"History is an aggregate of half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip and official prevarications." (Philip D. Jordan)
"It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world occasionally swapped history books, just to see what the other people are doing with the same set of facts.” (Bill Vaughn)
Jack Goody, from The Theft of History:
The ‘theft of history’ refers to the takeover of history by the West. That is, the past is conceptualized and presented according to what happened on the provincial scale of Europe, often western Europe, and then imposed upon the rest of the world. Europe makes many claims to having invented a range of value-laden institutions such as ‘democracy,’ mercantile ‘capitalism,’ freedom, individualism. However, these institutions are found over a much more widespread range of human societies. The same is true of certain emotions, such as love (or romantic love), which have often been seen as having appeared in Europe alone in the twelfth century and as being intrinsic to the modernization of the West (the urban family, for example).
We can look at the account by the distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in his book, The Rise of Christian Europe. He recognizes Europe’s outstanding achievements since the Renaissance (though some historians put its comparative advantage as starting in the nineteenth century), but those achievements he regards as being produced uniquely by that continent. Though the advantage may be temporary, Trevor-Roper writes:
“The new rulers of the world, whoever they may be, will inherit a position that has been built up by Europe, and by Europe alone. It is European techniques, European examples, European ideas which have shaken the non-European world out of its past—out of barbarism in Africa, out of a much older, slower, more majestic civilization in Asia; and the history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history. I do not think we need to apologize if our study of history is European-centric.”
I suggest that Trevor-Roper has not travelled far out of Europe either conceptually or empirically. Moreover, he adopts an essentialist approach that attributes Europe’s achievements to the fact that Christendom had “in itself the springs of a new and enormous vitality”. Trevor-Roper might be an extreme case, but there are many other more sensitive versions of similar tendencies which encumber the history of the various continents and of the world.
After several years’ residence among African ‘tribes’ as well as in a simple kingdom in Ghana, I came to question a number of the claims Europeans make to have invented forms of government (such as democracy), forms of kinship (such as the nuclear family), forms of exchange (such as the market), and forms of justice, when embryonically at least these were widely present elsewhere. Such claims are embodied in history, both as an academic discipline and as folk discourse. Obviously there have been many great European achievements in recent times, and these must be accounted for; but they often owed much to other urban cultures, such as China. The divergence of the West from the East, both economically and intellectually, has been shown to be relatively recent and may prove rather temporary. Yet, at the hands of many European historians, the trajectory of the Asian continent, and indeed that of the rest of the world, has been seen as marked by a very different process of development.
The sociology and history of the great states or civilizations of Eurasia need to be understood as variations one of another; unfortunately, that is just what notions of ‘Asiatic despotism,’ of ‘Asiatic exceptionalism,’ of distinct forms of rationality, of distinct ‘culture’ more generally, make impossible to consider. Those notions prevent rational inquiry and comparison by means of the recourse to categorical distinctions: Europe had this (antiquity, feudalism, capitalism) and they (everyone else) did not. Differences certainly exist. But what is required is more careful comparison, not a crude contrast of East and West which always finally turns in favor of the latter.
Starting with the sixteenth century, Europe achieved a dominant position in the world partly through the Renaissance and partly through advances in guns and sails which enabled it to explore and settle new territories and to develop its mercantile enterprises, just as the adoption of print provided for the extension of learning. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution, it achieved virtually world-wide economic domination. In Europe, a sophisticated scholarship (sometimes racist in tone) manufactured reasons why this should be so. Some thought that God (the Christian God) or the Protestant religion willed it that way—and many still do. This domination undoubtedly needs to be explained; but explanations based on long-standing primordial factors, either racial or cultural, are unsatisfactory, not only theoretically but empirically, since the divergence was late.
We have to be wary of interpreting history in a teleological fashion, that is, interpreting the past from the standpoint of the present, projecting contemporary advantage back on to earlier times, and often on more ‘spiritual’ terms than seems warranted. The neat linearity of teleological models forces European history itself into a dubious narrative of progressive changes; those models have to be replaced by a historiography which takes a more flexible approach, which does not assume a unique European advantage in the pre-modern world, and which relates European history to the shared Urban Culture of the Bronze Age. We have to see subsequent historical developments in Eurasia in terms of a dynamic set of features and relations in continuous and multiple interaction of ideas as well as products. We need to comprehend sociological development as interactive and evolutionary in a social sense rather than in terms of an ideologically determinant timeline of purely European events.
Europe has not only neglected or underplayed the history of the rest of the world, as a consequence of which it has misinterpreted its own history; but it has also imposed historical concepts that have aggravated our understanding of Asia in a way that is significant for the future. Eurocentric beliefs have been used to justify the way ‘others’ are treated, since those ‘others’ are often seen as static, as being unable to change themselves without help from the outside. But history teaches us that any advantage is temporary; already the enormous country of China is taking a leading role economically, which can be the basis of educational, military, and cultural power…
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