Eurocentrism and Colonial History: Blaut's Eight Historians
This paper reviews James M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians (2000), the second volume in Blaut's trilogy on Eurocentrism. The review examines Blaut's central argument that European dominance was not the product of unique racial, environmental, cultural, or religious superiority, but rather of colonial exploitation and geographic proximity to the Americas. The paper surveys Blaut's critique of eight major Western historians — including Max Weber, Jared Diamond, and David Landes — and evaluates his use of geographic, agronomic, and historical evidence to dismantle Eurocentric diffusionism. It concludes that Blaut's work offers an important corrective to mainstream historiography by centering colonialism as the driving force behind European modernity.
- Introduction: History as Western Ideology: History framed as Western ideological projection
- The Eight Eurocentric Historians and Their Claims: Overview of eight historians and four Eurocentric claims
- European Diffusionism and the Colonial World Model: Diffusionism as colonial doctrine explained
- Challenging the 'Rise of Europe' Narrative: Pre-1492 parity and colonial wealth as cause
- Agriculture, Environment, and False Objectivity: Blaut refutes agronomic and environmental Eurocentric claims
- Capitalism, Modernity, and Colonialist Historiography: Capitalism as central contested concept
- Conclusion: Toward an Alternative History: Book's value for decolonial historiography affirmed
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The review accurately maps the structure of Blaut's argument, moving from the book's theoretical framing to its specific historical evidence, giving readers a coherent sense of the work's scope.
- Concrete examples — such as the quote from Tome Pires on Indian merchants and the analysis of potato agriculture — ground abstract claims about Eurocentrism in specific textual evidence from Blaut.
- The paper maintains a clear evaluative stance throughout, consistently assessing Blaut's persuasiveness rather than merely summarizing his claims.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates critical book review technique: it situates the work within a broader scholarly context (the trilogy on Eurocentrism), explains the author's methodology (geographic and historical analysis), and evaluates the strength of specific arguments with supporting examples drawn directly from the text. This approach models how to engage analytically with a secondary source rather than simply describe it.
Structure breakdown
The review opens by framing history as Western ideology, then introduces Blaut's book and its eight subjects. It proceeds through Blaut's core thesis — European diffusionism as colonial doctrine — and his counter-evidence on pre-1492 parity between civilizations. A focused section addresses agricultural and environmental claims before widening to the question of capitalism and modernity. The conclusion affirms the book's contribution to decolonial historiography.
Introduction: History as Western Ideology
History, 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 of meaning: a reflection on the "destiny" of Western man. But history is also the ideological mainstay of life and the ruler of its disciplines. Nowhere are these thoughts more apparent than in Eight Eurocentric Historians by James M. Blaut.
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, which, offering an alternative model of history, would have given what Blaut called the "people without history" their proper due.
The Eight Eurocentric Historians and Their Claims
The eight Eurocentric historians examined in the book are: Max Weber, the arch theorist of Western rationality; Lynn White Jr., the advocate of technological determinism; Robert Brenner, the guru of Marxist dispersion; Eric L. Jones, the evangelist of the "European Miracle"; Michael Mann, the advocate of modern social power; John A. Hall, the champion of European "Powers and Liberties"; Jared Diamond, the bureaucrat of Euro-Environmentalism; and David Landes, the guardian of Pax Americana.
Common to these Eurocentric reflections are the perceptions and apprehensions of the "lords of humankind" — those who believe that theirs is the best of worlds, and who therefore wish to freeze history exactly where it stands. Blaut identifies four kinds of Eurocentric ideological claims that, he argues, support all Eurocentric explanations of the power and wealth of Europe (or the West):
Religion: Europeans (Christians) worship the true God, who guides them forward through history. Race: White people have an inherited superiority over people of other races. Environment: The natural environment of Europe is superior to all others. 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: the doctrine of European diffusionism. This is 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 — a world model which Europeans constructed to explain, justify, and assist their colonial expansion.
European Diffusionism and the Colonial World Model
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, an "Outside," in which cultural evolution is mainly an effect of the diffusion of ideas, commodities, settlers, and political control from the core. The ethnohistory 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 the 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 attitudes concerning race and the environment, psychology and society, technology and politics.
Conclusion: Toward an Alternative History
The role of each of these eight historians in generating colonialist understandings of history is not only proven to be mistaken, but the fallacious assumptions at the roots of their arguments are revealed. Working toward an alternative understanding of the origins of modernity, this clearly written book provides invaluable insights into the rules of colonialism, commerce, and the culture of European history.
Blaut, James M. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.