results from the diffusion of European civilization. Blaut persuasively argues that this doctrine is not grounded in the facts of history and geography, but in the ideology of colonialism. It is the world model which Europeans constructed to explain, justify, and assist their colonial expansion.

The book first defines the Eurocentric diffusionist model of the world as one that invents a permanent world core, an "Inside," in which cultural evolution is natural and continuous, and a permanent periphery, and "Outside," in which cultural evolution is mainly an effect of the diffusion of ideas, commodities, settlers, and political control from the core. The ethno history of the doctrine is traced from its 16th-century origins, through its efflorescence in the period of classical colonialism, to its present form in theories of economic development, modernization, and new world order. Blaut demonstrates that most "Western" scholarship is to some extent diffusionist and based implicitly on the idea that the world has one permanent center from which culture-changing ideas tend to emanate. Eurocentric diffusionism has shaped our attitudes concerning race and the environment, psychology and society, technology and 3 politics.

Blaut presents persuasive evidence that Europe was not more highly developed that other civilizations prior to 1492, and had no unique "potential" -- intellectual, social, or environmental -- for modernization. He shows that the "rise" of Europe over other world civilizations occurred because of the wealth obtained in early colonialism, mainly in the mines and slave plantations of the Americas. He then argues that the European conquest and exploitation of the Americas resulted from the fact that Europeans were geographically closer to the Americas than were African and Asian maritime-oriented civilizations, and that the conquest itself was facilitated by the great epidemics of Eastern Hemisphere diseases which decimated the populations and destroyed the civilizations of the "New World."

Blaut, a geographer by profession, makes his point through a telling graphic titled "maps of the world before and after 1500 AD." It contains dots representing "dated place-name mentions" in Brenner's articles. No region outside of Europe is ever mentioned before 1500 AD. After 1500 AD, references occur more frequently but tend only to reflect what Blaut regards as "Brenner's view that capitalism began to diffuse outward to the rest of the world after its birth in northwestern Europe."

Given the more enlightened racial framework of today, Eurocentric historians today support their views with "hard" evidence drawn from agronomy, climatology, demographics, etc. rather than openly racialist claims. Few today would argue that the Europeans were genetically endowed with gifts for invention or rationality, or chosen by god. Rather, fortuitous historical circumstances moved them to the head of the class. It is exactly these pretensions to hard, scientific evidence that Blaut succeeds in demolishing. Barely disguising his contempt, he answers one false claim after another. When 4 Eric J. Jones asserts that Europeans were solely destined to become capitalists after the Middle Ages, Blaut cites Tome Pires, the 17th century Portuguese chronicler, who described Indian merchants thusly: "They are men who understand merchandise; they are... properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it." He adds, "[T]hose of our people who want to be clerks and factors ought to go there and learn, because the business of trade is a science." Among these Eurocentric historians farming practices loom a larger than any other supposedly objective criterion underpinning the rise of the West. The West is the world of the spirited, inventive yeoman farmer, while the repressive East employed unproductive farming techniques. Benefiting from his early training and fieldwork in agronomy, Blaut presents an alternative interpretation. For example, while Michael Mann considers soil fertility in Europe to be the key to its rise, Blaut points out that until the arrival of the potato from South America, a vast swath of land across Europe remained unproductive because of excess rainfall, conditions beneficial only to potato growth. Meanwhile, crop rotation -- supposedly unique to the West -- was found in the rest of the world. But, the question of "Eurocentrism" remains a vexing problem for academia. In the broadest sense, Eurocentrism can be understood as the implicit view that societies and cultures of European origin constitute the "natural" norm for assessing what goes on in the rest of the world.