¶ … 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...
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…
