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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?

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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

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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

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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)

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 superiority will not be discussed here in detail. This is the openly religious statement, grounded in faith, that a Christian god will naturally raise His people higher than all others. Although we will refer to this view in various contexts, it is not the kind of argument that can be analyzed or criticized, because it is grounded in a faith that cannot be tested empirically; some believe it to be true and others do not, and that is as far as the matter can be taken. Suffice it to say at this point: the religious argument was so nearly universally accepted down to the nineteenth century that other arguments were not seen as necessary to many European intellectuals. Why, indeed, ask for the reasons that Christian Europeans are superior when we know that unbelievers will not go to heaven and, in this world, will not enjoy the grace of God? Unbelievers will naturally be rendered less intelligent, less fortunate, and so on. So long as scholars and educated people believed that religion underlies all things, including science, and that God intervenes to control human affairs, then it could simply be assumed that Europeans were superior because that was God’s will. It is what you would expect a Christian god to do for Christians, particularly for those Christians who worship Him in the right way. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when Eurocentric diffusionism was at its height, when Europeans hardly ever doubted their superiority over everyone else, although the explicitly religious arguments were disappearing from scholarly discourse, they were still there implicitly, as implicit beliefs. I rather suspect that the great majority of arguments for the superiority of Europeans were finally grounded in a religious faith: if the European environment is superior, that

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is because God made it so; if the white race is superior, that is because God made it so; if Europeans are more rational than everyone else and this has no explicit explanation, one can infer that it is the work of God; and so on. I do not know to what extent this kind of implicit appeal to the Deity is still present but unnoticed in the thinking of contemporary Eurocentric scholars, but I am certain that it quite often is so. We will from time to time discuss the ideas of scholars (like Lynn White, Jr. and K. F. Werner) who explicitly connect their views about history with their religious beliefs; in such thinkers the directionality of the causal arguments will be noted but not in any sense condemned. Sometimes a scholar makes such arguments unconsciously and implicitly. The only really disturbing cases are those that exhibit conscious hypocrisy.

Biology

Basically two sorts of argument have been used to explain the uniqueness, the superiority, of Europe and Europeans. One sort appeals to some noncultural force or factor as prime cause; the other finds the prime cause within culture itself. Setting aside the doctrine of divine intervention (which one would generally think of as a cause external to human culture, although the point is theologically rather complicated), two kinds of noncultural, external causation are common. One appeals to human biology, the other to the natural environment.

Race

Biological arguments assert, in general, that Europeans are superior, biologically, to non-Europeans. The classical and typical form of this argument was biological racism, the idea that Europeans had superior heredity, and so were born with abilities greater than those displayed by non-Europeans. Europeans were brighter, better, and bolder than non- Europeans because of their heredity. Generally the descriptive category used was n o t“Europeans” but rather “members of the white race,” but the distinction was not usually very important. Non-Europeans who were classified as members of the white (so-called) race were nonetheless believed to be inferior because they belonged to inferior subraces. Sometimes Europeans themselves were divided into superior and inferior subraces. Early in the nineteenth century it was widely, though not dominantly, believed that white people were not even of the same biological species as people of other races. This theory, “polygenesis,” claimed to have both biblical and scientific support.19 Its primary

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importance was its use as a rationalization for slavery: if Africans were not truly human, why, enslaving them could not be an evil act. This theory melted away during the course of the nineteenth century, mainly because it was offensive to liberal, modern, antislavery thought; what replaced it, however, was not much of an improvement. This was the doctrine we call classical racism, the belief that different human races have different endowments, just as different breeds of domestic animals have such differences— differences of intelligence, aggressiveness, courage, and the rest— and these different endowments are matters of biological inheri­ tance. It was then argued, for instance, that Africans were endowed with lower intelligence than Europeans, so it was both natural and moral for Europeans to colonize Africa and make all decisions on behalf of the Africans who, themselves, either did not have the innate ability to make these decisions, to govern themselves, or were just sufficiently less intelligent than the Europeans that a period of European control and tutelage was necessary while these slow-thinking Africans learned how to govern themselves. Racism, in a word, had as its main function the justification of colonialism and all other forms of oppression visited upon non-Europeans, including minority peoples in countries such as the United States.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century racism acquired a pseudoscientific aura of apparent truth. Scientists claimed to have proof of the differences among races, particularly as to intelligence. Now, also, they were armed with Mendelian genetics, so it seemed eminently reasonable for scientists who were, themselves, racists, now to assert that they had proof of the truth of the racist theories in which they already believed. These so-called proofs were unmasked as pseudoscience in a slow process that continued down to World War II: indeed, even today there are more than a few so-called “scientific racists.” What we need to notice about scientific racism is that it merely provided a new way of justifying something that was already almost universally believed to be true among Europeans. This meant, on the one hand, that it did not do much to intensify racism— which was in fact reaching a crescendo of intellectual and scholarly importance around the turn of the century for social reasons, having to do mainly with the growing importance of colonialism— and, on the other hand, that the disproving of scientific racism did not have much to do with the decline of racism’s popularity in the present century. Racism emerged from prescientific roots and survived so long as it was useful, science or no science.

This is not to deny that scientific racism gave strong impetus to racist beliefs in society; in a time when science was acquiring great prestige and

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influence, scientific arguments were indeed important.20 And scientific racism helped in some special ways. One important example here has to do with supposed differences in endowment among the supposed subraces within the so-called white race. Anti-Semitism, along with anti-Muslim attitudes relating to colonialism in the Middle East, led to a prolif­ eration of theories about the inferiority of the so-called “Semitic” subrace. (“Semite,” of course, should refer only to someone who speaks a Semitic language, such as Hebrew or Arabic.) This racist underpinning for anti-Semitism, then, became extremely useful for the general argument about the superiority of Europeans in history over all non-Europeans.21 Semitic peoples were acknowledged to belong to the white race. Now it could be argued that only Europeans belonged to the really superior subrace of whites. Semites were inferior. So were the non-Semitic peoples of western Asia (Persians, Turks, and so forth). Indeed, in certain situations it was even argued that scientific racism proved the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans: the northern, British and Germanic stock was truly superior to Italians, Slavs, and the rest. One famous instance of this sort of argument was the series of pseudoscientific testimonials given before the U .S. Congress at the time it was debating the first important immigration legislation in the 1920s. Scientists solemnly assured the Congress that southern Europeans were inferior people, and so should be excluded from free immigration to the United States in order to maintain the high racial quality of American stock.22

Today very few educated Europeans believe that there are genetic, inherited differences among the races as to intelligence or any other quality that might favor or inhibit social progress. Although a few people believe in the doctrine of classical racism, most of them are careful to keep their views to themselves, because today the doctrine is so thoroughly rejected, and viewed with such repugnance. If this were a book dealing with the history of ideas, we could go into the explanation for this transformation— the decline and fall of classical racism over a period of no more than two scholarly generations. During the 1920s the belief in the influence, major or minor, of inherited or racial differences was very widespread. After 1945 the theory was very rarely defended. Probably the key factor was Nazism. The Nazis grounded their ideology in this belief, claiming that the so-called Nordics were a Master Race, that inferior kinds of Europeans, inferior (so-called) subraces of whites— like the so-called Semitic race— and all other races as a whole deserved to be ruled by the Master Race. The Master Race, moreover, had the right to eliminate inferior subraces by genocide. Racism therefore was seen, and

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still is seen, as a component of the horrible ideology of Nazism. It is true that a small and fanatic group still preaches classical racism, and that a very small number of academics still proclaim its validity. The need to fight against the doctrine has not entirely ended. But this no longer is the important issue when we talk about Eurocentric prejudices, because another doctrine has largely replaced classical racism and performs much the same function, rooting its argument not in genetics but in culture. This doctrine can be thought of as cultural racism.23

Classical racism was so pervasive, down through the 1920s, that it probably figured as an explicit or implicit foundation for most arguments about the superiority of Europeans in history. It is as though the scholars who asked why Europe had risen and other societies had not done so had part of their answer at the outset: Europeans began with a genetic advantage, large or small, and then, throughout later history, they were always to a greater or lesser extent favored by the influence of their genetic superiority in matters intellectual, giving them superior decision-making ability, inventive ability, and so on. Here was an important reason why it did not, in those times, seem crucial to ask the question, “Why?” A t root, the answer was considered self-evident. Even moderate racists, such as Max Weber (whose views we examine below), could therefore assume that European superiority was carried along by a kind of subtle undertow of genetics, that this made Europeans at all times slightly more “rational” (Weber’s favorite word), and, therefore, slightly more progressive. It is very interesting that modem scholars retain the notion of the superiority of European “rationality,” a notion derived from Weber and through him from all of nineteenth-century social thought, yet they vigorously deny that the source of this “rationality” is racial superiority. The intellectual contortions they have to go through to retain the one without the other will claim our interest when we discuss this matter.

Among the historians whose theories about the “European miracle” are at present widely supported, only Max Weber uses classical racist argument in a clear and overt way. But Weber was writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when classical racism was accepted by the majority of European scholars. Weber’s arguments are a rather mild form of racism. He did indeed write of the “hereditary . hysteria of the Indian,” a basis for his argument that Indian religion prevented Indian development.24 He considered Africans to be geneti­ cally incapable of factory work.25 Chinese have a “slowness in reacting to unusual [intellectual] stimuli,” a “credulity” or “docility” that Weber thinks are wholly or partly hereditary traits.26 And Europe’s greater

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“rationality” has a definite hereditary basis.27 But the fact remains that Weber gave much greater weight to nonracial factors. And Weber, for his time, was only a moderate racist.

Moderate racism is, today, a more serious problem in the world of scholars than is classical racism, because it is mainly an implicit theory. We noted that Weber believed in the significance of racial differences, but he referred to the matter very rarely; yet it must have been an unstated, perhaps implicit, part of many of his arguments about social evolution in general and the comparative evolution of Europe and non-Europe in particular. This was fairly typical of early twentieth-century scholarship, hence the racism in that scholarship often is too difficult to identify, and the arguments presented by scholars seem not to be racist when they do not explicitly mention race as a factor. But more serious still is the surviving influence of what I call very moderate racism. A great number, perhaps the majority, of mainstream scholars, in the period, say, of the 1920s, believed that racial differences were very slight and that the individual human being’s capabilities and potentialities would not be predictable from his or her race, that race differences only appeared influential on a statistical basis for large groups: for instance, a slightly higher average “intelligence quotient” for whites as against blacks. This belief was consistent with militant opposition to racial discrimination. But it was not much better than classical racism when applied to questions of social evolution and comparison between European and non-European history. This is so because the historical arguments did not need to postulate large racial differences. If whites, on the average, held a tiny advantage over non­ whites in, let us say, inventiveness, that tiny advantage, working out its influence over the centuries and millennia, would produce the result that whites built high civilization and nonwhites did not. In a sense, this very moderate racism was a more serious problem than ordinary racism, because it allowed scholars to take liberal positions in opposition to overt racial discrimination yet continue to believe that whites are superior genetically to nonwhites within the subject matter of their own fields— anthropology, geography, history, and so on. It did reduce the significance of race to that of one “factor” among many, but it did not eliminate racial explanations in the matter of Europe’s supposed superiority.28

Probably it is unnecessary to say here that there is no credible evidence in support of the idea that races differ in genetic inheritance except in trivial matters like skin color. Even the idea of race is a vague abstraction and not really useful. For our purposes, the generalization that counts is this: racial differences explain nothing about culture or cultural evolution.29

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Demography

Demographic behavior is usually considered the second important biological factor in explanations for the European miracle. Causality here is very murky. The specific form of theory with which I am concerned . claims that Europeans, historically, controlled their population growth, whereas other peoples did not, so that Europe tended not to suffer overpopulation, and did not encounter what many historians call the “Malthusian disasters” that supposedly prevented forward progress in non-European societies. Malthusianism postulates, in its essence, that ordinary people do not control their sexual urges and so have more offspring than can be fed; a disaster of some sort ensues, with famine, pestilence, or war now reducing the population; and then people again breed more children than they should, and the cycle renews. Malthus considered this uncontrollable sexual urge to be general in the human species, although the educated classes could control themselves to some degree. Modern explanations for the “European miracle” modify this theory in a key respect: they assert that Europeans, historically, have had a cultural pattern of limiting the number of offspring whereas non-Europeans lacked this pattern; as a result, European population was maintained, throughout history, in rough long-term proportion to resources, in spite of periodic Malthusian crises, crises which were important in explaining various facts of European history but were vastly less significant than the supposed permanent grip of Malthusian forces—lack of demographic control and perennial overpopulation and misery— in non-European societies. Moreover, according to these historians, whenever technological advance or some other fortunate circumstance led to a rise in living standards, Europeans, unlike non-Europeans, did not allow their population to rise and thus eliminate the fruits of progress. We need to notice that this argument does not really center on the biology of reproduction but, again, on rationality: it is claimed or assumed that Europeans think about the problem of population and others do not. So demographic arguments for the superiority of Europe in history always return either to culture or to race: Europeans are more rational either because they have superior heredity or because they have superior culture. If non-Europeans have uncontrollable sexual urges, if they behave like the beasts in the field, this is either a sign of genetic inferiority or a cultural quirk. In the arguments most frequently encountered today, either culture is invoked or the matter is left ambiguous. Yet there is a paradox. Many historians believe that demography is an independent causal force in history. This telief is generally grounded in a quasi-biological argument: ordinary people have

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only partial success in controlling their sexual urges, and only partial success (or none at all) in controlling and spacing the birth of children.30 Many supporters of the miracle myth simply argue, then, that Europeans have greater, though still partial, success in controlling their behavior than do non-Europeans. For instance, Eric L. Jones claims that this is what he calls “the quality of Europeanness” :

Europe did not spend the gifts of its environment as rapidly as it got them in a mere insensate multiplication of the common life.31

In other words, Europeans do not simply reproduce thoughtlessly, as non-Europeans do. Jones makes the same point in many different ways; for instance, he says of Chinese peasants that they preferred “breeding new people” to improving their economic and political circumstances.32 John A. Hall makes a similar point:

The expansion of the European economy did not occur [through expansion of cultivated acreage], as in late traditional China, because improvements in output were not eaten up by a massive growth in population. T he ratio between population and [cultivated] acreage in Europe remained favourable ultimately because of the relative continence o f the European family.33

Europeans are sexually “continent.” Europeans, therefore, do not suffer overpopulation.

Another point worthy of notice: the historians have no difficulty invoking population growth as a positive factor in European history, as an indication of progress—for instance, the growth of Europe’s population in the eleventh century and thereafter is seen as proof that medieval Europe was healthily advancing—whereas population growth in non-European societies is seen as negative, as the working out of Malthusian laws of “overpopulation.” We will encounter examples of this very one-sided form of argument as we proceed.

There is now abundant evidence that all societies practice population control.34 They seem to do so very effectively at the aggregate level: although individual family groups may or may not succeed in controlling the incidence of conception—because the methods of birth control are often rather hit or miss— the society as a whole seems able to encourage population growth or discourage it quite successfully.35 It is most unlikely that population growth takes place when the society would, in the long run, suffer as a consequence; or, to put the matter more precisely, the members of a society change their demographic behavior in the space of a couple of generations when it becomes clear to them, as they observe

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changes around them in the probability of infants surviving to adulthood, and so on, that such change is desirable. The knowledge that all of this is indeed the case has only appeared recently.36 But this accumulating evidence really cuts the ground from under all Malthusian theories, historical and contemporary, European and non-European. The argument that population growth is an automatic, biological process, which occurs whether or not there is food enough to feed additional mouths, is simply wrong.37

When the evidence began to accumulate that historic European populations did indeed practice population control, some scholars decided, appropriately, that the old Malthusian models do not make sense in Europe: family size was kept small, births were controlled, and so forth, back in the Middle Ages. This called for rejection of one traditional theory, the idea that there is a general pattern for all so-called preindustrial societies (or “traditional societies,” or “peasant societies” ), involving high and uncontrolled birth rates, large families, etc., and thus, inevitably, a Malthusian trend toward overpopulation. Most historians today seem still to be wedded to the Malthusian theory, and still believe that medieval social change in Europe was mainly, or at least partly, produced by Malthusian cycles of overpopulation.38 But some historians now reject this perspective: population, in essence, is viewed by them as a dependent variable, not an independent variable.

But only in Europe. This newer, essentially anti-Malthusian, theory was rapidly shaped into a new explanation for the European “miracle.” It was simply asserted that European people, historically, controlled their population, and so, when they accumulated surpluses of food and commodities and wealth, these were not subsequently dissipated as population grew out of control and stole away the savings. This pattern, said these historians, was uniquely European and it was one important reason why Europeans were able to accumulate wealth and eventually rise into modernity and capitalism. Non-Europeans, by contrast, continued in their unmodern, traditional pattern, with overpopulation wiping out all benefits of forward progress. These Eurocentric historians, in a manner characteristic of tunnel history, did not notice that new scholarship on demography, some of it on historical demography— in various non- European parts of the world, from India to Barbados—was tending to overturn Malthusian notions as they apply to non-Europe just as readily as had been the case a decade earlier in European scholarship.39

We will take up a related matter, theories about the uniqueness of the European family, at a later point in this chapter. For now, it is enough to say, simply, that the demographic arguments in support of the European miracle are utterly unconvincing. This holds true both for the

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theories grounded in the belief in baleful Malthusian forces and for those which assert that Europeans, uniquely, know how to avoid those forces.

Environment Environmental determinism, the theory that the natural environment strongly influences human affairs and human history, is no longer a popular doctrine, but it is still used quite regularly in explanations for the European “miracle.” The point should, however, be qualified: Environ­ mental determinism, in the form it is used in these arguments today, is a “determinism” in a limited sense only. It does not claim that the environ­ ment explains everything, or that the environment is the most important explanatory factor. It is deterministic in the sense that it treats the environment as a separate, simple cause or “factor” not mediated by culture: something external to culture and influencing it from the outside. One finds each Eurocentric historian adding one or a number of environ­ mentalists arguments or factors to the mix, which, as a whole, explains the superiority of Europe. Even the historians who want to build their case mainly on social or political or intellectual foundations nonetheless manage (I know of very few exceptions) to throw one or more environ- mentalistic arguments into the stewpot, to give it body or flavor.

Environmentalistic arguments can be stacked into two piles. One consists of the set of claims about the superior qualities of Europe’s environment and how they help to explain the rise of Europe. The other pile consists of arguments as to why the nasty environments of other places have blocked development there. The two sorts of argument are—perhaps surprisingly—very different in form. Let us begin with the latter.

Two classical environmentalistic theories have been used over and over again, and still remain in use, to explain the (supposed) nondevelop­ ment of Africa and Asia. The first theory argues that tropical regions are innately inferior to cooler regions. This theory is used, for the most part, to dispose of Africa. The second theory argues that peoples in arid regions are held back from development because aridity necessitates irrigation, and irrigation along with related features of irrigated river-valley life leads, again necessarily, to the kind of civilization that is historically stagnant. This theory disposes of Asian civilizations, along with Egypt. (Most of Asia is not, in fact, arid.) I will discuss both of these theories, and more briefly a few other environmentalistic explanations for the backwardness of Africa and Asia.

Nasty-Tropical Africa

The idea that tropical climates are nasty, and inhibit the forward march of civilization, is a very old one in European thought.40 During the

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nineteenth century this notion was widely used to show why Africans have (supposedly) remained uncivilized, and must naturally accept European colonial control; it was one of the core theories of classical diffusionism.41 It was routinely built in to theories about the uniqueness of Europe, the European miracle, although I must add that historians did not usually consider the reasons for Africa’s nonrise worth bothering about: the matter was considered self-explanatory, and labors were devoted to the seemingly more important question why Asia (and North Africa) did not rise. And the tropical-nastiness theory is still quite regularly employed in historians’ arguments. It is, for instance, crucial to Jones’s argument in The European Miracle. It is also significant in a special arena: the debates among historians about African slavery, the slave trade, and the slave plantation system. By contrast, geographers, who in general know something about the natural environment and have long grappled with the theories of environmental determinism, do not, today, take the nasty-tropics theory very seriously.42

The tropical-nastiness doctrine consists mainly of three distinct theories. The first concerns itself with the supposed negative effect of a hot, humid climate on the human mind and body; the second, with the supposed inferiority of tropical climates for food production; the third, with the supposed prevalence of disease in tropical regions. Down to the 1940s, or thereabouts, there was some ambivalence among Europeans as to the thesis that humans cannot labor as effectively in the humid tropics as in other climates. The majority opinion had been that Africans can labor under the hot sun— a convenient rationalization for plantation slavery— but that Europeans cannot do so, although some diffusionist arguments were built on the idea that tropical conditions induce sloth, indolence, etc., in everyone, and thus the need for control-at-a-distance from temper- ate-climate civilizations. Eventually it became clear, from many sources of evidence including physiological studies, that human bodies of all sorts can labor as effectively in the tropics as elsewhere if the bodies in question have had time to adjust to tropical conditions.43 Although the claim that people in humid tropical regions cannot think as well as people in temperate regions— the tropical sun “boils the brain”— was almost univer­ sally accepted by Europeans in the last century and was incorporated into some well-known theories about European civilizational superiority put forward (for instance by Huntington and Markham) in the first half of the present century, this theory, never grounded in evidence, is now rejected across the board. Eric L. Jones is one of the few present-day European historians who is unaware that this theory of “climatic energy” (as it was called in the old days) has been exploded. Not only does Jones accept it as valid but he gives it some consicferafe/e significance:

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Civilizations had long been rising and falling in warm latitudes, although they appear to have been springing up farther and farther north. Such explanation as the literature offers for this shift is essentially climatic (Gilfillan 1920; Lambert 1971). O n the one hand it correlates mean temperature and the output of human energy, and on the other it claims that in warm regions man was subject to the build-up of endoparasitic infestation which caused each society there to reach a plateau of attainment and then stagnate.44

It should be noted that “the literature” does not support any of this. The scholarly literature roundly rejects the theory of “climatic energy,” which has not in fact been seriously defended since the 1950s. Climatic determinism as a whole is almost a dead letter. There has been no northward “shift” of civilization (ancient civilizations were located from the equator to 45° latitude). The notion that tropical regions are so parasite-infested that cultures stagnate is false (it will briefly claim our attention later). Jones’s general belief that hot climates are “debilitating” has little if any scholarly support, and does not in turn support the idea that Europe’s climate led to a European miracle.45 There simply is no basis for arguing that midlatitude climates are superior to tropical climates in terms of psychological or physical effects on human beings.

The fruitfulness of tropical environments was much debated by nineteenth-century European scholars. Some argued that tropical regions are lush and bountiful, but used this proposition not as a basis for asserting high development potential but rather the contrary: tropical environ­ ments are too bountiful to offer what Arnold Toynbee might have called a sufficient challenge to humanity, and so progress did not take place except under colonial guidance. We deal with this thesis later in the

j chapter. Our concern now is with the exact opposite thesis, which asserts, quite simply, that tropical environments are miserably poor in their potential for agriculture and it is this that prevents tropical regions from developing. (The term “tropics,” or more properly “humid tropics,” refers to regions with no cold season and with moderate to high rainfall: roughly 750 mm. of rain or more per year. Most of sub-Saharan Africa falls within the humid tropics, as does most of southern and southeastern Asia and most of Middle and South America.) According to this thesis, little food can be produced on a given piece of land in the humid tropics.

Now this thesis— low agricultural productivity of tropical land— is hard to defend on the evidence, since population densities in the humid tropics range from very low (in parts of the Amazon Basin, for instance) to extraordinarily high (in Java, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Barbados, Rwanda, and many other regions). The argument is grounded, rather, in a theory about the nature of tropical soils. To put matters in perspective,

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the scientific study of tropical soils is a very young field; few contributions of any consequence can be dated earlier than World War II if we exclude highly particular studies about the soils used for plantation crops like sugar-cane.46 The really crucial information, relevant to the proof or disproof of the traditional theories, was obtained in research carried out in a number of experimental centers in the late 1940s and thereafter, and then slowly disseminated to the world scholarly community. The result is that some historians (including some current writers about the “miracle”) can still, today, make use of quite fantastic theories about the supposedly evil nature of tropical soils. Some of these theories were refuted quite recently; others are now, today, very close to refutation; a few others, hardly defensible, nonetheless still lie around in the scholarly literature, unrefuted. A brief, only slightly technical, comment on these theories is necessary at this point of the discussion.

The old standard theory about tropical soils runs about as follows: Because of the high heat and abundant rainfall in the humid tropics, these soils cannot accumulate organic topsoil, since organic matter decomposes rapidly and is quickly leached out as rainwater seeps downward in the soil. Tropical soils, therefore, are low in plant nutrients. Also, they are subject to severe erosion, partly because tropical landforms tend to have high average slopes, partly because high rainfall means high runoff and therefore much surface erosion.

These two basic physical propositions, about infertility of the soil and erosion respectively, were then married to a cultural proposition, in the following argument. Because of the low fertility and erodibility of tropical soils, farmers must practice what is called “shifting agriculture.” (This is a farming system in which a field is prepared by clearing a piece of forest with the use of fire, and then, after one or more years of cultivation, is abandoned, another field being then cleared in turn and in its turn abandoned, in a continuous process of shifting fields.) The standard theory (as it was argued before the 1950s or thereabouts) then makes a series of sweeping generalizations about the combined effects of infertile, erodible tropical soils and shifting agriculture. It was claimed that farmers cannot return to the original piece of land after it has been abandoned and left fallow for some time, since the soils are too poor to regenerate and since burning the piece of land permanently damages the soil. Even where the environment is lush enough so that farmers can return and re-use each field, the production from each field will be less and less as the cycles of use and abandonment continue, and the soil will become more and more infertile until finally it is unusable. All of this implied that peasant communities would be unable to remain in any one region permanently;

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that the villages themselves would have to be moved as large expanses of forest land were used and then abandoned and the people needed to move elsewhere to find fresh, cultivable lands. The result would be grave indeed: a very sparse and highly mobile population with little or no chance of developing large-scale trade, cities, and stable states.

The entire argument was inserted at this point into world history and world geography. Most of sub-Saharan Africa is tropical. Therefore, shifting agriculture must be used there and no civilization can develop there. Or if civilization manages somehow to evolve to one extent or another, it must sooner or later collapse. (The decline of the classical lowland Mayan civilization was regularly used as the type example of this historical outcome; it is still so used by a few scholars.)

This traditional model of tropical soils and shifting agriculture was gradually softened as more information became available to students of tropical soils and tropical agriculture. By the 1960s it was generally known to the specialist community (though not yet to the majority of historians and social scientists) that shifting agriculture does not damage the soil under normal— that is, typical and widespread— circumstances.47 Almost never do shifting cultivators move their villages because of soil exhaus­ tion. (It became known, also, that shifting cultivation had been wide­ spread for many centuries in Europe, and there it had not apparently done any damage to the environment.) From this emerged a softer cultural model: if population densities are low, so that farmers can leave each abandoned field for the many years required for soil and vegetation regeneration, then shifting agriculture will remain an equilibrium farming system, and there will be no long-term deterioration of the environment.

But even this modification would not much alter the historical judgment about Africa and some other tropical regions: historians might still believe that any civilization arising in such a tropical area cannot be very complex under ordinary circumstances, because a low population density of food producers would not seem to provide the basis for a substantial complex of urban centers, religious centers, states, and the like. (As to the lowland Mayan civilization, some scholars continued to claim that shifting agriculture had destroyed the subsistence base of that civiliza­ tion, while others claimed that the decline and abandonment of cultural centers like Tikal had been due to other sorts of processes.) In any event, the prevailingly Malthusian view of peasants led to the general assumption that population would grow out of control and regions of tropical shifting agriculture would never rise very high in places like tropical Africa, anyway.

The model in this form is still current among historians. It is

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common in the European miracle literature, as the primary environmental basis for claiming that Africa could not have “risen” in the same way that Europe did. It is explicit in the work of some non-African Africanist historians.48

Evidence is now available to reject this entire theory, the notion that tropical soils are bad for agriculture and therefore somehow inhibit human history. First of all, we now know that tropical soils are not inferior. They are different. Because of the higher rate of chemical and physical weathering under humid-tropical conditions, soil production from the underlying rock is much more rapid than is the case in cooler climates. Therefore, soils maintain their fertility in considerable degree from the dissolution of minerals, and much less from the accumulation of organic matter. Erosion tends to be more serious, but regeneration tends to be more rapid. Tropical soils that have developed on rocks that are rich in plant-nutrient minerals are exceptionally fertile. Those developed on rocks that are not nutrient-rich are exceptionally infertile. There is no basis for comparing tropical and temperate “averages”: neither is better; they are different.

Evidence is also available now to reject the old view of shifting agriculture. Farmers practice it on poor soils, being careful not to let fires get out of control. They use a great number of techniques to assist the natural vegetation to regenerate, and to increase soil fertility in the cultivated fields, including green and animal manuring. When there is a land shortage, the shifting rotation is shortened, by the use of various techniques of intensification such as mounding or terracing, increased labor applied to such matters as weeding, adoption of different crops and different varieties, and many more.49 The correlation between shifting agriculture and low population density is a function of history, not ecology. In the Americas it reflects in part the post-Columbian depopulation. (The Amazon Basin, which today may have a farming population of perhaps one million, probably had seven times that number in 1492.50) In part also it reflects the often unnoticed fact that in most regions of the American tropics giant cattle ranches have pushed farmers off the better land, giving a statistical appearance of low population density: cattle have replaced people.51 The same process occurred in white-settled regions of southern Africa. Elsewhere in tropical Africa, most farmers practice forms of agriculture that should not be described as shifting agriculture except in marginal regions, like mountainsides and semi-arid wastes.52 Typically, they are sedentary or semisedentary farming systems, involving such things as semipermanent yam mounds and tree-crop farming, or irrigated farming, or mixed farming, or they are systems in which the period of cultivation exceeds

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the period of fallow, and fertility is maintained by many different cultural practices including the use of green and animal manure. But the most important generalization is this simple one: where there is soil degradation, and hunger, and poor farming, it reflects cultural causes from recent history or colonial history. It does not reflect inherent limitations of tropical agriculture and it does not reflect technological ignorance on the part of farmers.

A few variant theories about the low food production potential of the humid-tropical in general and Africa in particular are invoked by some historians. Some claim that Africans were unable even to farm in Africa’s humid-tropical regions until new technology, invented by non-Africans, diffused into the continent. One form of this argument claims that ironworking was brought into Africa a little over 2,000 years ago, perhaps by the Romans, and only then were Africans able to tackle the tropical forests.53 Since shifting agriculture was practiced with stone implements in ancient Europe, and since ironworking appeared in Africa—possibly after independent invention— around 800 B.C. or earlier, this theory is invalid.

An even more outlandish theory builds on the fact that some Southeast Asian crops diffused into East Africa two millennia ago. Some historians blandly assert that Africans could not farm in the tropical forests until these tropical crops, domesticated by non-Africans, became available for planting in the African forests.54 It has, in fact, been well known for a long time that Africans domesticated a great number of crops for humid- tropical regions, notably many varieties of the yam (Dioscorea spp.) the prime staple food there.55 Both of these diffusionist myths seem to be connected to an important colonialist belief—now important as an excuse for apartheid in South Africa. The belief is that advanced African cultures, with agriculture, trade, and states, expanded southward through the continent only very late in history, mainly because of the forbidding nature of the tropical part of the continent which held back their southward movement. According to this myth of emptiness (see Chapter 1), they had not arrived in (most of) South Africa when the Europeans took over that region, and supporters of white supremacy in South Africa claim, on this basis, that whites, having arrived first, have political and economic rights to own the land of South Africa.56 In fact, the expansion of agricultural peoples in Africa occurred thousands of years ago; recent archaeology has shown that rain forest regions were settled by farmers at least 3,000 years ago, and whites did not arrive first in South Africa.

Another variant of the myth of tropical nastiness as applied to Africa is the notion that rainfall variability in tropical Africa is uniquely and devastatingly high, such that agriculture could not, in precolonial times,

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be dependably practiced and famines were frequent and widespread. This then leads into various arguments about African backwardness. For some historians (among them Philip Curtin) there was a basic tendency toward mobility of populations and internal slave trading; for others (notoriously Joseph Miller), there was savagery and cannibalism.57 These historians belong to what I will call the “absolutionist” school of Eurocentric Africanist history, which absolves Europeans of most of the responsibility for slavery and the problems of modem Africa by finding explanations for such matters within Africa itself, often in the African environment. The European miracle historians make regular use of these arguments for purposes of comparison. It happens to be the case that rainfall variability is a serious problem in all semi-arid regions, including the Sahel zone south of the Sahara in Africa and also the Great Plains in the central United States, the steppes of Russia, and so on. Africa is not unique. The more humid parts of this continent do not have a peculiar problem o f climatic uncertainty: this is a historians’ myth, partly traditional, partly resurrected after the recent Sahelian-Sudanic famines. The latter did not reflect drought-proneness of the region. They reflected human problems, mostly inherited from the colonial period, which became disasters when ordinary rainfall cycles went through their dry phases.58

Much the same sort of argument applies to other parts of the tropics. In southern and southeastern Asia we tend, broadly, to find permanent, that is, sedentary, agriculture on lands with relatively high fertility, and shifting agriculture or tree crops on lands with low fertility. The experience of colonialism during the past two centuries or so has muddled that picture somewhat, since there have been major population movements and large population increases in some areas—with conse­ quent distortions of farming systems in reaction to land shortage and other nonenvironmental pressures. Yet the generalization still holds in regard to the environment: tropical conditions do not carry the implication of poor agricultural potential.59

What of the opposing theory, that the tropics are lush and bountiful? Down through the middle of the nineteenth century this theory was very widely accepted, and also this corollary: Since the fruits of the earth are so easily obtained in tropical climes, humans do not have to exert themselves to make a living. And so they do not progress. The argument was then woven into many different theories. Buckle put forward one such theory.60 Marx put forward another, rather tersely, in a footnote in Volume 1 of Capital, asserting without discussion that tropical regions do not develop toward capitalism because here “Nature is too lavish . . . She does not impose upon [man] any necessity to develop himself.”61 This brief comment seems to be the only occasion on which Marx raised the

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question why humid-tropical regions, including Africa, did not develop as Europe did.

The bountiful-tropics theory is still used today in some theories that try to explain the uniqueness of Europe’s rise. I suppose that every European child of our own time has seen some version of the cartoon showing the native sitting under the coconut tree, waiting patiently for his food to drop into his hands. This is not merely a relic of oldtime thought or an implicit theory. Eric L. Jones uses the bountiful-tropics theory in The European Miracle. (In West Africa “living was easy.”62) John A. Hall uses it.63 Occasionally it is used by Marxists, faithful to the letter of Marx’s comment quoted above.64 Probably there is no need to explain why these bountiful-tropics theories are unacceptable, since this— as we have seen-— is done time and again by scholars who insist that tropical regions are not bountiful; rather, they are barren and nasty. Neither the one view nor the other makes sense. And note that both are used toward the same end: to show that tropical regions have inferior potential in history.

Finally, we come to the theory that tropical environments are so disease-ridden that historical progress there is slowed, stopped, or prevented. Some historians develop this argument specifically with reference to Africa. Some others apply it sweepingly to all tropical regions: for Eric L. Jones it is a major reason why both Asia and Africa remained backward by comparison to Europe. Like the tropical-nastiness theories discussed previously, this one is traditional in European thought, and this fact is critically important for an understanding of the survival of the theory down to the present and its use in the European miracle paradigm.

One of the axioms of classical diffusionism, as we have seen in Chapter 1, is the idea that diseases and other evil things naturally counterdiffuse into Europe from non-Europe. It was therefore assumed by many scholars (including, for instance, Buckle) that non-Europe is both the source and the natural home of many— and the worst— maladies.65 That axiomatic belief is still with us: plagues from the Black Death to AIDS are still assumed—for it is always an assumption, whether or not reinforced by evidence— to come from the non-European world.66

This foundation belief was reinforced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the reports of upper-class European travelers about the, to them, dirty, disgusting, diseased communities they found outside of Europe. This was both a class phenomenon and a cultural one: alien lifeways necessarily seemed to be unhealthy. But the belief gained powerful reinforcement during the nineteenth century, when the growing wealth and modernization of (much of) Europe led to a dramatic improvement in health conditions, grounded in general improvement in

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living conditions, improved sanitation, and, finally, progress in medicine. Europe, therefore, seemed to be somehow healthy, non-Europe, somehow unhealthy. This error is still very widespread. Underdeveloped countries are poor. With poverty comes ill health. But the ill health is thought, incorrectly, to somehow stem from the natural environments of these regions or from the cultures of their inhabitants, not from poverty. However disease-ridden India, Africa, China, etc., may have been in this period, Europe itself had been just as disease-ridden a century or so earlier (a fact known in part from the demographic facts about life expectancy of ordinary Europeans down to the eighteenth century).

In this same period European colonial territories were expanding, and it became evident that Europeans living in colonies tended to fall prey to various kinds of exotic diseases. The most extreme case apparently was West Africa, which was called in those times “the white man’s grave.” Here the insecurity of the quite small coastal settlements—colonial territories in sub-Saharan Africa did not really expand until very late in the nineteenth century— combined with the massive effects of the movement of slaves (many of whom died in these settlements) produced peculiarly unhealthy conditions, though the Europeans thought the source of the problem was the innate unhealthfulness of Africa itself.

Most of the important diseases of humans and their domesticated animals are not peculiarly tropical. Smallpox, typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria, measles, bubonic plague, anthrax, and many other diseases are found across many physical environments, and their severity from place to place tends to reflect, more than anything else, conditions of human poverty, crowding, and the like. To some extent this is true even of the supposedly “tropical diseases,” such as malaria (which, in fact, used to plague extratropical areas, including New York). Some forms of malaria tend to be associated with stagnant water, and thus with irrigated agriculture, in a wide range of climates. Other forms, including some of the most serious ones, are associated with tropical forest conditions, the mosquito vector often breeding in bromeliad growths on the trees themselves. It is true that these forms of malaria are especially associated with shifting cultivation in the humid tropics. But farmers spend relatively little time in the forest, if indeed there is forest. And they develop immunities such that malaria does not ravage their communities (as it does ravage communities of foreigners in their midst: traders, colonial military personnel, and so on).

The question is: after all such matters have been taken into consideration, is there, then, a remainder that can be called “the innate unhealthiness of the tropics?” Probably the answer is no.

Although this generalization is now widely accepted, some historians

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cling tenaciously to the idea that Africa is and always has been a uniquely disease-ridden place. This is given as one reason for Africa’s (supposed) marginal role in world history, at least in modem world history. (Accord­ ing to William McNeill, disease “more than anything else, is why Africa remained backward in the development of civilization when compared to temperate lands.”67) In the view of some of the absolutionist historians, notably Curtin, the disease-ridden character of West and Central Africa in and after the sixteenth century is a key part of the explanation for the complementary facts that this region became the source of slaves for the Atlantic plantation economy and that this region, instead of “rising” with the growth of the Atlantic economy, instead remained undeveloped. It is important to put this theory into perspective in terms of the confrontation mentioned at the beginning of this chapter between traditional European historians and the Third-Worldist, revisionist school. Traditional scholars (at least those of the absolutionist school) claim that Africa in the sixteenth century had a rather small and mobile population, with little development of complex civilization and state organization, and with slave raiding and slave trading as important features of its society. Africa had not risen above this very low level of civilization mainly because of the prevalence of human and animal diseases—-with other environmental factors of the sort previously discussed being added on as additional factors. Africa thus quite naturally became the prime source of plantation slaves; and, also naturally, the slave trade did not fundamentally alter the reality of African life.

Third World historians tend to dispute all of this. Africa was densely populated before the slave trade, and the slave trade utterly devastated the continent, destroying states and civilizations, depopulating vast regions, and leading, overall, to disastrous underdevelopment. The slave trade mainly reflected Europe’s power relative to coastal African societies in the seventeenth century and thereafter, in consequence of the immensely profitable American plantations and— as we discuss in Chapter 4— the fact that militarily and commercially powerful West African states were mostly located some distance from the coast. Disease increased in intensity because of the devastation caused by the slave trade: depopulation, the abandonment of large areas formerly cultivated and grazed (now turned to forest and scrub), wars, economic decline, and so on. One crucial example of this devastation has to do with the tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis or African sleeping sickness. Traditional scholars claim that tsetse fly infestation prevented Africans from developing extensive cattle herding in earlier times and in many other ways contributed to historical stagnation. The response is that trypanosomiasis, like anthrax, is a disease with many mammalian hosts. Depopulation led to the massive expansion

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of wastelands, and of wild animal host populations, and thus to the spread of conditions in which the tsetse fly could flourish. This in turn changed trypanosomiasis from an endemic disease to which both humans and cattle had some immunity and exposure, which was kept in check by the relatively full occupation of lands, into a devastating disease that, since the end of the last century, has indeed prevented the development of animal husbandry in some areas of Africa. There is considerable evidence that the expansion of bushland led to the expansion of tsetse-fly-infested areas and thus to economic and social misery.68 Beyond this, there is little solid evidence either way about the history of health conditions in Africa and among Africans (not colonial visitors), and there are many reasons to doubt the inherited diffusionist assumptions and prejudices on this matter. In any event, one cannot make a case that disease was an independent force that “blocked” development in sub-Saharan Africa.

Arid, Despotic Asia

Asia is a large place and contains a large variety of environments. There is, understandably, a very long and varied list of traditional environmen­ talistic arguments, most of them particular to some one part of Asia and inapplicable to other parts. Back in the early nineteenth century, a pious form of environmental determinism prevailed in geography, and it seemed sensible to invoke a single explanation for all of this variety: God had placed different natural obstacles in the paths of different Asian peoples—-heat in one place, cold in another, drought in a third. Today it is more common to find, among historians writing about the “European miracle,” not a list of Asia’s environmental infirmities but rather a set of separate comparative judgments, each centered on Europe, and each referring to a specific period in European history. Europe, or some part of Europe, at some particular time, was superior to all of Asia in environmental qualities X and Y and Z. Or, more typically, the comparison will invoke environmental obstacles for one Asian region, political obstacles for another, religious obstacles for a third, and so on, in a very eclectic sort of argument.

For these reasons I will not review all the environmentalistic theories as to why Asia supposedly remained backward in comparison to Europe. I will deal with the comparative judgments about climate, landforms, and so on, one by one, in the following section of this chapter (“Temperate Europe” ).

There is, however, one very large and coherent theory that is used today, much as it was in the last century, to deal with Asia as a whole in one grand and sweeping judgment of inferiority. This theory has a number

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of variants which are known by various names, among them “the Asiatic mode of production,” “hydraulic society,” and “Oriental despotism.” The theory is not usually thought of as an example of environmental determin­ ism, since it seems to start its argument with technology, claiming that irrigation-based (“hydraulic” ) societies have certain highly distinctive characteristics that inhibit historical development. But one of the roots of this argument is environmental. It is the claim that aridity in Asia made irrigation necessary. One can properly ask how a theory of this sort can be applied to parts of Asia that are not at all arid. (It has even been invoked as an explanation for Stalinism in wet, cold Russia.69) To understand this contradiction, and to understand accordingly why this theory is untenable in all its forms and variants, we must look briefly at the history of the doctrine.

European writers of the past half-millennium have tended to view Asia as a place where people are inherently unfree and society is inherently unchanging. It would take us far afield to go into the evolution of this belief, but by the eighteenth century it had become a significant part of the emerging doctrine of diffusionism.70 It was accepted as an axiomatic truth, rarely questioned, but efforts were made to explain this inherent “Oriental despotism” (as it came to be called) in terms of everything from theology to race to environment. The belief seems to have been applied mainly to the Ottoman Empire, which was in that period a political and military threat to some European societies and a commercial threat to others, until the late eighteenth-century expansion of direct European colonialism in India and Southeast Asia gave the theory new functions. Not only was the notion of Oriental despotism useful as a justification and rationalization for colonial expansion, but it became the basis for colonial legal doctrines that were being fashioned at that time. In Asia, it was decided, there is no private property in land because the ruler, despotically, owns everything. Therefore, when we Europeans depose the ruler, <we own everything. And if we take over a despotic state, we acquire the rights of despotic rule over a people who were unfree to begin with. (But European rule, however despotic— colonies had no democracy—was described as bestowing “freedom.” )

The modern form of Oriental despotism was often connected back to the biblical “Orient.” When modem Asian societies were described as “stagnant,” it seemed fair to assert that they basically retained the character described for them in the Old Testament. (The Old Testament, we recall, spoke of the existence of great cities, empires, agriculture, etc. ) While it was necessary to explain modern wonders like the Taj Mahal and great modern Asian states, it was not difficult to view these as relatively minor advances over the original biblical civilization, and to find

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secondary explanations for the evident fact that Asian civilizations had advanced somewhat—but long ago they had ceased to advance, and so remained essentially biblical and essentially stagnant.71

I think it likely that the geographical connection between aridity and “Orient” comes partly from this source, that is, from the biblical images of arid regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Partly, no doubt, it comes from the fact that early modem Europe, down through the mid-eighteenth century, thought mainly of the dry western Asian regions, the Ottoman realm and the Persian-Inner-Asian region, as “the Orient,”* because the farther Orient, from India to Japan, was still somewhat remote from European attention. In any event, early nineteenth-century geographers like the great Karl Ritter were describing one special type of geographical-cultural system, the type associated with Asian civilizations of the great river valleys of arid Asia and northeastern Africa, notably the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, and smaller valleys of similar character, and ascribing the traditional Asiatic traits of despotism to regions of this type. They seem to have extended this model somehow to comprehend the river valleys of wetter parts of Asia, through a logical leap from the idea of irrigated river-valley civilizations in arid regions to irrigated river-valley civilizations in Asia as a whole.

The general association of Oriental despotism with river-valley civilizations, from Egypt to China, was commonplace in the nineteenth century.72 Marx and Engels, however, took the idea a definitive step forward by advancing a theory that derived Oriental despotism from propositions about aridity and irrigation.73 In the 1850s Marx and Engels were, for the first time, seriously confronting the question of how their essential theory of historical evolution could be applied on a world scale. It needs to be said first that they were probably the most skeptical European thinkers of their time as regards all of the traditional and (as they insisted) elitist social theories then in vogue. But their skepticism had inevitable limits, since they were products of an elitist German education and since they knew almost nothing about the world outside of Europe apart from what they learned in the press, and in books and official papers presenting the colonial point of view with all its prejudices. Accordingly, Marx and Engels did not seriously question the prevailing doctrine that the Orient is in some sense despotic and to some degree historically stagnant and unprogressive. But their skepticism about European social theory, with its elitist foundations, immunized them from the usual explanations for Asian despotism and stagnation. Asians were no less rational than Europeans, and no less willing to struggle against economic exploitation. This reasoning led Marx and Engels to speculate that the cause of Asiatic despotism and unprogressiveness lay, not in

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human society, but in the natural environment. In Asia, it appeared, social evolution had not led to private property ownership: the ruler, despotically, owned the land, except where it remained as original communal property. Hence this speculation from Engels:

The absence of property in land is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Herein lies its political and religious history. But how does it come about that the Orientals did not arrive at landed property, even in its feudal form? I think it is mainly due to the climate, taken in connection with the nature of the soil, especially with the great stretches of desert which extend from the Sahara straight across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary up to the highest A sian plateau. Artificial irrigation is here the first condition of agriculture. . . . A n Oriental government never had more than three departments: finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works.74

This theory was advanced very tentatively by Marx and Engels, and was modified in later writings; it appears that Engels rejected it altogether in his late writings.75 Our interest lies in the fact that the environmental­ istic component remains influential today, even though it is now obvious that Marx and Engels were mistaken in the notion that Asia is arid. The theory nonetheless has had an effect on recent Marxist discussions about the European rise of capitalism and the (supposed) nonrise of capitalism in Asia.76 More crucially, it has been woven into the mainstream European miracle literature in an interesting intellectual sea change.

Max Weber, early in the present century, and Karl Wittfogel, at midcentury, are probably the key figures in the transformation of this rather archaic doctrine into a modem environmentalistic argument for the European miracle. Weber had little to say about the natural environment per se. Drawing on various scholarly ideas which were in circulation in turn-of-the-century Europe, including Marxian ideas, he argued that the development of private property in Europe’s Antiquity and Middle Ages was indeed one of the primary features of social evolution toward capitalism. He stressed what he saw as a fundamental difference between the rise of feudal (seigneurial) property, which was close to, and moving toward, full private property, and a contrasting form that he associated with the Asian river-valley civilizations (and ancient Egypt). He saw that social form as being associated closely with the need to irrigate in such environments, hence associated, inferentially, with the environment. These latter societies were, he said, despotic and land was not, in general, passed fully into the hands of officials, but rather lent to them on temporary tenure, on con dition of service, as a means of providing them with rental income, men for military levies, and so on.

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Irrigation required collective labor appropriation under despotic rule, for maintenance of canals and waterworks. In forested lands of Europe, such despotic rule over peasants had not been needed.77 Thus in Greece and elsewhere in Europe yeoman farmers, individualists, became the signature of rural society. Cities, instead of being mainly the seat of despotic power, became truly urban. Thus, in general, there was a peculiarly western trajectory, toward modem urban and capitalist society.

The crucial factor which made N ear Eastern development so different [from Greek development] was the need for irrigation systems, as a result of which i the cities were closely connected with building canals and constant ; regulation o f waters and rivers, all of which demanded the existence of a j unified bureaucracy. There was an irreversible character to this develop- E ment, and with it went subjugation of the individual. . . . O n the other ; hand in Greece . . . the position of the monarchs declined . . . and so began a development which ended . . . with an army recruited from yeoman i farmers who provided their own arms. Political power necessarily passed to I this class, and therewith started to emerge that purely secular civilization which characterized Greek society and caused capitalist development in Greece to differ from that in the N ear East.78

Weber’s formulation of the difference between Oriental societies and Western societies has become one of the fundamental arguments of the miracle theory as it is put forward in our own time. But Weber did not put firmly in place one important part of the edifice. This is the matter of showing why irrigation societies acquired the special characteristics assigned to them: despotism and stagnation, and, beyond that, lack of private property, lack of full urban development, and so on. This essential technical and environmental elaboration of the theory was introduced in 1955 by Karl Wittfogel, in his book Oriental Despotism.

Wittfogel, an ex-Marxist who started his argument with the Marxian proposition which we have discussed, tried to show that societies grounded in irrigation, “hydraulic societies” as he called them, are necessarily despotic and must necessarily have the kinds of social and political properties that earlier writers had associated with Oriental despotism, The same is true of societies that somehow acquire-at-a-distance the character­ istics of hydraulic societies, by diffusion. (Hence, according to Wittfogel, nonhydraulic Soviet Russia became despotic.) Wittfogel’s reasoning was environmentalistic, in a manner less ignorant of physical geography than Marx and Weber but nonetheless quite naive. Wittfogel believed that irrigating a tract of land necessarily, deterministically, increases its produc­ tivity. Some societies will thus choose to adopt irrigated agriculture, and so the great river valleys of Asia were occupied. But, according to Wittfogel,

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irrigation requires major public works for the creation and maintenance of canals, and hence requires a command-type political structure-—he says this was the origin of the state as a political form-—which also functions to control the distribution of water.

Thus hydraulic societies are necessarily despotic. There are a number of fallacies in this argument, as many scholars have pointed out. Three of the fallacies concern the environmental proposition, the idea that irrigation necessarily increases productivity massively, and therefore leads to the development of complex social stratification, the state, and so on. First fallacy: irrigation increases productivity substantially only when the ecologically limiting factor on crop growth is lack of water; but quite often— in Asia as elsewhere— this is not the case. This means that the elaboration of great irrigation systems is not a natural response to the environment. Rather, a small-scale irrigation system in a river-valley can become enlarged into the great system as an effect, not a cause, of political and social inequality: pressure to deliver surplus pushes the process, enlarges the irrigation network, and leads, logically, to ever greater inequality. In other words, the large irrigation systems are preceded by, and explained by, existing despotism or social complexity, not by environmental mandates. (Wittfogel argues in roughly the opposite direction: the need to irrigate in a dry region leads a society to develop coercive command structures to manage the irrigation system, and thence leads to class oppression and the state— and despotic Oriental civiliza­ tion.) The one ecological generalization that makes undoubted sense is the correlation of land productivity with population size and density, which is basic to the elaboration of social hierarchies and such things as religious ceremonial centers and states. But irrigation does not, magically, make land productive. Some land is highly productive without it. In the

I classical Mesopotamian and Nile cases we do not know whether the ruling classes forced increases in productivity, and this created the large irrigation systems, or whether the process worked the other way around. The second fallacy is the belief that the irrigation of truly dry river valleys made these valleys immensely productive, overall. Irrigation allowed agriculture to be practiced in lands otherwise desertic, but water was always in short supply and we know very little about crop yields. What we do know is that the really high productivity, and large social entities (in terms of population size as well as density), were found in wetter regions, mainly rice-farming regions, where elaborate irrigation systems usually were unnecessary for agriculture (and sometimes rainwater alone filled the paddies, as on the lower Irrawaddy plain and part of northern Luzon). Third fallacy: There is good reason to believe that some of the oldest civilizations were grounded not in irrigation, but in drainage, an

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ecological response that does not ordinarily involve large-scale water­ works. Drainage systems seem to have preceded irrigation in the earliest Mesoamerican civilizations. It is quite possible that the earliest Eastern Hemisphere irrigation systems, in such places as the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, the Wei, the Yellow, the Niger, etc., were originally drainage systems, opening up swampy riverine regions and perhaps elaborating polities long before the societies became committed to major engineering works and so became “hydraulic.”79

Wittfogel’s environmentalistic argument, bringing down to our own time the old ideas of Marx and Engels about aridity, irrigation, despotism, and stagnation, juxtaposed with Weber’s arguments about the difference between Oriental despotism and the rest, is seminal for many present-day European miracle historians, although most of them modify Wittfogel’s theory in important ways. The essential concept is the notion of hydraulic society, explicitly or implicitly seen as a natural product of arid Asian river valleys (and the Nile). The way this leads to “miracle” arguments in the writings of such historians as Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall deserves a moment’s attention.

Eric L. Jones, in The European Miracle, lays stress on what he conceives to be the fundamental difference between “rainfall-farming” societies of Europe and irrigating societies of Asia. Wittfogel, he says, was essentially right. Irrigating societies suffered the “political consequences of a society with a huge, manipulated peasant mass.”

European agricultural society was able to avoid a comparable history of authoritarianism—a kind of political infantilism—by virtue of an open- ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming.80

Jones then adds to all of this his theory that farmers who work in warm standing water become diseased—a fallacy, as we saw above, that confuses the consequences of poverty with those of ecological settings.

The fairy tale (for it is that) which associates marvelous social consequences with “rainfall farming” of the European variety will claim our attention shortly. Here it should simply be noted that all of the supposedly dire effects that Jones— like Wittfogel before him— attributes to irrigation societies are, in point o f fact, the normal attributes o f ancient class society and ancient civilization. That is, when these civilizations emerge, we find, as part of the process, reduction in peasant freedom, recruiting of masses of people for various purposes, and the like. The romantic image of free peasants is an image drawn from preserfdom, prefeudal times. After Franco-Roman colonization European peasants were as unfree as any peasants of the Asian river valleys or anywhere else.

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And of course rainfall farming, along with forested frontiers, was characteristic of much of Asia.

John A. Hall, in Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, wants to distance himself from WittfogePs “fantasy” (as he calls it) about the inherently despotic nature of Oriental society. He then promptly absorbs a good part of WittfogePs theory into his own formulation of reasons for the European “miracle.” Hall, like most miracle theorists, tries to make use of the greatest possible range of traditional arguments for the miracle, then pushes certain arguments forward as supposedly the most important ones. He thinks that political forces and Malthusian demographic forces are the most important, although he sees as a deeper force the Weberian notion of European “rationality.” Hall does not accept the formula that leads to the generalization that Oriental states were despotic. No, he says, they were arbitrary, cruel, and unwilling or unable to encourage economic development, and they held Oriental society stagnant (or, much the same thing, going through repetitive cycles). But they were not despotic. By this he means that Oriental states were not truly strong, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. We will see, shortly, how he says that medieval European states had some sort of inner strength, an organic quality, with progressive change somehow teleologically prefigured in their medieval form. So, according to Hall, there was Oriental despotism but the despots were weak.81 Hall then introduces irrigation as another independent factor.

j [In Europe] there was no need for irrigation. It is quite likely that this j encouraged, or at least allowed for, a decentred agricultural civilization | : based on individual initiative.”82

| Thus a “need” for irrigation in Asia, which must have been an j environmental need. Thus, the old Wittfogelian equation of irrigation | with despotism (as against “individual initiative” ). Then Hall moves to j other factors on his very long list. j Michael Mann is another contemporary theorist of the “European | miracle,” and he too has a long laundry list of factors which, he thinks,

contributed to the miracle.83 He tends to emphasize the importance of ancient Europe’s acquisition of political and especially military power. Mann takes pains to distance himself from Wittfogel, but in the end he incorporates most of WittfogePs model—perhaps I should call it the Marx-Weber-Wittfogel model— into his own theory. Like Marx, Weber, Wittfogel, Jones, and Hall, he accepts the characterization of ancient Oriental societies (from Egypt to China) as unfree and unprogressive. But he points out that the despotisms did not extend to true large-scale

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politicomilitary power. And the ancient Oriental civilizations, although they were rooted in irrigation agriculture, also made use of other forms of resource use in areas adjoining the river valleys. Mainly for these reasons, Mann claims that Wittfogel “overextended his model.”84 Ancient irrigat­ ing societies were despotic but they were not powerful, and this, for Mann, is what counts. Mann then rephrases the model and puts it, more or less entire, into his own theory. The distinction that counts is indeed, he says, the one between “irrigating” and “rainfall” farming societies. Asian societies are sweepingly categorized as the former, European societies as the latter. According to Mann, the fact that European farmers, starting with the ancient Greeks, used iron plows and farmed unirrigated (“rain­ fall” ) land, is the one most fundamental reasons that Europe forged ahead of Asia and North Africa. This was the first great miracle. It put Europe ahead of all other areas, and Europe has remained ahead ever since.

Here, in brief, is Mann’s argument. We start with the ancient Near Eastern civilizations, grounded mainly in irrigation. Conceding that irrigation was the innovation that caused these civilizations to rise in the first place, Mann argues that the irrigation base somehow “caged,” or confined, the population; this metaphor is meant to convey the idea that these people are unfree, and also in some sense constrained from further social progress. (It is a metaphor and not an argument.) Around 1800 B.C., says Mann, “the Middle Eastern empires of domination were shaken by two immense challenges . . . from the north,” from Indo-European invad­ ers— this seems to be a version of the discredited “Aryan migrations” theory— who brought two revolutions with them, based in charioteer warfare and the use of iron tools and particularly iron plows. The “balance of power now shifted northward.”85 Mann concedes in passing that these northern folk did not actually invent chariot warfare and ironworking (which came perhaps from Anatolia), but he passes without pause (or logic) to the thesis that the northern peoples, Indo-Europeans, acquired dominance in politicomilitary terms and in terms of productive power. From this point forward, Mann contrasts two civilizations, the “irrigating” ones of the Middle East and the iron-plow-using, rainwater-farming peoples of the north— Greece and, broadly, Europe. Mainly because the Europeans were iron-plow-rainfall-farming peoples, they acquired, ini­ tially in Greece, modern civilization, including democracy, classes, private (more or less) property, science, and a respect for human reason.86 Why? The centerpiece of the model is the image of an individual peasant- farming family which is fundamentally independent. It gets its water from the skies, not from a despotically managed irrigation system. Iron, says Mann, is abundant, so the peasant farmer does not depend upon cities and long-distance trade networks to acquire iron for plows and axes. This

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independent peasant, a true yeoman farmer (as Weber also had said), is the prototypical democratic, civilized, energetic, forward-looking European.

None of this makes sense. To begin with, it is geographically absurd to imagine that the Middle East was a region without plow agriculture, one basically of irrigated river-valley populations. Plows were used in irrigated farming. Rainfall-based farming was dominant, not in Egypt and Mesopo­ tamia, but in most of the Levant, Anatolia, Iran, and of course much of Asia farther east, not to mention Africa. Iron working was not invented by Europeans and was used as much by non-Europeans as by Europeans. The same is true of the iron plow, which was as important in early China, for instance, as in early Europe.87 (It is an old myth that Indo-European speakers, Aryans, spread the use of the plow to, and only to, the regions they settled or conquered.) Workable-grade iron ore deposits are not as abundant as Mann thinks they are (except in certain special regions, such as some of the laterite deposits of the humid tropics).

But the silliest part of Mann’s thesis is the environmental determin­ ism. We have an image of an arid region fit for nothing but irrigated farming, which is assumed to be a tether on the progress of civilization. We

j have an image of an open region of good soil, forested, in which iron-using j peasant farmers not only produce an unmatched abundance but also ¡ acquire from their ecology a democratic, bold, bright, form of society | which marches forward then to modernity. Let me add just a word about i each of these images.

Irrigation, in the eyes of many miracle theorists, is somehow unpro- ¡ ductive. Jones, Mann, and others make the assertion that more food is produced per worker on rain-watered lands. This is not true. In fact, irrigation was developed to increase food production, whether or not the source of the process was the aspirations of village people themselves or the surplus requirements of a political or religious superstructure. When an irrigated district has reached the point where there is serious land shortage, that is, late in its social and geographic evolution (along one possible line of development), the productivity per person declines. This is obvious. It means, first of all, that farm workers spend more time during the year producing and have less time for nonfarming activities, including village

j cultural life and work on such things as monumental structures. Eventually this situation may lead to the collapse of the farming system, with salinization, and so on, and finally, perhaps, starvation. Contrast this now with nonirrigated agriculture. Normally, there is poorer nutrient status of soil (irrigation brings dissolved nutrients in the water, and alluvial soils tend to have good nutrient status). Normally, there is greater moisture deficit, given the dependence on unpredictable rains. Thus natural fertil­ ity tends to be lower on nonirrigated land, all other things being equal

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(which they often are not). Now it is true that early iron-age farmers, clearing forested land and making new farms, achieved high production on this fresh land, but that phenomenon is transitory, and in any case it did not have much effect in the semi-arid valleys of Greece. Early European farmers tended in fact to settle on alluvial lands and lowland terraces, and quite early they were using irrigation and drainage—because it enhanced labor productivity.

The notion that European agriculture was somehow conducive to independent living in a way contrasted with Asian agriculture is another part of this myth. Early European farmers were not to any great extent, as Mann depicts them, living in isolation from one another, surrounded by forest. In the cases where they did live this way it was, again, a frontier phenomenon, in Asia as well as Europe. Farmers mostly lived in social aggregates, villages, large or small, compact or linear, depending upon many circumstances. There is no reason to doubt that the upland farming communities of Asia were quite similar to those in Europe. We return to this matter later in the chapter when we discuss the myth of the unique European family. For now I will simply categorize as mythic the idea that early European agricultural communities were somehow more individual­ istic, more independent-minded, more progressive than were communities elsewhere.

The most fundamental error made by the nineteenth-century think­ ers and Weber and now mechanically repeated by historians such as Jones, Hall, and Mann, is to believe, or assume, that one type of environment produces a particular type of society and the latter then persists down through history. You simply cannot contrast the very ancient irrigating civilizations of Asia and North Africa with the later nonirrigating farming civilizations of Europe— or indeed of Asia— and then suppose that two contrasting civilizational types have been, thereby, created so as to remain in place down through history. Culture changes. Farmers move from one environment to another. In many places farmers practice both irrigation and nonirrigated agriculture on different soil types when appropriate land is available to them.88 Thus the theory which asserts that arid Asian agricultural civilization produces a stagnant, despotic form of society down through later times, one which will not develop toward modernity, is purely a myth.

Temperate Europe

We have already seen how historians constructed a mythic model of “rainfall-farming” European society, supposing that rainfall brings benefits not associated with irrigation and that Europeans alone, in their hemisphere, practice “rainfall farming.” Historians like Mann, Jones, and

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Hall carry the argument farther along. Europe’s rainfall-based farming, combined with Europe’s supposedly fine and fertile soils, produced an environmental basis for agricultural production unmatched elsewhere. Although these historians give a lot of credit to the supposedly uniquely rational, inventive, European mind, they give much of the credit to Europe’s natural environment.

For example, Michael Mann draws a picture of a steady northwest­ ward movement of European history—what we described in Chapter 1 as an Orient Express model—which he sees as an essential continuance down into the Middle Ages of the northwestward trajectory of that individualistic, creative, bumptious peasant society which, he thinks, emerged in the Iron Age with the uniquely European marriage of farming, iron, and rain-watered land. His model of the evolution of Europe’s society (its “miracle” ) is much more complex than this, but a key part of that model is the inexorable, steady, historically pregnant geographical movement—what he calls a northwestward “drift,” with a permanent northwest “leading edge.” Eschewing philosophical determinism, he nonetheless gives the whole process a strongly Hegelian, teleological flavor.89 One of two main reasons for this northwestward movement is the beckoningly fine environment of northwest Europe. And the main reason why this environment is so fine is its “deeper, wetter, more fertile soils.”90

John Hall, similarly, extols the “northern European clay soils,”91 northwest Europe’s “deep and productive clay soils fed by rainfall” (“There was no need for irrigation” ).92 Eric L. Jones, in The European

| Miracle, makes much the same claim, if slightly qualified. He writes of Europe’s “open-ended productive environment of forest land and rainfall farming,”93 of Europe’s “High, even rainfall and passable summers.”94

j Jones (unlike Mann and Hall) recognizes the fact that Asian land j supports a higher farming population, with the implication that the land i is more productive, but he merely notes that Europe’s productive land j comes in smaller, separated regions, and then he gives us one of the myths ! of Oriental despotism:

j The very impracticability of hydraulic agriculture freed a fraction of j European energies for other purposes. The rainfall farmers of Europe might

be fewer in number than the farmers of China and India, but the former spent less time on all aspects of farmwork than the latter spent on water control work.95

The implication, of course, is that European peasant farmers didn’t have to spend much time at farm work in order to satisfy their needs and their quota of surplus, whereas Asians worked much harder for the same product. This is plainly absurd unless we abandon historical method and

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try to compare Asian peasants under modern conditions of extreme land shortage with ancient European frontier conditions or modern European capitalist farmers. Stated differently, this makes no sense in terms of actual agricultural technique— irrigation is intended to increase produc­ tivity per worker, and usually does so— and in terms of any model of the historical European peasant as poor, oppressed, and overburdened.

The uwet soils” of which these historians speak are usually excessively wet: acidic podzols and gleys that are difficult to work and infertile until heavily manured. The “high, even rainfall and passable summers” are in fact a climate so wet that solar energy is often severely limited, grain crops sometimes cannot do well (recall how important was the post-1492 introduction of the potato), and soils do not dry out until late in spring, if at all. I do not want to caricature the situation. It is merely the case that northwest European soils, across their entire range , of variability, are not superior to the soils of many other regions. In ecological terms, the lands of warmer, drier regions that have either good rainfall regimes or possibilities for irrigation or drainage tend to be rather higher in productivity. My point is more limited. There is nothing about Europe’s agricultural environment that explains the so-called miracle, or that might lead one to believe (as the authors I have cited believe) that European history throughout its course has been favored over Asian history by the European agricultural environment.

Europe’s supposed environmental superiority is by no means limited to farming. I will close our discussion of environmentalism by briefly commenting on four other comparative judgments which are routinely made by present historians of the European “miracle.”

First is the classical “capes and bays” argument, familiar to most European and Anglo-American schoolchildren. Supposedly, Europe’s configuration of peninsulas and bays, and Europe’s possession of navigable rivers, gave this continent a natural basis for communication, trade, and accessibility denied to other continents. This, then, is supposed to have had a lot to do with the rise of markets and eventually capitalism in Europe.96 Part of the argument, like the emperor’s clothes, is transparently false when looked at directly. For instance, accessibility by sea along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and much of the South China Sea was considerably easier in the Middle Ages than it was in Atlantic Europe. (If monsoonal wind patterns posed a problem in the Indian Ocean, storms posed a greater problem in the North Atlantic.) Trading cities dotted the Indian coast, and trading vessels plied up and down this coast, and on to Indonesia and Arabia, carrying bulk commodities like rice and iron as well as high-value goods, long before Italian galleys inaugurated a regular commodity trade between the Mediterranean and the northwest

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Atlantic. I do not belittle the great seamanship of the Atlantic fishermen, the Iceland traders, and the Hanseatic League when I note, simply, that other regions were using the sea as effectively as the Europeans were at comparable times.

As to rivers, Europe’s endowment of navigable rivers is impressive but not unique. It is not better than India’s and China’s. Interisland navigation in insular Southeast Asia was much easier than was navigation up and down the Rhine, say, or the Danube. Again it is a matter simply of reducing comparisons to reality. The “capes and bays” errors are normally followed by another error: the idea that Europe had, in early times, an advantage over civilizations that had to transport commodities overland. Many of the “miracle” historians repeat the theory that overland transport necessarily was much more costly than water transport. This is in fact a multiplicity of comparisons. When Mann and others quote the old formulas about draft animals consuming their weight in fodder over a limited distance (some say this takes place within 100-150 km), they ignore the fact that most draft animals graze or browse along the way: hence the great Inner-Asian Silk Road and the Sudanic caravans are easily comprehensible.97 Canals in China were much more effective than circuitous coastal shipping routes in Europe. And water transport— particularly upwind and upriver— may not have had advantages over land transport 1,000 or so years ago.

Eric L. Jones, in The European Miracle, makes the large claim that Asia suffered so much more than Europe from natural disasters of all sorts that Asian development was strongly inhibited by this presumed fact.98 He carries the argument to the point of claiming that the risk of natural disaster was so high as to frighten ordinary people into unusual demographic behavior, to close off trade possibilities, and more. Setting

j aside the fact that we have very little historical data on this subject, the j main error is a simple matter of scale. Jones’s “Europe” is really West and I Central Europe. This region is roughly the size of the Indian subcontinent I and perhaps one-fourth the size of the settled portion of Asia. So it might | well have one-fourth as many natural disasters, ceteris paribus. It is true I that floods are more serious in regions where people farm river valleys, but

populations make adjustments which keep this one risk small enough so that it does not affect long-term development, and I suspect that winter-weather dangers in rural Europe were as great as flood risk in Asia, on a per capita basis. Hurricanes are no worse than the worst North Atlantic winter storms. The theory as a whole is unsupported by evidence and empty of credibility as an argument for the European “miracle.”

The miracle historians point repeatedly to Europe’s environmental differentiation, claiming that this leads to a unique potential for

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interregional trade and thus, again, for capitalism ." One need merely note that Europe does not possess an unusually large range of environments, and natural products, by comparison with other regions of comparable size. China, for instance, has roughly the same range of midlatitude environments plus a tropical south coast.

The last environmentalistic fable to be discussed here is the claim that Europe’s topographic differentiation into many small “core regions,” separated by mountains and forests, somehow led to a number of supposedly unique features of ancient and medieval European society, including even the development of a unique trading system and a unique system of moderate-sized states and the many benefits supposedly deriving therefrom. Since this issue ties in with the parts of the “miracle” literature that concern Europe’s supposed uniqueness in economic and political development, I will postpone discussing the geography of the matter until later in this chapter. Suffice it to say now that this idea of “cores” is partly a myth, and insofar as it is valid the same sorts of “cores” can be found in other continents.

Rationality We turn now to the theories about Europe’s historical superiority or priority— Europe’s “miracle”— which ground themselves, not in biology, not in environment, but in culture. First I will deal with theories which start from a conception of the superior “rationality” of Europeans. “Rationality” in such theories embraces many psychological attributes, always including inventiveness and innovativeness (or progressiveness), usually a capacity for abstract thought, and often a certain ability to make moral or ethical judgments. The issue is not whether such things are or are not fundamental causes in history; the issue is whether Europeans had more rationality, or higher rationality, than every other human commu­ nity, and whether this was the principal reason, or at any rate one of the principal reasons, for the unique rise of Europe. The plain assertion that Europeans are smarter than everyone else seems to have a certain antique or Victorian ring to it, but this is deceptive: theories about “Western rationality” and the like are just as important today as they were for prior generations of scholars. Sometimes they are difficult to identify as rationality theories because they display other plumage. An explanation may focus on, say, technology, arguing that European technological innovations produced various forward movements in European history; looked at closely, however, the technological explanation usually dissolves into a theory about the inventiveness of Europeans, that is, their rationality. By the same token, an explanation may start with the state, or free markets, or the family, but usually (not always) it derives such

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structures from the more basic trait, rationality. Sometimes it works the other way around. Classical racist theories were rationality theories: to be white is to be more intelligent. Some (not all) Marxist theories are rationality theories: the defeat of feudalism released creative energies which then led to technological innovation, etc. Another complication is that superior rationality may be posited just for one crucial period and place, a magic key that started the whole process: Periclean Athens, Gutenberg’s workshop, etc. I will try to sort these matters out by dealing first with the category “rationality theories” as such, then turning to other sorts of theories, technological and institutional, some of which are also rooted in the idea of European rationality.

The Rationality Doctrine

At the beginning of this century most European scholars accepted the basic proposition that Europeans are more rational than non-Europeans. This was explained by a great variety of competing theories, biological racism being perhaps the most prominent, but I suspect that most Europeans accepted the proposition as indisputably correct regardless of the explanation. It was simply obvious that European countries had attained a higher level of wealth and civilization than other countries and

| had done so on their own, mainly through invention, innovation, and creativity. Europeans also now controlled the entire world and this, too, had to reflect some intellectual and probably also moral superiority. This was the heyday of the doctrine of classical diffusionism (discussed in Chapter 1), and few people doubted the doctrine’s basic propositions: Europe develops; non-Europe does not develop or does so more slowly; Europe’s development is based ultimately in some intellectual or spiritual principle; the normal and natural way for non-Europe to modernize and progress is by receiving the diffusion of rational European ideas, brought by European colonial administrators, settlers, planters, missionaries, and purveyors of commodities.

By this time most European thinkers had come to accept the doctrine of “the psychic unity of mankind,” at least to the extent of agreeing that all of humanity shares a common ability to progress toward modernity. This doctrine crystallized into a theory, widely though not universally accepted in the early part of this century, that can be called the dualistic-developmental conception of human rationality. The elementary dualism was a distinction between the mentality of child and that of adult. The human mind has developed from a prehistoric condition which was mental childhood. European history is either to be explained as the fruit of human mental development or has been

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intimately accompanied by such mental development, in a process that was fundamentally the same as the psychological development from childhood to adulthood. Europeans became more rational as history progressed, just as children acquire rationality in the course of ontogenetic development. Ancient people had been not merely less intelligent but also much more governed by emotions and passions than by intellect, just as is the case with modern children. With some modification, the same was thought to be the case for modern European women, who were less intelligent and more governed by emotion than men, that is, they were less rational than men. But women, too, would experience mental development, and would eventually be rational enough to vote, hold public office, etc.

Non-Europeans, within the same theory, were seen as psychically undeveloped, as more or less childlike. But, given the psychic unity of mankind, non-Europeans could of course be brought to adulthood, to rationality, to modernity, through a set of learning experiences, mainly colonial. (The phrase “colonial tutelage” was a signature of the doctrine, and this conception is encountered in most history and geography textbooks of the time.) It was not simply a case of “the natives are like children.” The idea of non-European nonrationality was a definite, putatively scientific principle, widely accepted: non-Europeans think somewhat like children, and will be led toward adulthood by Europeans. Non-Europeans were of course graded. “Savages” were mental children without qualification. Problematic peoples, like the Indians, Ottomans, and Chinese, were thought to be childlike in some respects and not in others. Indeed they were governed by emotion and passion much more than Europeans. (Colonial revolts were obviously irrational— were outbursts of childlike emotion.) As far as scientific and abstract philosophical thinking was concerned, the people of these cultures were clearly not up to full adult standards, but in some respects, notably in arts and crafts, they were perhaps gifted adolescents.

So we have a model which has, as its centerpiece, the Rational Modern Adult European Man. History is his progression to mental adulthood. He is contrasted with ancient European man; with modem European children; with modem European women; with modern non-Europeans. The contrast was often extended, also, to psychotics; in some schools of they thought were explicitly seen as having a developmental^ arrested mentality and this was indeed used as a therapeutic principle.100 What needs to be emphasized is the fact that this was considered to be a scientific theory. Thus it was valid to exchange principles across these various dimensions of contrast. For our purposes, the most important of these principles was the attribution of mental

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development to European history and the attribution of mental nondevelopment to non-Europe, past and present; hence Europeans had naturally acquired a unique rationality.

It would be wrong to reduce to caricature the scholarly theories of a few generations back, and the model I have just described looks, on the face of it, like a caricature. Most scholars did not literally believe, say, that the American Indian was a mental child, or that ontogenetic mental development exactly recapitulates the mental development of our species. But the model was a dominant force in European thought in certain precise ways. The equation of child, ancient, and non-European was explicitly accepted in nonscholarly discourse (newspapers, Tarzan novels, and so on). American educational policy toward Indians and other colonials was explicitly grounded in this model, even if it was a smoothed-down version of it. A very large number of writings in history, geography, and all of social science made use of one or another part of the model. And several very widely accepted theories were really forms of the same model. Three examples will be helpful.

| Most anthropologists accepted the idea that there are two distinct j mental types, one being the so-called “primitive mind,” the mind of tribal : peoples just about everywhere (some added: peasants everywhere). The | “primitive mind” was very explicitly described— the most famous descrip- | tion is found in Levy-BruhPs influential book, How Natives Think— as ! being incapable of higher theoretical and abstract ideas, as being emotion ; driven, and so on.101 Some anthropologists opposed this notion (Boas, : Radin, and Mead perhaps most notably102); most anthropologists accepted j it with some qualifications; some accepted it literally. Levy-Bruhl’s rather i stark form of the theory had great influence on psychologists and all of i social science. Closely connected to this theory was the notion that there : are “primitive languages,” languages incapable of expressing higher theo­

retical and abstract thought. This old notion (which had been used in one ! form by William von Humboldt) was joined to the proposition that people

cannot think beyond the limitations of their natural language, and so a ; primitive language entails a primitive mind.103 Beyond that, the old ! philological theory about the innate superiority of Indo-European lan- , guages still had many adherents, and this theory extended the notion of j primitive language to most of the non-European languages of the world. ; The third example is a broad family of theories in psychology that made

use of the idea that mental development in the individual is homologous to mental development in the species, and that modern primitive peoples have the mentality of children and ancients, sometimes extending the concept to the putative psychological makeup (and limitations) of non- European peoples in general. In the twentieth century this theory received

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its most influential expression in the psychoanalytic viewpoint of Carl Jung and his followers. Jung swept broadly across non-Western cultures (Arabs, Indians, Africans, African-Americans, and others) declaring, basically, that only modern European man has fully developed an individ­ ual consciousness, an ego, an ability to think, even an ability to conceive of himself as an individual separate from the external world. Only European man is rational.104

The doctrine went through some important changes as it became absorbed into the “modernization” paradigm, the body of ideas which, as we have seen, came to dominate European social thought in the 1950s and still does so to some extent today. “Colonial tutelage” gave way to “diffusion of modernizing innovations.” Non-Europeans no longer were “natives,” and no longer were described as “childlike.” In place of the notions of “primitive mind” and “primitive language” came the notion of traditional mentality. Non-Europeans are “traditional” in two senses: they lack “modem cognitive abilities,” that is, the ability to think theoretically and scientifically, and they lack “modem attitudes” of the sort that push a person to achieve higher things, to reject the old, and so on.

This appears still to be the primitive mind, but there is an important difference. “T rad ition al minds” a te simpVy w aiting to t>e aw akened, to t>e modernized. The larger picture was one of a vast landscape of traditional societies, containing people with traditional mentalities, and moderniza­ tion would set the drama into motion. Mentalities would change. Social structure would change. New ideas and technology would diffuse into the modernizing societies from the already-modernized European societies, and so on. Recall that the modernization doctrine is not only a concept of the spatial spread of European ideas, attitudes, and the like, in the present-day postcolonial world. It is also a historical concept: moderniza­ tion as history. “Traditional society” and “traditional mentality” cam e to be used to describe early Europe, the rise of Europe was now seen as a modernization process, and the start of that process was a much debated matter of deciding when Europe began its “takeoff”— its rise from the level of traditionalism and toward m odernity: History is appealed to for the basic causal principle: Europe modernized, and now non-Europe will follow— though not slavishly— in its path. We will come back to this point in a moment. First I want to comment on the main causal principles that are thought to lead in the other direction. I will show that schools have arisen in psychology, sociology, and other disciplines that claim to provide scientific demonstrations as to what, exactly, is the nature of the “tradi­ tional mind,” and the output from these scholars tends, then, to seep back into history, where it finds its way into the newer writings about the European miracle.

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In psychology, the important figure is Jean Piaget. His basic theory of mental development postulated an invariant series of “stages” of develop­ ment through which all children must progress. Piaget was influenced by Levy-Bruhl and the primitive mind doctrine, and as late as 1971 he thought that

it is quite possible, and this is the impression we have from known ethnographical work, th a t in many societies, adult th ought does n o t go beyond the level of “co n cre te ” operations, and therefore does n o t reach th at of propositional operations w hich develop betw een th e ages of twelve and fifteen in our m ilieus.105

“Propositional operations” means, roughly, logic. “Concrete” is childish prelogical thought, unable to deal with the abstract and the theoretical. Now Piaget was a great psychologist, but he did not have, or claim to have, direct knowledge of non-European psychology. He was arguing from the traditional dualistic-developmental model that equates the child and the primitive. (And he was about 30 years out of date as to ethnography.) But many of his disciples, seeking to connect their theory with the modernization doctrine, took up the theme and began to carry

I out research to find out whether non-Western people (particularly i Africans) do, indeed, have inferior cognitive abilities. It is no ; oversimplification to say that virtually all of these studies made the same | mistake and came up with the same, predictable conclusions. They used i the tests of cognitive ability that Piaget had used with European children ■ and, scarcely modifying them, administered these tests to non-European • children and adults and found, predictably, that these people do not have

full adult cognitive abilities. By now the error has become well known, and most present-day Piagetian psychologists do not seem to assert that non-Europeans are cognitively childlike. Along with the Piagetian

, studies of the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared, in this era, many studies carried out by psychologists from other schools of thought (like the Heinz

! Werner school) which took the old primitive-mind doctrine as fact,106 ; along with studies carried out by white South African psychologists j comparing white and black subjects, other Europeans studying other ; African populations, and a few Israeli psychologists comparing the I cognitive abilities of Arabs and Jews. With few exceptions, the European j psychologists found the non-European subjects to be deficient in | cognitive ability, and so to be “traditional.”107 In nearly all of these

studies the testing was such that the “natives” didn’t really stand a chance because the tests were European, administered by Europeans or their

| native assistants, in Europeanized settings. The error became so well

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known that the entire field of “cross-cultural psychology” gained a bad name— as an apologia for ethnocentrism— until, in the 1980s, it changed direction. The point is that while most cross-cultural psychologists today, apparently, deny that non-Europeans are less rational than Europeans, they established a body of publications that are still used by others to make the opposite point.

The rationality doctrine was perhaps most influential in those parts of sociology and economics that were closest to the modernization doctrine, particularly among academics who were involved in making and implementing the policies being put into place in the 1950s and 1960s to develop the underdeveloped countries. As we saw in Chapter 1, this sphere of ideas was crucial to the politics of modernization for at least three reasons: First and most basic was the need to validate diffusionism. Second, development of the sort that involved only the spread of new ideas and new techniques was much cheaper, in principle, than development involving massive flows of capital, industrial development, and the like. And third, along the same lines, development at the level of ideas, of research, extension, education, and so on, was not threatening; it would not produce the dangers of revolution and counterrevolution implicit in efforts to change the relation of power groups, to effectuate land reform, and the like. For these reasons, scholars were encouraged, indeed were given lavish grants and were well paid, to produce analyses of modernization that would lead to workable policies for bringing about development mainly through an influence at the level of ideas.

Everett Rogers, a rural sociologist; David McClelland, a social psychologist; and Everett Hagen, an economist, provided highly influential contributions that I will describe briefly and with some caricature. Rogers was one of the leaders in a movement to sort out peasant mentalities into those that are prodevelopment (“cosmopolitan”) and those that are noninnovative and “laggard.” The crucial notion was the idea of the diffusion of rationality into rural non-European communities. The key to development (with some qualification) was the transmittal of new ideas to innovative “adopters.” The fact that most of the ideas were not, themselves, workable (thus were not rational), and that adoption of them would have required of peasants not more knowledge, but more power and landownership, was ignored. McClelland claimed that non-Western peoples in general have not modernized because they lack the proper “need-achievement” motivation. They will modernize when and if they acquire this need to achieve, which had been of crucial importance in earlier European development, from ancient Greece on up. Hagen produced an elaborate theory, based in no evidence whatever, that non-Western peoples, and particularly peasants, have a

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traditional mentality that resists change of all sorts. The model starts with a mythic peasant unconscious mind that is uncreative, submissive to paternal authority (and therefore oppressive of innovative children), and unwilling to change. All three of these scholars, and dozens of their acolytes, produced a general model of peasant mentality as defective in both cognitive and attitudinal (affective) characteristics, but, of course, not hopelessly so.108 One of many recent outgrowths of this doctrine is Stephen Marglin’s theory of the Western mental “episteme,” a marriage of the old “primitive mind” idea and the newer ideas about traditionalism, which argues, in essence, that the Western mind is, and historically has been, scientific, rational, and intellectually hardheaded— the “epis­ teme”— while the non-Western mind is traditionally given to technique and art (“techne”) but not to science. Marglin’s new twist on this old doctrine is to say that some of the non-Western “techne” should be incorporated in development along with the Western “episteme” because “techne,” less intellectual but more feeling, is less likely to destroy the natural environment and causes less psychic damage to non-Westem people, a distinction rather like the older duality between scientific thought and emotion-laden concrete thought.109 Marglin’s ideas provide an example of much theorizing in the economic development world (like Hagen, he is a development economist) about non-Western nonrational­ ity.

It would take us far afield to examine the parallel arguments in all the other fields of social thought. The following should suffice: In geography, the diffusion-of-innovative-ideas approach has been im­ portant since the 1960s and remains so today. The same old assumptions about peasant and non-Western traditionalism are still dominant. Some geographers claim even that non-Europeans are mentally not capable of using all available means of coping with natural hazards like drought and hurricane. One geographer, Robert Sack, has come up with a classically Eurocentric theory about spatial cognition: most non-Western people (primitives and most peasants) cannot think in spatial terms the way modern Western adults can. Among the authorities he uses— the argument is from authority, not evidence— are Levy-Bruhl and Piaget.110 In the field of education in the United States the newer forms of the dualistic-developmental theory of (Western) rationality are highly influential in many areas, including testing.111 In the field of philosophy, there is a strong relationship between the stream of ideas about rationality, discussed above, and the resurgence of mind-body dualism, such as one finds in the Cartesian and Kantian traditions and particularly in the modern neo-Kantians.112

I do not suggest that the doctrine of non-Western nonrationality is

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fully hegemonic in modem scholarship, or that the above formulations have not been challenged. In general, however, the doctrine remains somewhat dominant in all fields of thought except, perhaps, anthropology and economics. Anthropology in recent decades has, with some lapses, maintained quite firmly that primitive minds are not primitive.113 And some schools of economics need the principle of universal economic rationality so badly, as axioms for their theories, that they are willing to concede rationality to everyone.

Rationality and the European Miracle

The idea of European rationality is often called “Weberian,” because Max Weber made important use of the idea in various explanations for European social evolution and various negative judgments about the lesser rationality of other societies. The rationality doctrine was, however, widely held in early twentieth-century Europe when Weber’s important writings on this subject were published. But he codified the traditional doctrine and added something of his own to it, so the doctrine can indeed be called Weberian from the present-day perspective. It is also Weberian in another and perhaps more important sense: Weber placed European social evolution in a framework emphasizing the modernization process, and contrasting Europe’s modernization with the “traditionalism,” as he sometimes called it, of Asian civilizations. When the modernization paradigm locked into place among scholars just after World War II, Max Weber was the most obvious, and most logical, source of basic sociological doctrine for the paradigm. From that time on, scholars who wrote about the rise of Europe and chose to emphasize the individual trait of rationality, or social-level traits and institutions which Weber had treated as primary (and, in the main, as consequences of European rationality), were Weberians to one degree or another (even if they rejected some parts of Weber’s model). The importance of Weber for our discussion of present-day theories about the “European miracle,” is the fact that the most influential, probably dominant, school of thought concerning the “miracle” today is more or less Weberian. Weber’s views about rationality therefore require at least brief discussion.

Weber analyzed Western capitalist society of the late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century epoch in meticulous detail and with great insight, although there were important limits to his insight. He held to the typical conceit of his time and place and class in thinking that contemporary European capitalism is the culmination of a process of social evolution that was, at root, an intellectual progression, an ascent of human “rationality,” meaning intellect and ethics, from ancient to modern

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society. (He had doubts about the likelihood of further ascent in the future.) A t each stage of that progression people invented new social forms, such as higher forms of the state, the legal system, the bureaucracy, the economy, the city, and so forth, but these forms were, basically, products of evolving rationality rather than primary causes of progress in their own right. But the march toward ever more rational society took place in Europe, among Europeans. Outside of the European tunnel of time, all societies were in varying degrees traditional and in varying degrees irrational.

Weber said rather little about the question of why Europeans came to display this rationality in the first place, that is, as a basal cause. He invoked several factors, one of which, as we noted previously, was race and another, the natural environment. Others seem to lie deep within culture. Yet Weber rarely discussed causality at this basal level, that is, attempting to explain why Europeans have unique rationality, and have had it since a long time before the Protestant Reformation and modernity.114 One reason seems to lie in his view of social causality, with ideas and values, and the evolution of ideas and values, treated as prime causes of social processes, social structures, and social change. Given this conception, he would not be expected to look for nonideologicaHevel causes for ideas and values. Doubtless there were other reasons.

Whatever Weber considered to have been the basic cause of the differences between rational, progressive European society and irrational, traditional Asian society (Africa and America were scarcely noticed), he delineated these supposed differences very carefully. The most crucial arguments are found in his General Economic History and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The development of rationality among Europeans— however that had happened— led to a special sort of “economic ethic,” a body of values, aspirations, and logical thought processes that emerged primarily in connection with the Reformation (and particularly Puritanism) but which, more fundamentally, produced capitalism. The important point here is that basal rationality produced both the “economic ethic” of capitalism and the Protestant movement: Weber is not (as some think) explaining capitalism and modernity in terms narrowly of religion. He does invoke religion to explain many aspects of the supposed traditionalism of Asians, but here too a primordial irrationality is seen as underlying religion. (He writes, for instance, of the “magical traditionalism” of Indians and Chinese.115)

The superior rationality of Europeans produces other major historical differences between Europe and non-Europe. Europeans are basically freedom loving, not ground under by Oriental despotism; this devolves into a form of city that is much freer than the Asian city, the

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latter being conceived by Weber as (in essence) merely a physical entity wholly controlled by the overarching empire, and the former as a truly new form of society, emerging in the Middle Ages and inaugurating modernity.116 (As we discuss in Chapter 3, Asian cities were not as Weber described them. Some were free city-states, others were virtually free under a loose imperial umbrella. European cities, on the other hand, were much less independent than Weber thought.) Landholding systems were also different because of differences in rationality: only in Europe, says Weber (here putting forward a purely traditional European view) does the concept of private property truly emerge. The feudal estate is almost genuinely private property. The Asian estate is seen as merely a temporary assignment of land as a source of revenue for dignitaries, a form of salary given for service and ordinarily returned to the state. But European feudal estates were also, legally and actually, granted on service tenure, and in both continents these sorts of estates tended in general to become hereditary and thus eventually private property (see Chapter 3). Of course, Weber talks about other supposed differences between Europe and non-Europe, but the examples given here will suffice to show his overall approach.

Weber did not originate most of these arguments, although he codified them and developed them in a brilliant way. Yet Weber is given credit overall, and “Weberianism” is now the most important form of theory in explaining the European “miracle.” The basic form can be summarized very simply. Rationality is the causal root. The effect of differential rationality is, in Europe, permanent progress, modernization, and capitalism. In non-Europe it is stagnation, traditionalism, and various irrational cultural attributes such as superstition. The model here is simple diffusionism: rationality and therefore modernization are permanent in Europe. Non-Europe does not modernize except by the diffusion of these traits from Europe.

The doctrine of “Western rationality” is widely used today in explanations for Europe’s unique rise, its “miracle.” No longer is the superior rationality of Europeans attributed, even implicitly, to racial superiority, but how the historians manage to assert the one without the other is not an easy question to answer. Generally, causality is consigned to the impenetrable mists of ancient history, with perhaps an occasional speculation about ancient free-living European peasants or the evils of Oriental despotism, or with a ritual citation of Max Weber. For many historians, I suspect, the idea of European rationality is simply axiomatic. Europeans, for whatever reason, are just built that way.

Eric L. Jones dwells very heavily on rationality as an explanation for

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Europe’s historical superiority in The European Miracle. His claim is that there is a fundamental lack of rationality among Asians and Africans. T he assertions are laid on so thickly, and with so little attempt to account for this putative irrationality, that it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Jones, perhaps alone among modem “miracle” historians, holds some deep prejudices. Africans are dismissed, in a brief discussion, as having had no significance in history. They are characterized in a way that suggests, not very subtly, that they are closer to the beasts than are other humans.

In A frica m an adapted himself to nature. T h e h un ter felt part of the ecosystem, n o t outside it looking in with wonder, and definitely n o t above it and superior. A fter all, there were large carnivores who sought m an as a prey. T h e most evocative symbol of this ecological oneness may be the honey guides . . . birds com m ensal with m an. T h ey fly, ch atterin g loudly, ahead of bands of hunters, leading th em . . . to the tree hives of wild bees and feeding on the wax after the m en have broken open the hives. ( 1 5 4 ) 117

This is a Tarzan image. Most Africans were farmers, not hunters (we discussed this previously). The scavenging house sparrow is also commensal with humans in the suburbs of London, but Jones speaks of “commensalism” only for Africans. (Ethology, as we will see, is evoked somewhat similarly for Asians.118)

T h ere was scan t in centive or pressure for developm ent or invention. . . . A n y pressure . . . was apparently offset by th e use of slaves instead of the im provem ent of m e th o d s .. . . Otherwise wealth was spent on luxury items. . . . [There was] pervasive insecurity as a result of con flict and slave-raiding. (155-156)

Africans thus were noninventive, were aggressive, were lovers of luxury, were slavers and slaves. And also hunters close to the beasts they hunted. So: it “is not clear what indigenous developments were possible” (156).

Asians do not think logically. There is “relative absence of the empirical enquiry and criticism of the Graeco-Judeo-Christian tradition” (161), and “lack of a crisp tradition of logical debate,” which may explain the “failure” of Asian science” (162). “The notion of a consensus in interpreting nature may have seemed absurd” (162)— that is, Asians may not even have had an ability to conceptualize scientific verification, to distinguish empirical truth from falsity. They were uncreative: “Asian institutions suppressed creativity or diverted it into producing voluptuous luxuries” (231).

Asians have attitudes and values that inhibit progress. “Oriental

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philosophies [emphasize] emotions, values and cosmologies,” at the expense of empirical thought (161). Orientals are lazy (163). They (like Africans) have a “love of luxury” (170), and they love to buy things like “kingfisher feathers . . . precious stones . . . drugs no modern pharma­ copeia would own” (164). They have a “servile spirit,” their armies lack “tough” petty officers (167). They are, as a rule, introverted, inward looking; they are “increasingly immobile societies undergoing ‘curious experiences/ ” given to self-imposed “isolation” (170), lacking an urge to explore (168, 177, 203, 231). They are given to senseless warfare (169, 188, 197), do not have a written legal system (164, 188, 197), and do not have a concept of political boundary (167, 194). There is much thievery and piracy (189, 199, 209, 229-30).

In most judgments of this type (of which I have given only a sample), Jones is referring to Asians in general and through all times in their history.119 Some judgments are more specific. Islamic society was for a time somewhat innovative, borrowing technology from other societies, and preserving ancient Greek sciences. (This is a standard Eurocentric belief: Arabs preserved Greek science during the Dark Ages and then handed it back to Europe for further development, something like an intellectual left-luggage office.) The Ottoman Empire (the single real example of Islamic culture discussed by Jones, with the imputation that it stands as symbol for Islam as a whole and at all times) stamped out original thought. It produced unreason, backwardness, and retrogression, a “mist of obscurantist thought” (183). Ottomans didn’t even know “the elementary facts of geography” (184) and couldn’t even make decent maps (179). (Jones himself doesn’t know much about geography and maps.) Rulers were often “degenerates,” “drunkards,” “mental defec­ tives,” “lechers,” ruling with despotism and terror (186-187), their “philosophy” being theft and despoilment, against which there was “no legal shield” (187-189).

Indian society was socially and psychologically “frozen” (192), with values that were deleterious to economic progress. Religion was invoked to sanction all acts, but the advice of religious counsellors was “malicious or random” (195). The Mughal rulers were, like the Ottomans, degenerates, running society for their own benefit, given to “voluptuous selfishness,” harems, jewels, menageries, intrigues, treason (196). The state was purely predatory. Technology was “almost stagnant,” not even copying from abroad (199). “No written legal code existed,” says Jones in a quite bizarre misstatement (197).

China was technologically inventive and innovative until, the early Middle Ages, when progress stopped. There was thereafter a “retreat” (203); some skills were even forgotten. Chinese became “inward-looking”

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(203, 216, 220). China “backed away” from technology, from trade, from exploration. Technological development stopped even in agriculture, and only the cultivation of new land, with irrational cutting of irreplaceable forests, and the fortunate, timely, arrival of New World crops such as maize and sweet potato, saved the Chinese temporarily from disaster, although cutting down these forests was “one of mankind’s greatest acts of ecological stupidity,” stupidity which led to “soil erosion, gullying, silting and floods” (213). (Apparently the deforestation of Europe and North American was not “stupid.”) Peasants were given to “envy and suspicion” (206), were stupid as farmers (212-217), and were stupid also in preferring “maximal reproduction” over “affluence” (218). The state was despotic, a “revenue-pump” for the rulers, providing no services (206). There was (again) a love of luxury, an attitude of “empty cultural superiority” (205), a corrupt, venal, parasitic ruling class. Chinese had “anti-social customs” (7) and were diseased.

Ethology, the science of comparative animal behavior, is invoked repeatedly by Jones in his characterization of Asians and Africans. Oriental courts were given to displays of “the dominance relationship” (109, 209). Multiple wives had “ethological significance,” as also, perhaps, did the “amassing” of slaves for “display purposes.” “Great attention was paid to submission symbols, kneeling, prostration, the kotow” (209). In India, a “similar calculus . . . underlay human demographic behavior and veneration of the cow” (19). Recall the “commensalism” in Africa.

These beliefs about the intellectual and moral inferiority of non-Europeans are old colonial-era prejudices, which Jones merely recites. The fact that The European Miracle is taken seriously by some historians is partly, I think, a reflection of the degree to which these old prejudices still lurk within our scholarship as implicit beliefs.

Many other historians of the “miracle” try to insert European rationality at or near the base of their explanatory theories. Michael Mann can be taken as a typical representative of the genre. We have already discussed his contrived little theory about the marvelous Iron Age Indo-Europeans of the northern forests, uniquely individualistic, aggres­ sive, freedom loving (all notions from nineteenth-century and earlier scholarship, none grounded in solid evidence for Europe or, compara­ tively, for non-Europe). Mann moves smoothly to ancient Greece, which he sees as the product of this earlier Indo-European root rationalism. The Greeks invented most things rational, from science to democracy to ethics (a respect for humanity). Other Mediterranean peoples contributed rather little by comparison with the rational Indo-Europeans who swept down from the north. (Even the Roman influence, which subjugated the

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European peasant, is seen as vaguely “un-European.”120) History then moves northwestward as northern Europeans clear the forest and move what Mann calls the “leading edge” of European society forward toward what seems to be its foreordained goal, Britain.121 Early in the Middle Ages, around A.D. 800, a newer stage of rationality emerges, combining the old culture and the new Christianity. Europeans now demonstrate their “rational restlessness” and their unique inventiveness, producing a revolutionary agricultural system and much more. The explanation is the ancient rationality, the newer Christian rationality, and the marvelous European environment.122 This, for Mann, is the kernel of the European miracle. The only part of this construct that requires further comment is the theory of a medieval technological revolution; this we discuss in the following section.

Lynn White, Jr., contributed a very influential form of the rationality doctrine with his theory about the unique technological inventiveness of medieval Europeans, a theory we discuss in the next section. John Hall contributes another version, much like Mann’s except for its emphasis on the invention of rational politics by Europeans and its tendency to follow Eric L. Jones in various negative judgments about Asian history. Space does not permit me to review the way some other present-day historians invoke, and use, the theory of Western rationality as grounding for their theories about the European miracle. I should simply note that some of them are Marxists and near-Marxists. Perry Anderson, for instance, argues from ancient Greek rationality to European medieval progress. So does M. I. Finley. Robert Brenner contributes a very different Marxist rationality theory: there was no rationality until, quite suddenly, capitalism appeared among the English yeoman farmers, who promptly became amazingly inventive and started a technological revolution that has not yet ended.123

Technology

Among all of the narrow-minded ways of looking at history, technological determinism is the one most congenial to Eurocentric tunnel vision. It has the appearance, the illusion, of cold-blooded scientific fact. “X was invented here, on this date, and produced these effects.” In talking about matters of technology, one can deny that ethnocentrism enters the picture: “this is hard fact, indisputable.” And the significance of technology seems equally indisputable: a new tool does produce more food, a new weapon more casualties, whereas a new social form might have historical significance; then again, it might not. But technological determinism gets its greatest strength from the terror known as

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“telescoping history.” When we travel, mentally, back to medieval Europe, we pass backward through the eras in which Europeans clearly were technologically superior to everyone else, and so we tend to expect that superiority to have been the state of things at all prior times. But Europe advanced technologically beyond Asia and Africa mainly after the beginning of the industrial revolution. Europe did not even begin to forge ahead of other civilizations in technology or science until the seventeenth century or even later. By telescoping history we imbue the Middle Ages with the marvelous technological attributes of modern Europe. It is then but a small step to the conclusion that, since technology is so obviously a powerful cause in history, and since Europe has always been so technological, here is the root of the European miracle.

But tools do not invent themselves or reproduce themselves. If you invoke technological determinism, you must not only show that the technology appeared and had such-and-such effects, you must also explain why it was invented, and by whom. In nearly all (I think) technologically deterministic arguments made as part of some explana­ tion for Europe’s historical progress, technological arguments end up being arguments about the inventors, not the inventions. They end up in some Weberian claim that Europeans are more inventive, innovative, “rational,” than non-Europeans. Technological determinism then differs from other kinds of tunnel-historical theories mainly in its claim that rational Europeans moved their society forward by inventing new technology, rather than doing so by inventing new political systems, new forms of social organization, new religions, or whatever.

Claims are made by Eurocentric historians that technology was a prime mover in all epochs from the post-Neolithic on down. Nowadays it would be hard to ignore the evidence that in ancient times the greatest technological innovations, in agriculture, transportation, and other spheres, entered Europe from the south and east, so technological arguments tend to begin with the Middle Ages. There are, however, exceptions. Michael Mann, as we noted previously, has revived the old notion that the invention of iron somehow revolutionized European peasant society in a way it did not do elsewhere, that it produced a wondrously inventive, acquisitive (etc.) type of society, rooted in iron-plowing Indo-European-speaking peasants, and he claims, in parallel, that Oriental despotisms of the ancient Middle East held back technological inventiveness, where peasants were supposedly held in tight control by the political system that irrigation technology necessi­ tated. But this theory is contradicted by a great deal of evidence. So much is known about technological progress in the Middle East during this period (from the late Neolithic to the “Iron Age” and beyond) that the

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notion of noninventiveness is unreasonable. But iron working was not invented in Europe. Probably it came from the Middle East, but there are hints from farther afield (including West Africa). Plows were used in Middle Eastern agriculture, irrigated and nonirrigated, as well as in European agriculture. Plows may have been used earlier in China than in Europe. So the technological argument put forward by Mann (and others) is unsound and the psychological and social deductions are fallacious.

Many other “miracle” historians are prepared to start with the ancient Greeks and define these folk as the original uniquely inventive Europeans, but the Greeks did not contribute more to technological progress than their neighbors did to the south and east, so arguments of this sort must revert to the abstract idea of “rationality,” thus, of potentiality, not actuality, a point we have already discussed. The Romans, in turn, were moderately inventive, but so were their neighbors. In the European Dark Ages, as everyone agrees, technological progress was hardly impressive, and was in fact going on at a healthier pace in parts of Africa and Asia. I suspect that the majority of historians today are not willing to go along with Michael Mann and others who claim to find a unique technological progress in Europe prior to the Middle Ages, although this view was quite widespread until a few decades ago. Most would disagree with Eric L. Jones, in The European Miracle, that Europe has always been “a mutant civilization in its uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology” (p. 45), since there is nothing unusual about this process in human society.

It is with the Middle Ages that technological arguments come to prominence. It is here that the notion of a technological “takeoff to modernity” is most frequently encountered among historians of the European “miracle.” The common argument form is about as follows: Northern Europeans indeed were rather backward folk until late in the Dark Ages, the early Middle Ages, when a kind of awakening occurred, and n o rth ern Europeans now suddenly em erged as the people we know— the most dynamic, most progressive, most innovative, most rapidly rising (etc.) people in the world— and the key to this rise was a set of early medieval technological innovations, based mainly, these historians claim, on European inventions, neglecting non-Europe and thus presenting us with a typical sort of Eurocentric tunnel history.

Lynn White, Jr., is an A m erica n historian whose book Medieval Technology and Social Change presents this kind of technologically deterministic tunnel-historical argument in perhaps its purest form. This book, published in 1962, has been highly influential; its arguments are built in to the theories of many “miracle” historians, including Mann, Jones, and Hall (who not only cite the book repeatedly in their writings

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but rely on it for many technological arguments they invoke in support of their theories). The book is an effort to show that technological invention and innovation was the central cause of the rise of Europe during the Middle Ages. White lists a series of supposedly European inventions, and shows, for each in turn, what marvelous effects it had on European history. Here, for starters, is an example. The early medieval invention of the iron stirrup had a “catalytic . . . influence on history.” It permitted a new form of mounted warfare, created the phenomenon of the medieval knight, and produced feudalism (knights became manorial lords). And so, “The Man on Horseback, as we have known him during the past millennium, was made possible by the stirrup.”124

But W hite’s crucial arguments concern productive technology, and particularly agricultural technology. He claims that an agricultural revolution occurred in Europe (or rather in northern Europe) in the early Middle Ages, and this quite revolutionized European society and became a large part of the explanation for modernization and the rise of capitalism. He believes that three European inventions were the crux of the matter: the heavy plow, the horse collar (and therefore the use of horsepower), and the three-field rotation.

The heavy plow, pulled by teams of (typically) eight oxen, is assigned, by White, a tentative central European origin in the sixth century; it then diffused quickly throughout northwestern Europe, and “does much to account for the bursting vitality of the Carolingian realm in the eighth century.”125 White is correct in calling attention, as others before him have done, to the importance of the heavy plow as an agricultural innovation in the wetter and colder parts of Europe. It was highly advantageous in opening the deep, heavy soils of the North European Plain and the deep-working of soil was critical in view of northern Europe’s moist weather. It was in fact necessary for the areal spread of farming into some of the wetter soils. Therefore, the heavy plow had much to do with the overall increase in medieval agricultural production. But the heavy plow was not in fact invented in Europe in the Middle Ages. Plows pulled by teams of 24 oxen were used in northern India before the time of Christ.126 Southern Europe used lighter plows, because the soils were generally lighter and drier, but the technology was not significantly different. It seems certain that the heavy plow was either diffused into northern Europe from elsewhere or was a local adaptation of a widely used tool-form. So this is not a European technological revolution. And the effects of the innovation in northern Europe probably should be attributed to the social forces that led to the introduction of the heavy plow, not to the technology itself. We know, for instance, that the growth of feudalism led to massive expansion of

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cultivation, partly at the incentive of the lords, who wished to increase their wealth and power by expanding their demesnes, partly as a reaction by peasants to the persistently increased demands from the lords for surplus product, increments of demand which could not be met without endangering the subsistence of the peasant family unless the peasants found a way to increase their total production. It appears that whatever historical effects are attributed by White to the plow should rather be attributed to feudalism as a social system. And the effects claimed by him are indeed quite miraculous.

Thanks to the adoption of the heavy plow, says White, there was a tremendous growth in population. Then there was a changeover to the “open field” system of cultivation and this led, according to White, to the invention of “communal patterns” of human cooperation (as though communal life had not been known previously and was unknown elsewhere). This was a social revolution, a “reshaping of peasant society.” It was “the essence of the manorial economy,” ignoring the fact that the manors were owned by lords, not villagers.127 More important still, there came then “a change [in] the northern peasants’ attitude towards nature and thus our own” (my emphasis). Why? Because many families had to collaborate to mount one plow team, and so their allotments now were proportional to their social contribution, not to their needs. (“No more fundamental change in the idea of man’s relation to the soil can be imagined: once man had been part of nature; now he became her exploiter.”128)

But all of this is nonsense. Neither the technical arguments nor the social deductions make any sense. The Domesday Book gives household- to-plow-team ratios of between 2:3 and 3 :5 .129 The open-field system seems to be quite old and was widespread in Europe and known in Asia and North Africa in early times.130 Northern villages, using big teams and heavy plows, were no more cooperative than southern villages, using light plows. Communal ownership of fields in some societies implied greater cooperation than that found in the European open field system. The manorial economy was a social system, not a technological invention. And so on.

W hite’s second revolutionary advance is labelled “the discovery of horse-power.”131 Horses had been around for some time, of course. The essential innovation, for White, was the modern horse collar, which he thinks was probably developed in the Occident some time before the ninth century. According to White, the horse collar transformed agriculture and grain transport in northern Europe by permitting horses to replace oxen in pulling plows and wagons. Horses pull about the same weight as oxen but do so about 50% faster. From this fact White draws

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awesome conclusions. There was, he says, a large increase in agricultural production. Commerce became intensified because transport by horse­ power was vastly cheaper than by ox power. Villages became much larger, almost townlike, because now there could be a larger radius of travel from home to field. The enlargement of villages yielded the “virtue of a more ‘urban’ life,” permitting the village to have a church, tavern, school (now boys “could learn their letters”) .132 And now there could be “news from distant parts.” A transformation, overall, of profound importance. It “urbanized” the village, giving peasants the “psychological preparation” for “the change in Occidental culture from country to city.”133 All this and more from one innovation: the horse collar.

But the horse collar was widespread in Eurasia from an early date, and probably was invented for harnessing not horses but camels.134 And the presumption that horses held advantages over oxen in plowing and transport is widely disputed: the horse was more efficient, but more costly in upkeep, and generally required that cropland be devoted to feed crops. In England the horse did not replace the ox. Village size had nothing to do with horsepower. In many parts of the world where horses were not used, villages were much larger than they were in northern Europe. In countries like China, long-distance grain transport was often by canal, much more efficient than horse-drawn wagons. And so, again, neither the technical arguments nor the social deductions make any sense.

Finally, White attributes equally marvelous effects to the introduc­ tion of the three-field system. Part of this argument is familiar to every European schoolchild, who learned that the three-field rotation was a great advance over the older two-field system because (mainly) it reduced the proportion of the land in fallow from roughly 1/2 to 1/3. But White adds a cornucopia of additional blessings. Oats could now be planted widely, hence there was greater use of horsepower. In a section o f Medieval Technology and Social Change, “The Three-Field Rotation and Improved Nutrition,” he claims that the three-field system somehow permitted farmers now to grow legumes, and this vastly improved the European diet, which, in turn, “goes far towards explaining . . . the startling expansion of population, the growth and multiplication of cities, the rise of industrial production, the outreach of commerce, and the new exuberance of spirits which enlivened that age.” In short, says Lynn White, Jr., “the Middle Ages were full of beans.”135

But none of this (least of all the pun) can be taken seriously. There is no basis for W hite’s argument that population was held down by an unbalanced diet (overloaded, he says, with carbohydrates, undersupplied with proteins). Farmers using the two-field system were not protein- starved, because legume cultivation long antedated the three-field system,

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grains also contained proteins, and fruits, animal products, and so on, were widely consumed. The three-field system was not a technological revolution. First of all, even more intensive rotations, including fallowless systems, were in use in many parts of the world long before the Middle Ages, and I suspect were common in parts of Europe (such as portions of the Po plain) where deep, nutrient-rich soils and good soil-water relations were found. Second, the two-field system was preferred, and was not supplanted, in many ecological situations, and in areas where fallow was needed for grazing. The picture is complex, but the generalization is clear: the three-field system was neither a technical revolution nor a fountainhead for social change. And it had close relatives in other continents, so it cannot be said to have been something uniquely European.

In Medieval Technology and Social Change, White says little about the causes of the revolutionary technology. He does so elsewhere, however, and we find that his basic argument is really quite Weberian.136 Technological determinism dissolves into an ideological determinism, focused on the inventiveness— the rationality— of Europeans. This White attributes, basically, to religion: in part to “the Judeo-Christian teleology,” and in larger part to “Western Christianity.” The former underlies the European’s unique “faith in perpetual progress,” which leads to a faith in the virtues of inventiveness and technology.137 The latter produces “an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature”— that is, the separation of Man and Nature. To a Western Christian, nature is inert, valueless. It is blasphemy to “assume spirit in nature.”138 This gives the Western Christian a desire and right to manipulate, use, transform nature— to invent new technology. The errors here are glaring. First, there is ignorance of the teachings of religions other than Christianity. Second, White resurrects the ethnocentric myth that ancient pagans and followers of modem non-Christian religions somehow are unable to fully separate Man from Nature and share the primitive view that spirits reside in all things. Actually, medieval Christians did perceive spirit in all things. (It was God’s way.) They did not treat humans as absolutely separate from nature. This dualism is a product of modern times, mainly of the commoditization of nature with the rise of capitalism. Dualism is a doctrine of post-Cartesian thought, not something residing deep in “Western Christianity.” Medieval Christians believed that the world is one, a plenum, an uninterrupted chain of being. Medieval folk did not, in general, believe, as White claims they did, in “perpetual progress”: they believed in the Fall, and they believed, on the whole, that Creation had been perfect and complete. White is simply telescoping history in order to

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claim that modem European attitudes about technology and technology cal change are actually basic and ancient attributes of the culture of Europeans, and only Europeans. His central thesis is basic tunnel history: Europeans are uniquely inventive, so they create unique technology, so they progress.

I believe that all of the claims for European technological superiority in the Middle Ages can be countered, and eventually disproven, in much the same way. I think it will become clear that all of the civilizations of the hemisphere were inventing new technology and sharing it around; the “sharing” being the usual mechanisms of diffusion as they operated in two spheres of reality: agricultural techniques passed from farmer to farmer and other techniques (including some of those involved in commercial agriculture) moving through the mainly urban network of trade and transportation, or occasionally (as with some military technology) moving around the map along with conquest. Thus I see a rather even building up of technology in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It was only after 1492, with its utterly revolutionary consequences, that European technology acquired the beginning of an edge over Asian and African. Did medieval technological evolution produce, as cause, the major medieval social changes? I leave the answer to that question to others. My purpose in this book is not to defend any one theory of social change, merely to show that the processes were not uniquely European.

In Chapter 3 I will discuss this matter further, showing how technological and economic surfaces emerged in medieval Europe, Africa, and Asia, and that processes of change in all three continents were— as to technology and economy— quite similar.

Before we leave the subject of technology, something must be said about one fascinating issue: what I will call “the China formula.” Since the end of World War II a great deal has become known about the history of technology in China, much of it through the work of Joseph Needham and his associates.139 In prior times, the European miracle theorists were prone to ignore Chinese technological achievements. (Weber did so less than most.140) The usual pattern was to admit Chinese priority for some innovations but claim that, overall, the main technological advances took place in Europe and the Mediterranean. Where there were truly notable Chinese inventions, it was often claimed that the Chinese invented these things in a ludic vein whereas the Europeans put these things to work. (The paradigm, of course, is gunpowder, which the Chinese were supposed to have invented merely for fireworks.) One could bundle such proposi­ tions into a classical diffusionist model of the Chinese: they had, in prior ages, progressed somewhat, but then they slowed to a stop, starting up again only when Europeans brought new ideas.

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It is now known beyond doubt that Chinese technology was on a par with that of the western part of the Old World, in some ways superior to it and in other ways inferior, during and before the Middle Ages.141 This new knowledge is devastating to many of the European miracle theories, those that claim that ancient and medieval European progress in technology was a crucial cause of the “miracle.” (If the Chinese were doing the same things at the same times, the argument about Europe’s uniqueness just crumbles.) The result has been a general modification of many of the miracle theories to take these newly known facts into account. Typically, the formula runs as follows.

1. “If indeed the development of technology in medieval China forces us to ask why China did not, then, have its own miracle, we can at least assert that China was the only civilization outside of Europe about which such questions arise.” In other words, European superiority over everybody else is not put into doubt. This is convenient for those, for instance, who want to show that India, Africa, the Middle East, and so on, had no potential for development.

2. “Whatever technological advances took place in medieval China, the important point is that they stopped.” In the formula, this argument is expressed in different ways for different spheres of technology, but the central argument is fairly standard: something characteristic of Chinese medieval culture forced it to cease developing and so to stagnate. In other words, what is plugged in here is the old doctrine of Oriental stagnation. Most typically, Weber is used to make this point: just about all of the Weberian claims about the reasons for Chinese lack of progress are regularly paraded at this point. Some historians balk at using Weber’s thin argument about the stultifying effect of Confucianism. Others prefer not to notice Weber’s ethnocentrism when he describes Chinese personality traits. But Weber’s arguments about the city, landowning, bureaucracy, and empire are still quite regularly employed. The Chinese city was not “free” and did not have a real bourgeoisie. Chinese landowning was not close to private property. The Chinese bureaucracy and the Chinese imperial state were not “rational” and so held back the society from progress.

One can respond to this argument in two steps. First, as Purcell has pointed out, the important question really is how and why these Chinese advances happened, not how and why they stopped happening (if indeed they did stop). In other words, historians must explain how China came to be such a technologically innovative society that it outstripped other civilizations in many spheres of technology for many centuries. Weber

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doesn’t help in this process one bit. The whole Weberian scheme is an explanation for stagnation, and what we are talking about is impressive progress, not stagnation.

The second step in the argument requires a focus on the precise period when, according to European miracle historians, the Chinese advance is supposed to have stopped. According to Elvin, broad-spectrum technical advances in China ended after the early fourteenth century. China at this time had perhaps the most advanced and most highly commercialized agriculture in the world. Chinese industrial technology was unexcelled in such fields as textile manufacture. Mechanical clocks were well known.142 Chinese merchant ships were plying throughout Southeast Asia and into the Indian ocean. Chinese guns were unexcelled. Canal technology was impressive. And so on. Broadly, the changes associated with the rise and travails of the Ming dynasty are associated with the slowing of technical advance, although advances continued to take place in some spheres of technology (shipbuilding, cannons, printing with movable metal t y p e - invented circa 1400, probably in Korea143— and much more). But Europe at this time was not experiencing a major technical advance either. After 1350 Europe stagnated both economically and technically. There is little evidence that European technology was advancing prior to 1492. The Renaissance was not a technological revolution, as historians have long realized.144 After 1492 important European advances began again in some technical spheres (notably shipbuilding). Whether truly revolutionary technological change really began before the eighteenth century is a matter of contention among European historians.

What does this say comparatively about China? It suggests that there is no problem of “stagnation.” There was, instead, a slowing of progress during two centuries, in a scenario well known in all human cultures, because uneven progress is the norm. It suggests, rather, a problem that Third World historians focus some attention on but European historians tend to ignore. As a result of the European commercial expansion in the sixteenth century— we argue in this book that the year 1492 was the real birthdate of this process— aggressive European merchant communities began competing and trading with the Chinese in various places, notably Manila and some South China ports. Why did the Chinese merchant community not assert its dominance in this trade? Why did the commer­ cial advantage steadily move in the direction of Europeans, not Chinese (and other Asians)? In other words, there is no stagnation to be explained. There is, rather, a problem as to how and why Europeans gained substantial control of long-distance trade in Asia after about 1600. Anticipating the discussion of later chapters, I will comment simply that this process does not reflect any internal cultural “blockages” in any Asian civilizations.

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Rather, it reflects the tremendously rapid increase in the profitability, scale, and organization of European enterprise overseas after 1492, which nobody else could really take advantage of, because of the constantly increasing flow of New World bullion into European mercantile coffers (a point we will discuss in some detail in Chapter 4).

During the first half of the fifteenth century, a number of Chinese fleets of combined military, diplomatic, and merchant character were sent into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Some of the ships held hundreds of men; some were so large that vegetable gardens were placed on the decks. We will discuss the significance of these great voyages in the next chapter; my point now is to notice the way European miracle historians try to accommodate these facts into their theories about Chinese nonprogress. The standard comment is: “But they stopped.” In fact, the last voyage did end around 1440. But the purposes of the voyages had been accomplished. Chinese merchant ships continued to trade in Southeast Asia. Nothing stopped. It is true that the emperors banned Chinese shipping for a time (mainly the early sixteenth century), but such bans were a means of extracting bribes (in effect easements) and they were not, in any case, enforced. For the “miracle” historians, the fact of the imperial ban is proof that China had stopped progressing, and that only Europe contained the potential for the “miracle.” This does not accord with the facts.

Chinese may have invented guns; in any case, they were as advanced in firearms technology as any other culture down to the end of the Middle Ages. Typical of the way European miracle historians deal with this sphere of technology (as with others) is Carlo Cipolla’s account of the process in his well-known and influential book G u n s, Sails, and Empires: Technobgi- cal Innovation and the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1 4 0 0 - 1 7 0 0 . He concedes, to begin with, that “Chinese guns were at least as good as Western guns, if not better, up to . the beginning of the fifteenth cen­ tury.”145 But when the Portuguese appeared off Canton and fired off their cannon in salute a century later (1517), the Chinese had, magically, retrogressed:

T h e roar of European ordnance awoke C hinese . . . to the frightening reality of a strange, alien people th at unexpectedly had appeared along their coasts under the p rotection and with the m enace of superior, formidable weapons. . . . How to deal w ith th e “foreign devils” ? To fight them or to ignore them ? To copy and adopt their techniques and give up local habits and traditions or to sever all co n tacts with them and seek refuge in a dream o f isolation? To be or n o t to be? . . . a dilemma th at was tragically unansw erable.146

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Thus does rhetoric replace fact in the mythology of Asian stagnation and the European miracle.

The “Chinese formula,, seems to be losing credence. But I have no doubt that an “Indian formula,” an “Islamic formula,” an “African formula,” and so on, will be contrived to shore up Eurocentric history as we learn more about Indian, Middle-Eastern, and African technological development prior to 1492.

Society

In Chapter 3 we will take a look at medieval European society and compare it to medieval Asian and African society in terms of those social categories that seem to be important in the process of change toward capitalism and modernity. Among these categories (forms, facts) are class, the state, landholding, trade, and urbanization. Our present task is the more modest one of criticizing theories that claim that one or another social category somehow led Europe to rise above all other civilizations before the end of the Middle Ages, before 1492. For this task we can select a few of the categories that present-day historians of the European miracle claim as favored candidates for this role of historical leadership, of causal motor propelling the so-called “take-off to modernity.” The favored ones seem to be the state, the church, class, and the family. Most frequently these categories are, themselves, explained in terms of supposedly more basic forces: European rationality, European technology, European demographic uniqueness, or European environmental superiority. These have been discussed at sufficient length already. The following discussion, therefore, will be brief.

State

A typical sort of argument begins with a model of the modern European nation-state, the kind of medium-sized, well-integrated, moderately democratic state that emerged after the rise of capitalism, after modernization, after the French and American revolutions. Nobody denies that this form is unique. But European miracle historians tend to make one of two claims about this state form: either it appeared very early in European history, early enough to play a causal role in modernization, or it was somehow immanent in European culture, a state form that was created, naturally and rationally, by freedom-loving, individualistic, antidespotic Europeans of medieval or earlier times. Sometimes both claims are made: a reduction to European moral rationality and, at the same time, a holistic argument at the level of the state itself.

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Eric L. Jones, for instance, does precisely that in The European Miracle. Europe’s medieval political system, says Jones, was near “the heart of the European miracle.”147 Here the argument combines the traditional prejudice about Europe’s innate and unique love of freedom with some very odd environmentalistic arguments. First the latter. Jones takes the familiar argument that Europe in early times had a number of fertile core areas, each of which became the hearth of a regional culture, and he turns it into a curious argument to the effect that Europe’s ecological core areas naturally led to a pattern of medium-sized states, unlike, he says, the “imperial” pattern of Asian societies. Empires, in Jones’s view, are innately despotic, and innately given to interfering with the development of the economy. Europe’s geography saved it from this fate. If a number of Europe’s modern states have ecological “core areas,” most do not, and rather few of these core areas became states. The model is environmentalistic and invalid. In any case, comparable core areas are found in many other parts of the world. Medium-sized, separate units of productive agricultural environments are, for instance, typical for Southeast Asia, including the rather discrete mainland cores, like the Irrawaddy and the Chao Phraya basins, the middle Mekong, and the Red River, and even more so the insular region, with cores in Sumatra (two or three), Java (three), Bali, Lombok, Sulawesi, Luzon, and so on. India and China too are moderately dissected in this way. Distinctive cores in Africa include the Middle Niger, Chad, and Congo, among others; in western Asia, Mesopotamia, the Iranian Plateau, and so on.148

Next, Jones builds the image of these natural European l/r-states as somehow naturally forming into what he calls “a states system,” a grid of roughly equal-sized independent states. These, ip the Middle Ages, acted toward one another as though they were Hegelian individuals, competing yet cooperating, and marching forward, together, as a kind of members’ club, toward modernity. Thus Jones discerns deep in the Middle Ages what amounts to the modern nation-state and the League of Nations. Telescoping history, he imbues the medieval European polities with all the virtues of the modem state: they provided public services, they encouraged the free development of the economy, they were incipiently democratic, and so on. All of this because of their environmental basis and because freedom-loving Europeans lived in them. In reality, the kind of state, and state system, that he describes does not appear until roughly the seventeenth century. Jones finds political characteristics of already- modernizing Europe, falsely claims that these were present long before— some, being environmental, were always present— and so claims to have proven that Europe’s modern democratic political system was, somehow, always present in Europe (and nowhere else). In fact, medieval

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Europe was a hodge-podge of semisovereign feudal political units, a map so confused that states as such were not always identifiable, and with few of the modern state characteristics attributed to these polities by Jones.

But to understand the absurdity of this model of political history, we must notice the way Jones talks about the supposedly barbaric, despotic states of non-Europe. In non-Europe, a natural irrationality combines with environmental disadvantages to produce the opposite of the wonderful European state and system of states: the huge Oriental empire. Why did Asia not develop politically as Europe did? The political “infantilism” of Asia is explained by Jones in terms of (1) a psychological deficiency, consisting of irrationality in matters of intellectual vitality and innovativeness and a sort of moral failing in attitudes relating to the desire for progress, resistance to domination, will to forego animal pleasures, and the like, and (2) an inferior natural environment. The effects of these failings (and some lesser ones), and thus the effective reasons for Asia’s political nondevelopment and nonprogress, are (1) uncontrolled population growth, and (2) bad government, “Oriental despotism” or, as Jones prefers to label it, empire. Throughout The European Miracley the main argument supporting the theory about how Europe’s system o f states favors development is Jo n e s ’s countertheory about the evil nature of the Asian imperial state. Yet, in the end, the countertheory turns out to be as empty as the theory. Jones does not, in fact, give any credible explanation as to why such large empires exist in Asia and not in Europe. But neither does he give a credible argument as to why large states are worse for progress than medium-sized or small ones. (And he is blind to the very real progress that occurred in Asia, and to the many nonimperial states in Asia.) When we examine Jones’s theory about Asian empires, then, we find that it has nothing to do with size or kind of state and everything to do with a conception about the basic nature of politics in non-European societies. This is nothing more than the old idea of “Oriental despotism.” Asians, and indeed all non-Europeans, naturally suffer nasty, despotic, capricious, irresponsible, evil governments. Only Europeans understand and thus enjoy freedom.

This is not an atypical theory among historians who wish to argue that European political processes and forms were causal forces leading to a medieval “miracle.” The basic form of the theory is traditional. It consists mainly of three propositions: Europeans have an old, deep-seated rationality that impels them toward modern, implicitly democratic, political forms (or, less directly, toward individualistic economic behavior and thus a preference for a minimalistic state); non-Europeans suffer gladly and naturally a despotic, imperial form of state, sometimes powerful but always arbitrary; and Europe’s natural environment gives political

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modernization one or another sort of unique boost (ecological cores, fertile soil, capes-and-bays accessibility, or whatever). Other propositions figure in most arguments, but these three seem to be the most widely used.

They combine with a methodological principle of great significance: whatever causal forces were at work, they were at work early— that is, they set the process of modernization in motion long before the end of the Middle Ages. This, of course, is the crux of the matter. In the present book I argue that modernization (or whatever you want to call it) was indeed going on in medieval Europe, but not only in medieval Europe. Thus the events after 1492 did not start modernization but enabled European changes to increase in magnitude and effect and eventually produce a uniquely “rising” society. Therefore we argue from the uniformitarian hypothesis that Europe had no potential greater than that possessed by non-Europe during the Middle Ages. The fact that there were forces pushing toward democratization and the modern state in medieval Europe tells us nothing about European uniqueness.

John A. Hall uses the basic Jones model, emphasizing what he calls the “blockages” that prevented China, India, and the Islamic Middle East from developing modem state forms. In brief: China suffered under empire. India suffered under caste (and so had no politics whatever).149 Islamic-region politics reflected tribalism. Hall describes very old and not really typical forms for each of these civilizations, assuming them to be frozen and permanent, contrasts these with late postmedieval European forms with the inference that these too have been present at least in embryo for a long time, and then builds an argument that non-Europe always lacked the potential for a “miracle,” while Europe always had it.150

Michael Mann addresses himself to the abstract entity “power” instead of the more visible “state,” but his argument is not fundamentally different. Mann, like a number of other “miracle” historians, tries to interpret the political chaos of early medieval feudalism, with its fragmentation of polities and sovereignties, into an argument for incipient modernity. The smallness of these politicosocial units implies, somehow, that they were more “intensive,” more meaningful, more pregnant with development potential, than the supposedly vast imperial polities of non-Europe. Mann’s notion of “intensiveness” is basically a notion of value, not of fact.151 In this context we may recall the Magna Carta myth: devolution of power from king to barons is traditionally described as a movement toward democracy, even though the barons in those times were hardly democratic, and poor people preferred to be able to appeal above their heads to the king. (And later the rise of royal power is described as a further step toward democracy, except that you can’t have it both ways.152) Jean Baechler uses roughly the same model— although,

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unlike Hall and Mann but rather like Jones, he downplays the role of Christianity in political evolution— with one additional argument: Baechler believes that the medieval European aristocracy (originally an Indo-European “warrior aristocracy”) was itself the original source of democracy, claiming, in a curious reading of history, that aristocrats not only dealt democratically (respectfully) with one another, but they also respected the rights of their peasants.153

Yet there was no democracy in the Middle Ages: European states . were as despotic as any found anywhere else. Just as we noted with regard to the ancient Greeks, political forms found in Europe had counterparts elsewhere. If city-states were (perhaps) the closest to democracy— some

. of them were republican, and were in essence merchant-oligarchies— one need only note that city-states of many sorts lined the coasts of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Nor was the republican form unknown in Asia and Africa.

Church

Many theories assign one or another causal role to the church as a social institution in the modernization of Europe and the rise of capitalism.154 (Many other theories assign such a role to Christianity itself, but I will not comment on these.) O f course, the church did have such a role. The problems lie elsewhere. Most of them concern the question whether the church (or churches) provided Europe, and Europeans, with something that was not provided to non-Europeans by their own religious institutions or by other institutions in their own cultures. For instance, the claim has been made that the Catholic church in the Middle Ages unified Europe in cultural terms, to a degree not found elsewhere. But elsewhere comparable or parallel processes were at work. For instance, the much-maligned empires, such as the Chinese empire, provided unity in many ways, while the Islamic religion provided it in the Muslim world. It has also been argued that the medieval church compensated for the political fragmentation of Europe, allowing pan-European development to take place in spite of the lack of a clear pattern of strong states. True. The question is comparative: did the church thereby give Europe some developmental advantage over other civilizations, in which, quite often, there was political unity throughout most historical epochs? I think the answer must be that the church did not give Europe some special cultural quality, lacking in other civilizations, such that Europe could thereby leap into the forefront of social evolution.

Therefore I see no basis in fact for suggestions that the medieval church led to European historical superiority in a way that other religious

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institutions, in other civilizations, did not do. John A. Hall, for instance, asserts that “Christianity provided the best shell for the emergence of states.”155 Michael Mann claims that the medieval church “encouraged a drive for moral and social improvement even against worldly au- thority”— a statement that one might question not merely as a comparison, but also as a factual assertion about the role played by the church in Europe.156 For H. E. Hallam, “the medieval Latin church was the seed-bed of the early modem idea of capitalism.”157 K. F. Werner maintains that “the ‘European miracle’ [took place] . . . because of the existence of a Christian world dominated in the west by Catholic doctrines.”158 Such statements fail as comparisons with other religions, and other civilizations; but they also fail because the postulated rise of Europe did not take place in the Middle Ages but somewhat later. That Christianity helped in that eventual rise is not at all in question.

It is not necessary to discuss Max Weber’s celebrated argument about the role of religion in the rise of Europe, or his celebrated argument about the special role of the Protestant Reformation in the rise of capitalism. Weber of course held the views that I criticized above. But the causal role of religion is not at issue in this book, the concern of which is a uniformitarian view of European and non-European civilizations and their dynamism.

Class

Three kinds of argument concerning class are relevant to our discussion. The first of these is a two-tiered argument for Europe’s ancient and medieval historical superiority that can be summarized as follows: (1) Classless (or “preclass”) regions and peoples are simply irrelevant in the matter of explaining Europe’s superiority and the world’s historical progress, because classless societies are necessarily both unprogressive and primitive. (2) Therefore, the real problems calling for explanation concern the question why some class-stratified societies (the European ones) are progressive while others (principally Asian) are stagnant and backward. Africa below the Sahara is then declared sweepingly to be classless and thus irrelevant to world history. This argument is still widely used, in some analytical works (among them Eric L. Jones’s The European Miracle), in some world-history textbooks (as we noted in Chapter 1), and in some (probably most) modern atlases of world history. (Many of these atlases have no maps of Africa for the whole of history from the Upper Paleolithic to 1492!159) In place of an extended discussion of this issue I will just offer these comments: Africa was not classless in 1492 (a point to which we return in Chapter 3), classless societies are not stagnant,160 and

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the historians who make this sort of argument about classlessness quite regularly contradict themselves by declaring that the classless European peoples of ancient and medieval times— the “barbarian tribes,” Germans, Celts, Slavs, etc.— were very progressive: after borrowing the idea of classes and a few other things from the Romans, these primitive but supposedly progressive, innovative, aggressive, inquisitive, achievement- oriented Europeans than surged forward to modernity.

It is customary and quite proper to examine the class structure of a society in history and ask how the different classes acted to favor or resist change, and in which directions. In the absence of such an examination, we usually get an analysis with a bias toward ascribing causality solely to kings and other sorts of elites. Eurocentrism becomes a problem only if the assertion is made that a given class did something historically efficacious in Europe but that this class did not exist in civilizations outside of Europe. This kind of argument is very common in the European miracle literature. Although especially favored among conservative historians, it is also found quite often among those Marxists who cling to the old formulas about the “stages of class society.” Fairly representative of the latter is Padgug’s argument that a slave mode of production, in its pure form— with slavery dominant in commodity production and with implications for economic progress, the development of private property, and class struggle— existed in ancient times only in Greece and Rome, and that lack of this feature in Asia accounts in part for the tendency of Asian societies to “stagnate.”161 (Roughly the same argument is then used by some Marxists to assert that the slave-plantation system of later times was not properly capitalist because the workers were slaves, not wage-earners. We deal with this point in Chapter 4.) This issue is important, but I will set it aside after one comment: I believe that those scholars who assert that the slave class was more important in the classical Mediterranean than Asia make a very elementary error, perhaps easiest to do if one is not a geographer. It may just be a question of geographical scale. The Athenian empire was perhaps one-hundredth the size of the Ch’in empire. In small, highly developed regions of China, slavery was very likely as important as it was in Attica or in the plantation regions of Roman Italy.

Jean Baechler, a French historical sociologist, has argued that one uniquely European class, the medieval aristocracy, was the central causal force in the European miracle.162 He dismisses Africa out of hand, then asks why it is that modernity arose in Europe and not in Asia.163 Accepting many of the standard arguments as partial explanations, he argues that the most important reason the miracle occurred was the existence in Europe of a true aristocracy. Baechler describes an ancient

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Indo-European society characterized by its warrior aristocracy. In India, the aristocracy became corrupted, but not so in Europe.164 He carefully defines the medieval aristocracy and its special social quality, “feudality,” in such a way as to distinguish it from a mere landlord class, or a class of landlords with added seigneurial powers. The aristocracy was a band of comrades, equals joined by bonds of feudal loyalty, a democracy in its own right. It did not, he says, hold the political power in society, and this was a key to its unique character. Elsewhere, either the aristocracy was ground under by the (imperial, despotic) polity, or it became corrupted into a caste form, as in India; in such cases there was to be no modernization. The European aristocracy had a special sort of private power, one original source of capitalist power. (Baechler contradicts himself here, since in the feudal era the aristocracy was indeed the political power. He simply notes that there was a time of political chaos, and passes on to other matters.165) In sum, the aristocracy invents democracy and incipient capitalist property. The European peasants are also incipient capitalists from early on. Baechler casts aside the idea that Europe’s peasantry was an unfree, oppressed community in the Middle Ages and gives it quite remarkable qualities: The peasant village was self-governed, a kind of “republic,” with characteristics reminiscent of urban life.166 “A peasant is an entrepreneur in miniature.”167 By the fourteenth century this incipiently capitalist peasant is the real peasant of Europe. The peasant village is a little democracy. The peasants are autonomous decision-makers. Baechler simply ignores serfdom, ignores, likewise, the importance of the fact that the lords owned the land, exploited the peasants, and controlled their lives. Feudalism becomes a kind of democratic society in which the aristocrats play a democratic role and the peasants live as free people. Moreover, these peasants, deep in the Middle Ages, had all of the attributes of the capitalist farmer that we associate with the eighteenth century and thereafter: investment, profit orientation, capital accumula­ tion. (And they were smart enough, Baechler says, to avoid the extended family.) All of this is fantasy. It is a simple telescoping of history, pushing the modern world (and particularly the modern capitalist farmer) back into the Middle Ages.

Baechler contrasts all of this with India. His depiction of India is bizarre. India had no aristocracy throughout history, as a result of the caste system, and this is the “deepest cause” for its failure to develop throughout history.168 (India did have a very formidable aristocracy.) Indian society had no political dimension: “The polity . . . . is not a reality in India.” Therefore “the sense of identity in India could never be political”— not to say democratic.169 (Nonsense.) Caste was invented to take the place of

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the missing polity. (More nonsense.) India didn’t have a peasantry, it merely had “agricultural workers.”170 How can this be true? Because real peasants were entrepreneurial decisionmakers, something supposedly absent in India (but in reality no more so than in Europe). Baechler thus uses a mythical India as a counterpoint to his basic argument: In Europe, aristocrats and the free society created by them (and their allies the peasants) were the principal source of the “miracle.” But Europe’s aristocracy and peasantry did not have these romanticized qualities, and, more crucially, comparable classes existed in many other regions in the same period, as we will see in Chapter 3.

In Marxist theory, the concept of class is part of a larger and more consequential notion, that of class struggle. For all class-stratified societies, said Marx and Engels, class struggle is the motor of progress. Most present-day Marxists consider cultural evolution to be very much more complex than this, but they continue to emphasize the idea, and process, of class struggle. Again we must notice that there is nothing inherently Eurocentric about this concept unless one argues that genuine class struggle, or some phase or form of it, occurs only in Europe. But many Marxists argue precisely that way. According to Maurice Godelier, for example, the West displays “the purest forms of class struggle” and “alone has created the conditions for transcending . . . class organization.”171 Probably the most influential recent formulation of this sort of argument is Robert Brenner’s theory about the rise of capitalism.172 Brenner tries to demonstrate that the rise of capitalism prior to 1492 was a result of class struggle, but class struggle only in Europe. Then he uses this argument as evidence against what he calls “Third-Worldism,” the belief that non-Europe has been of great importance historically and is so (politically) in the present. This conclusion has strongly influenced not only Marxist but also conservative thought in history, geography, sociology, and economic-development theory. Certainly the Brenner theory deserves our attention in this book. And it is not at all a complicated theory.

According to Brenner, class struggle between serfs and lords, influ­ enced by depopulation, led to the decline of feudalism in northwestern Europe. (Brenner does not mention non-Europe and scarcely mentions southern Europe.) In most parts of northwestern Europe, the peasants won this class struggle and became in essence petty landowners, now satisfied with their bucolic existence and unwilling to innovate. Only in England did the lords maintain their grip on the land; peasants thus remained tenants. The peasantry then became differentiated, producing a class of landless laborers and a rising class of larger tenant farmers, wealthy enough

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to rent substantial holdings and forced (because they had to pay rent) to commercialize, innovate technologically, and thus become capitalists. (Brenner thinks that serfs, lords, and landowning peasants did not inno­ vate, and that towns, even English towns, had only a minor role in the rise of capitalism.) English yeoman tenant farmers, therefore, were the foun­ ders of capitalism. Stated differently: capitalism arose because English peasants lost the class struggle. In reality, however, peasants were not predominantly landowners in the other countries of the region; capitalism grew more rapidly in and near the towns than in the rural countryside; and the technological innovativeness that Brenner attributes to fourteenth and fifteenth century English farmers really occurred much later, too late to fit into his theory. More importantly, commercial farming and indeed urban protocapitalism were developing during this period in southern Europe and (as I will argue) in other continents. Brenner’s theory is simply wrong.173

Family

There is nothing new about the belief that the European family is in some fundamental sense more rational and more civilized than the family types found elsewhere. When the modernization doctrine became dominant, this belief seems to have faded into the background; there was now a near-consensus among social scientists that differences in family type should be strung along the continuum from “traditional” to “modern” or, as a variation, from “folk” to “urban.” Traditional families, it was argued, have tended to reflect strong kinship ties at a scale larger and wider than the nuclear family; they have tended to form large, extended-family households; and they have tended to be associated with high birthrates. In the absence of much evidence concerning the medieval European family and household, it was rather widely assumed that earlier European families had conformed to the traditional model, which was seen as the “preindustrial” family, contrasted with the'modern, post-industrial-revo- lution nuclear family, forming a small household, with looser kin ties beyond the household, and with fewer children. This transformation was thought to be associated with what was called the “demographic transi­ tion,” the process of change from a “traditional” demographic pattern, with high birthrate and high deathrate, characteristic of preindustrial conditions, to a “modern,” postindustrial demographic pattern, with low birthrate and low deathrate.

In the modernization theory of the family, the non-European world of underdeveloped countries would go through essentially the same transformation as it modernized. Extended family households would be replaced by nuclear family households. This would instill modem

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prodevelopment attitudes: people would have fewer children (thus combating overpopulation), and they would tend, now, to think more individualistically and thus entrepreneurial^.

All of this was a bundle of assumptions. There was no evidence of a causal link between birthrate and size of household (or strength of kin ties beyond the nuclear family); there was merely a correlation within rich, modern societies: both nuclear families and lower birthrates were characteristic of these societies. (One leading demographer pointed out that nuclear families might, in principle, be likely to have more children per couple than extended families.174) In addition, the idea that an adult breadwinner would be more entrepreneurial, more prone to accumulate capital, more competitive, and so on, if he (assumed to be male) was working only for his wife and children and not for a large family including his parents, cousins, and other relations, was a tenuous assumption. Large, tightly knit families had proven to be powerful accumulators, for instance, among many immigrant groups engaged in commerce. Why, indeed, should an adult want to work harder only for spouse and children, and not for parents, sisters, and so on? (One can in fact construct an argument to the effect that an extended family with multiple working adults has definite economic advantages in a developing economy.175) As the modernization doctrine itself developed, after about 1960, these ideas began to dissipate. It became clear that various forms of social organization can be equally modern, and that the root causes of change and nonchange do not lie in the family structure.

Rather dramatically, in the m id -1960s, the notion o f a peculiarly European family pattern was reinserted into historians’ common discourse, partly as a result of an influential paper by John Hajnal.176 As we noted at an earlier point in this chapter, in the discussion of demographic arguments for the “miracle,” historical demography was at that time uncovering evidence that preindustrial Europe (or part of Europe) had a lower birthrate than one would expect of a “traditional society.” It seemed that Europeans had been marrying later in life than would be expected in a traditional society with Malthusian controls and therefore maximum birthrate. Instead of scrapping the Malthusian model itself, and arguing instead that all human societies actively control their population dynamics by using such tactics as adjusting the age of marriage, these historians began to assert, simply, the uniqueness of Europe. Other preindustrial societies exhibited the “traditional” pattern, with high and uncontro lled birthrates (a n d therefore superrapid population growth when mortality declined in the “transition”). Preindustrial Europe, in complete contrast, had a rational family system, with rational population control. It was then argued, without evidence,

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that preindustrial Europe had a higher level of living and a lower mortality rate than non-Europe, from which it was deduced that Europe kept its birthrate down in proper, rational, adjustment to its lower deathrate, mainly using the mechanism of delayed marriage. Those who put forward this argument simply failed to consider the possibility that families in other societies have acted pretty much the same way. Evidence to this effect was beginning to appear from a number of non-European societies. Some societies had much lower birthrates than would be expected from the classic model. Other societies had demonstrated major shifts in birthrate, either upward or downward, in response to changes in economic and other conditions.177

Hajnal began his 1965 essay with this flat statement:

T h e marriage pattern of most of Europe as it existed for at least two centuries up to 1 9 4 0 was, as far as we ca n tell, unique or almost unique in the world. T h ere is n o known exam ple of a population of non-European civilization w hich has had a similar pattern. T h e distinctive marks of the “European p attern ” are (1 ) a high age of marriage and (2 ) a high proportion of people who never marry at a ll.178

HajnaPs argument was in some ways very careful and in others very casual. He noted carefully that the evidence for late marriage and (somewhat) low marriage frequency in Europe for periods before the seventeenth century was inconclusive, and that the “fragmentary” evidence for the European Middle Ages suggested a “non-European pattern.”179 He introduced absolutely no historical data for non-European regions, casually comparing historical Europe with twentieth-century non-Europe. The theoretical constraint is very clear: non-European patterns are “traditional” and permanent, hence a comparison of seventeenth-century Europe with mid-twentieth-century Asia or Africa is perfectly accepta­ ble.180

This proposition about the unique European pattern of later marriages and lower marriage frequencies was widely and quickly incorporated into the broader theory of Europe’s historical “miracle.” Without much supporting evidence, the proposition was firmly pushed backward into the Middle Ages. According to Lawrence Stone, writing in 1977, “it has now been established beyond any doubt” that over most of northwest Europe the middle and lower classes “married remarkably late, certainly from the fifteenth century onward. . . . This custom of delayed marriage is an extraordinary and unique feature of north-west European civilization.”181 Here one notices particularly the word “remarkably.” This is “remarkable” only if there is something to compare it with; yet

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non-European historical data are not given or even sought. Michael Mann derives the pattern from the Iron Age Indo-European peasant society. Patricia Crone speculates that it is perhaps an ancient Germanic trait. Eric L. Jones thinks that it goes back three or four thousand years. Alan Macfarlane thinks that it has its roots in “a particular amalgam of Christianity and Germanic customs.”182 And so on. In a word: the pattern is very old in Europe.

The matter of dates, or age, is certainly crucial. Western Europe was undergoing major transformations from the seventeenth century onward, and a delayed and lower marriage rate could well be explained by a number of the newer facts: mobility, loss of holdings due to enclosures, urbanization, and, later, the well-understood demographic and social effects of the industrial revolution. Even the sixteenth century was somewhat chaotic in western Europe. But if the marriage pattern emerged before 1492, a date before these disruptions began, then one can speak of a definite “European pattern,” not merely a “preindustrial” or “tradi­ tional” pattern. And one can begin to build a general causal theory for the subsequent changes— the “European miracle.”

Additional propositions were added. It had long been known that nuclear family households and neolocal residence (the married couple establishes a household well separated from those of the parents) have been characteristic of western Europe during recent centuries, and this is to be expected as a feature of modernization. It fits with standard modernization theory: the process is supposed to lead from extended family to nuclear family. But the European miracle historians now argue that nuclear families and neolocal residence are part of a unique “European familial system” (Laslett).183 And again they locate its origin far back in history. And again they sweepingly assert that non-Europeans lack these patterns. In fact, there is good evidence that nuclear-family households were common in many parts of non-Europe. Taeuber, analyzing Buck’s data, found that more than 60% of peasant households in China were nuclear in the early twentieth century.184 These are not historical data, but the point is that China is supposed, according to modernization theory, to be especially “traditional” as regards family and many other things; indeed, there is common confusion between the notion of the Chinese lineage or “sib”-—made famous by Weber— and the idea of the extended family. Larger, extended families are uncommon in Latin America. In India, as well as in China, the notion of an extended family is ambiguous because of the ambiguity of the notion of “neolocal residence” (in a cramped village, house-building space can be a problem), and the association sometimes found between neolocality and available land upon which to begin a small holding. Further confusion is added

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over the association between extended (and/or joint) family and inheritance rights, power, mobility, and more.185 Meanwhile, back in Europe, the model of a supposedly characteristic nuclear-neolocal pattern is subject to very serious questions for the Middle Ages. (For even earlier times the idea of a unique pattern is speculative, and belongs with other old and suspect ideas— discussed earlier in this chapter— about the ancient Germanic tribes and their unique individualism, progressiveness, and the like.) Medieval marital residence patterns may sometimes have reflected manor rules (such as assignment of holdings) rather than cultural residence rules in circumstances of serfdom and insecure tenancy, and a distinction has to be made between different types of rural regions, such as the areas with off-farm employment (like woolen areas of southeastern England), those with “frontier” characteristics, and so on. There is even reason to question the notion of a persistent west European marriage pattern.186 But even granting the generalization about western Europe, there is no basis for considering the European pattern to have been, historically, unique.187

Finally, the model is embellished with some rather gaudy ornamen­ tation. It is claimed that the unique European pattern is not merely a matter of neolocality, nuclear households, and age and frequency of marriage. West European marriages were grounded in love. Elsewhere, marriages were arranged. (But arranged marriages seem to have been the rule in premodern Europe, prior to the periods of high mobility and social disruption. The notion, regularly invoked here, that non-European couples are strangers to one another prior to their being shoved into marriage is colonial-era prejudice supported by a few unusual cultural situations. Romantic love in this argument is considered an attribute of European rationality. Non-European couples are certainly as loving as European couples.) It is claimed, next, that the unique European family, because it is nuclear, produces a unique European personality type. The theory is that the small (European) household leads inevitably to individualistic, competitive, acquisitive, yet caring behavior. Mann and Jones, as we saw earlier, put forward the image of an ancient peasant household, a Hansel and Gretel house deep in the forest, as the historical source of this individualistic pattern. Macfarlane, who presents perhaps the most extreme form of this theory (and is chided by some of his colleagues not for his theory but for his claim that it applies mainly to the English), argues that the early medieval English family produced a person with the psychological and behavioral traits of (in essence) Weber’s capitalist personality, that the causal chain runs from tribal customs and religion to family, from family to personality, and from personality to the beginnings of capitalism (a point we return to below). This argument is

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advanced mainly by erecting a model of what Macfarlane considers to be “peasant society,” with a peasant family and peasant mentality. Early English rural folk don’t fit this model. Therefore they were not peasants, and did not have the traditional traits of peasantry, like a traditional family type and traditional mentality.188 As many have commented, Macfarlane’s notion of “peasant” is a straw man, uncharacteristic of modem non-Europe, much less of historical non-Europe, and his view of the medieval English farm folk as nonpeasants is historically invalid.189

The theory of the unique European family is an important part of the European miracle theory as it is being propagated today. It is used in two distinct arguments. The first of these combines the family theory with Malthusianism. The argument runs as follows: Humans in general are not rational enough to control their sexual behavior and limit the number of offspring to suit the prevailing conditions of food supply and the like. Therefore, ordinary humans experience permanent, or periodic, crises, in which overpopulation leads to famine and war and pestilence, after which the now-reduced population begins again to overproduce offspring. The root axiom is mationality. People behave not intelligently, but (as Mai thus said 200 years ago) rather like barnyard beasts.190 The historical result of this process is to prevent development. Any improvement in, for instance, productive technology merely leads to population growth, to crisis, to depopulation, and thus back to the status quo ante— a cycle of stagnation. This is one and perhaps the crucial cause of the nondevelopment of non-European societies in general. Europeans, by contrast, have always (or perhaps for just a millennium or so) exhibited rational behavior in all matters relating to population. This includes decisions about marriage and about childbearing. The unique European late-marrying, nuclear, neolocal, companionate family is the crucial institution in which this rational decision-making process takes place. Thus the European family has permitted Europeans (or west Europeans, or northwest Europeans) to check population growth, and thereby accumulate material wealth that would otherwise be dissipated in the feeding of excess babies. This primordial accumulation underlies the permanent progress of Europe. This theory, in one form or another, is advanced by many of the historians whom we have been discussing, among them Crone, Hall, Jones, Laslett, Macfarlane, and Mann.191 Hall expresses one form of the theory in the following comment (part of which we quoted earlier):

[The] European family has long been small, late marrying, nuclear and notably sensitive to M althusian pressure. . . . T h e expansion of th e E uro­ pean econom y did n o t occu r laterally, as in late traditional C h in a, because improvements in output were n o t eaten up by a massive growth in

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population. T h e ratio between population and acreage in Europe remained favourable ultim ately because of the relative con tin en ce of the European family.192

The Malthusian theory reduces humans to beasts. But even for those scholars who accept Malthusianism, the notion that the European family staves off the Malthusian disasters is hardly credible.

The second way in which the “unique European family” theory is used in arguments for the European “miracle” is a matter of deducing ways that the European family produces various sorts of uniquely progressive attitudes and actions on the part of Europeans, attitudes and actions that then lead toward the miracle. A very widely used form of this argument is expressed thusly by Laslett:

[The] European familial system may have been responsible for a whole series of features conducive to econ om ic progress, and perhaps innovation. T h e conditions laid down for marriage and procreation imposed on all individuals . . . the necessity of saving, accum ulating. . . . [The] European familial system fostered th e spirit of hoarding and parsimony.193

The family thus generates the personality traits of an incipient capitalist, and does so deep in the Middle Ages. This, too, is hardly credible and hardly in accord with the realities of life (and psychology) before 1492. Laslett, like Macfarlane and many others, makes the false assumption that a typical medieval European family does, in fact, have choices permitting saving, hoarding, accumulating, and so on. This argument requires that the peasant family be a substantial landholder, or at least a tenant with firm security, such that capital accumulation can take place and not be bled off by master or landlord. There is much dispute about the degree of landownership in late-medieval western Europe, but it is certain that family behavior of the sort described by Laslett could not have been common under serfdom and, after the decline of serfdom, could not have been common in places where peasants did not own the land. And this seems to have been the rule, not the exception.194 It appears that this argument is, again, a telescoping of history. The entrepreneurial yeoman farmer of, say, the eighteenth century, is pushed back into the Middle Ages, and an effect becomes a cause.

Many other European-family-to-European-miracle arguments are common in present-day scholarly discourse, but space permits m e to give only one additional example, from Lawrence Stone:

T h ere are several consequences w hich must have followed from the late marriage p attern. . . . [It] is reasonable to assume th at for many young men

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this delay involved considerable sexual denial at a tim e of optim um male sexual d r iv e .. . . If one follows Freudian theory, this could lead to neuroses. . . . [It] could help to explain the high level of group aggression, w hich lay behind the extraordinary expansionist violence of western n a tio n -states at this time. It could also have been a stimulus to capitalist econ om ic enterprise . . . stimulating saving in order to marry, and generating activist social and econ om ic dynam ism.195

Again:

T h e sublimation of sex am ong young male adults may well acco u n t for the extraordinary military aggressiveness, the thrift, th e passion for hard work, and the entrepreneurial and intellectual enterprise of m odern W estern m an .196

Europeans conquered the world because their young men were sexually frustrated.

Space does not permit us to list and discuss all of the other common or garden-variety explanations for the so-called European miracle. Some additional explanations will be mentioned in various contexts at later points in this book. But I hope that the discussion in this chapter has sufficiently made the point that no characteristic of Europe’s environ­ ment, Europe’s people, or Europe’s culture, at any time prior to 1492, can be convincingly shown to have had anything to do with the fact that Europe developed while other civilizations did not do so.

I will try, in the next two chapters, to show that the whole question must be phrased in a different way and answered in a different way. Europe did not rise, relative to the other civilizations, prior to 1492. When Europe did rise, after 1492, this reflected, not some special quality of “Europeanness,” but the immense wealth which came into Europe as a result of colonialism in the sixteenth century and thereafter.

NOTES

1. Although Eric L. Jones’s 1981 book T h e European Miracle popularized the phrase “the European miracle,” it had been in use for a long time with the same essential meaning: the unique rise of Europe before or during the Middle Ages. N ot every historian would describe this as a “miracle,” but the term has wide acceptance, as evidence the fact that an international symposium entitled “T he European Miracle” was held at Cambridge University in 1985.

2. Apparently my 1976 article, “W here Was Capitalism Bom ?” was the first publication to reject the “miracle” theory absolutely, that is, without qualification. In 1990 Samir Amin, commenting on a later paper of mine, indicated his basic

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agreement with this rejectionist position. (Am in, “Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A C om m ent,” 1990; Blaut, “Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism,” 1989; also see Blaut, “Fourteen Ninety-Two,” 1992; and Am in, “On Jim Blaut’s ‘Fourteen Ninety-Two,’” 1992.) A few other historians have taken positions approaching this one; their views are discussed later in this chapter.

3. A n other seminal work was Cyril Black’s T h e Dynamics o f Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (1 9 6 6 ). Other such works in various fields will be discussed later in this chapter.

4. Perhaps one reason was the maturation of the discipline of history itself. A nother was the influence, not entirely salutary, of positivistic scientific method on history, which led to an attempt to specify variables and “factors,” and, if possible, quantify each of them. A n oth er reason was the loss of faith in the nineteenth-century idea of inevitable progress: after nearly a half century of chaos and war, progress definitely did not appear to be something natural and inevitable; it had to be explained and also produced. Still a third reason was the general secularization of European thought, including history, such that human events could not be assumed to reflect guidance of a higher power. A nother reason, possibly a very important one, was the general development of academic disciplines, and their involvement in (and nutrition from) international and domestic policy. This implied that each discipline, seeing the world with some degree of bias in favor of its own subject-as-factor (for economists, the market factor; for psychologists, the motivation factor; for sociologists, the demographic factor and the social-structural factor; for geographers, the resource factor; etc.) tended to argue in favor of historical models that treated our factor as crucial and those of others as secondary. Since many social scientists wrote history in this process, this led to some special pleading.

5 . 1 do not mean to imply that all of this was a dominant theory for the discipline of history as a whole. T he great majority of historical scholars worked on smaller problems, carefully delving into events and developing limited explanations for those events. T he modernization perspective influenced some of the smaller generalizations, for instance proffering explanations in which the factors most supportive of modemizationism were favored— factors like population, technology, and the like. And there were some areas of research where lack of attention to the history of non-Europe was a critical source of error (most notably, as we will see, in studies of the history of European technology). In addition, there were (and are) many different points of view in the vast and diverse field of professional history, so it would be questionable to characterize a particular historiographic period as being dominated by a particular governing theory (or “paradigm”). I suspect that my own concern with the body of literature relating to the “European miracle” problem probably leads me to overemphasize the significance of the modernization view on history as a whole. It should also be noticed that most of the prominent writers about the specific problem of explaining the unique rise of Europe were specialist historians— economic historians, historical sociologists, and so forth— and not historians of the standard breed.

6. Cabral, Unity and Struggle (1 9 7 9 ). 7. As to the present and future, Third World intellectuals tended to make two

arguments. Those who supported the idea of a capitalist form of development argued that economic development must consist of the defense of native capital against the corrosive diffusion into one’s country of the economic and political dominance of European countries and corporations. For socialists, influence and dominance by international capitalism quite obviously had to be rejected. Both groups tended to

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adopt “dependency theory” or “underdevelopment theory,” which was a theory both of history and of modern social processes and development. A relatively small minority of Third World intellectuals, usually reflecting the thinking and interests of the very wealthy and very right-wing sectors, welcomed the idea of economic domination by foreign capitalist interests. Since the wealthy social sectors dominated most Third World societies, this minority point of view often determined policy. Also, it received much more prominence than it deserved in the journals of the First World.

8. See James, A History o f Pan-African Revolt (1 9 3 8 ), T h e Black Jacobins (1 9 3 8 ), “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery” (1 9 7 0 ); Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1 9 4 4 ). We discuss these matters in Chapter 4.

9. Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (1 9 7 4 ) and later works. My articles “Geographic Models of Imperialism” (1 9 7 0 ) and “W here Was Capitalism Born?” (1 9 7 6 ) laid out the skeleton of a general theory.

1 0 . 1 deal with this matter in T h e National Question (1987b ). 11. See Van Leur’s 1934 essay “O n Early Indonesian trade,” reprinted in his

Indonesian Trade and Society (1 9 5 5 ). 12. Duyvendak, Ma H u a n Re-examined (1 9 3 3 ); Needham and collaborators,

Science and Civilization in C hina, published in 6 volumes between 1965 and 1984; Wheatley, T h e Golden Khersonese (1 9 6 1 ) and T h e Pivot o f the Fo u r Quarters ( 1 9 7 1 ); Elvin, The Pattern o f the Chinese Past (1 9 7 3 ).

13. Amin, Unequal Development (1 9 7 6 ), Eurocentrism (1 9 8 8 ), “Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism: A Com m ent” (1 9 9 0 ).

14 Bernal, Black A thenay vol. 1 (1 9 8 7 ) and vol. 2 (1 9 9 1 ). 15. Mention should also be made of Eric W olfs 1982 book Europe and the Peoples

Without History which provides a useful and important survey of the history of both European and non-European civilizations and shows how unconvincing is the theory that non-European civilizations, historically, were stagnant and unprogressive (that they were “peoples without history”). Wolf, however, stops short of questioning the truly crucial Eurocentric belief that Europeans were more progressive than non-Europeans in several ways that are crucial to the “European miracle” theory, and so he does not directly confront that theory. (It should be noted that most mainstream historians no longer argue that non-European civilizations are, or were, totally unprogressive, totally “unhistorical,” arguing instead about slow rates of change, “blockages” inhibiting change, and the like— a difference of phrasing which, as we will see, is not always a difference of argument.)

16. It is always risky to try to explain broad changes of fashion in scholarship, especially when the changes are still underway, so this interpretation cannot be more than a hunch, or hypothesis. Scholarly attitudes toward the Third World were very positive in the period of anticolonial and civil rights struggles. After the late 1960s the mood changed. N ot only did more conservative views come to dominate the Western world, but rather unexpected difficulties emerged in the Third World itself: national conflicts, failure of development programs, and more. Western scholarship had never really abandoned the traditional view of Europe and its relations to non-Europe, including the diffusionist view of colonialism, and it appears that this older paradigm, never abandoned, simply became, once again, thoroughly dominant. Certainly the attention that had been paid previously to dependency theory and related views fell away among mainstream scholars. Among Marxists the process was even more dramatic, because it was less expected. In brief, Eurocentric Marxists who dismissed the role of the Third World both historically and in the present now became virtually

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the only Marxists within the academic world to pronounce upon issues related to the Third World. It became quite fashionable to insist, once again, that only the working class of the advanced capitalist countries can bring about socialism because each stage of history commences in this part of the world (Inside) before it spreads to the rest of the world (Outside). In the conservative camp, not only did Eurocentric views regain their hegemony, but one began, now, to hear whispers of views not far distant from racism: views about Third World peoples not having the potential to develop.

17. See Brenner, “T he Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Sm ithian Marxism” (1 9 7 7 ), “Agrarian class structure and economic develop­ ment in pre-industrial Europe” (1 9 8 5 ), “The Agrarian roots of European capitalism” (1 985b ); Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1 9 7 4 ), Lineages o f the Absolute State (1 9 7 4 ); Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer o f Capitalism (1 9 8 0 ).

18. I will discuss only the more important beliefs, perhaps neglecting a few of these. And I will give just enough evidence to show that these beliefs are not self-evidently true. Much fuller evidence is given, to dispute some of the beliefs, in Chapters 3 and 4.

19. See Chapter 1, note 2. 20. Bowler, The Invention o f Progress (1 9 8 9 ); Harris, T h e Rise o f Anthropological

Theory (1 9 6 8 ); Gossett, Race: The History o f an Idea in Am erica (1 9 6 3 ); Jackson, Race and Racism: Essays in Social Geography (1 9 8 7 ); Stocking, R a ce, C u ltu re, and Evolution (1 9 6 8 ); Trigger, A History o f Archeological Thought (1 9 8 9 ).

21. See Bernal, Black Athena, vol. 1 (1 9 8 7 ). 22. See Gossett, Race (1 9 6 3 ). 23. Blaut, “The Theory of Cultural Racism” (1 9 9 2 ). 24. “Hereditary neuralgia of the presumably strong tendency toward hysteria

and autohypnosis of the Indian . . . ” Max Weber, The Religion o f India (1 9 6 7 ), p. 387. This postulate is basic to Weber’s analysis of Brahminism as prime cause for India’s lack of development.

25. “[The] . . . negroes long ago showed themselves unsuitable for factory work and the operation of machines; they have not seldom sunk into a cataleptic sleep. Here is one case in economic history where tangible racial distinctions are present” Weber, G eneral Economic History (1 9 8 1 ), p. 379. Although Weber says here that this is merely “one case” of racial influences, note that the case is crucial for Weber’s analysis both of “rationality” and of modernization; the “racial distinctions” here separate out Africans in a fundamental way: a clear case of moderate yet crucial racism. In the same vein, “it was found that the American Indians were entirely unsuitable for plantation labor” (p. 2 9 9 ).

26. Weber, The Religion of China (1 9 5 1 ), pp. 2 3 1 -2 3 2 . Weber considers these to be “racial qualities of the Chinese” (p. 230) although cultural factors may be involved.

27. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o f Capitalism (1 9 5 8 ), p. 30. Weber says here that “it would be natural to suspect that the most important reason” for the rationality of the Occident lies in “differences of heredity,” and “the importance of biological heredity,” he thinks, is “very great” (p. 3 0 ). But we do not yet know how to measure its influence, so our attention should focus mainly on the cultural factors (pp. 3 0 - 3 1 ) . This was typical moderate racism (as I call it) for the time the work was published (1 9 0 4 - 1 9 0 5 ).

28. I have not discussed the question whether biological racism remains important today as a genuinely implicit theory, that is, one still accepted but not consciously so. I suspect that it does. Some Eurocentric historians hold to positions regarding individual differences between Europeans and non-Europeans that are so

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extreme, and so bigoted, that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least a few of them may hold to an implicitly racist infratheory, perhaps unconsciously believing, that is, that the inferiority of non-Europeans is genetically determined.

29. Among many sources on the racism fallacy, see Franz Boas’ classic book, Race, Language, and Culture (1 9 4 8 ); also Blum, Pseudoscience and Mental Ability (1 9 7 8 ); Gossett, Race (1 9 6 5 ); Haller, Outcasts from Evolution (1 9 7 1 ); Jackson, Race and Racism (1 9 8 7 ); Magubane, T h e Ties that Bind: African-A m erican Consciousness and Africa (1 9 8 7 ); Gill and Levidow, Anti-Racist Science Teaching (1 9 8 7 ).

30. The idea that demographic behavior is not fully under social control, is a primordial biological fact or factor, seems to underlie the thinking of most Eurocentric historians (conspicuously Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, and John Hall). T he basic proposition seems to be that population will necessarily grow beyond the rational limits, and so overpopulation must result unless societies find nondemographic solutions, notably by increasing food supply to feed the inexorably increasing population. See, for instance, Michael Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power, vol. 1 (1 9 8 6 ): If agricultural yields had not increased in medieval Europe, “the continent would . . . have experienced a similar Malthusian cycle every century or so— and would not have generated capitalism” (p. 4 0 2 ). This view is even encountered, occasionally, in the radical and feminist movements. Note the following view put forward by a Marxist-feminist: “[We] assume (given the ubiquity of the sex drive . . .) that the total number of conceptions in a population will tend to exceed those desired within a given incentive structure, and this unintended surplus will be greater, the more imperfect are the means at hand. . . . A given fertility pattern then is taken to be ‘rational’ . . . except for a small but variable excess [of births],” Seccombe, “Marxism and Demography,” (1 9 8 3 ), p. 31. The context is a discussion of European medieval social evolution, but the argument is given mainly in support of Brenner’s theory about the strictly European rise of capitalism. Most radicals and feminists reject Malthusianism and would reject Seccombe’s view as Malthusian.

31. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 3. Part of the passage is a quotation. 32. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 219. 33. Hall, Powers and Liberties: T h e Causes and Consequences o f the Rise o f the West

(1 9 8 5 ), p. 131. Italics added. 34. As F. Hassan points out, “Among human populations the practice of

population control in one form or another is universal.” ( “Demographic Archeology,” 1978, p. 71.)

35. Some families will of course have more conceptions than desired, and others fewer, because birth control techniques are imperfect, but the average for the larger group will be broadly in line with the group’s values and population targets. The techniques run the gamut from variable age of marriage and variable dowry or bride price, to complexity of marriage rules (defining who, in a kin system, is eligible to be one’s spouse), to timing of sexual relations, to the use of antifertility and abortive devices, to infanticide, and other practices.

36. Much of the scholarship comes from India, where colonial ideology used to claim that poverty is a result of people having too many children. Now demographers and other social scientists have disproven this myth. See, for instance, Mamdani, T h e Myth o f Population Control (1 9 7 2 ), and Nag, “How Modernization C an Also Increase Fertility” (1 9 8 0 ). For Africa, see, for example, Kitching, “Proto-Industrialization and Demographic Change” (1 9 8 3 ); Swindell, “Domestic Production, Labor Mobility, and Population Change in West Africa, 1 9 0 0 -1 9 8 0 ” (1 9 8 1 ); Cordell and Gregory, the introduction to African Population and Capitalism (1 9 8 7 ).

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37. See, for instance, numerous studies showing the plasticity of birthrates, including Nag “How Modernization C an Also Increase Fertility” (1 9 8 0 ), Collyer, Birth Rates in Latin Am erica (1 9 6 5 ), and Harewood, “Population Growth in Grenada” (1 9 6 6 ).

38. See Aston and Philpin, eds., T h e B renner Debate (1 9 8 5 ), especially the introduction by R. Hilton.

39. Perhaps more readily, because the Malthusian explanation for poverty in Third World countries has been a rather troublesome issue for scholars and planners in these countries, and it has been important to show that poverty in their countries is not somehow caused by the demographic misbehavior of ordinary people.

40. For instance Montesquieu, in T h e Spirit o f the Laws ([1748] 1949) “People are . . . more vigorous in cold climates” (pt. xiv.2). “There are countries where the excess of heat enervates the body, and renders men . . . slothful and dispirited” (pt. xv.7).

41. “Africa” almost always refers to “Africa south of the Sahara” in the discourse I am criticizing, so I will use “Africa” in the same sense in the present discussion.

42. Blaut, “T he Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems” (1 9 6 3 ). 43. See, for example, Collins and Roberts, eds., Capacity for Work in the Tropics

(1 9 8 8 ), which fails to find convincing evidence suggesting negative tropical effects. 44. The two citations (Gilfillan, “The Coldward Course of Progress,” 1920, and

Lambert, “The Role of Climate in the Economic Development of Nations,” 1971) are hardly indicative of modern scholarly literature.

45. India’s “debilitating climate” is one reason why India fell behind Europe, according to Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 198.

46. Among the pioneer works which have importance for peasant agriculture, we may mention Fred Hardy’s “Some Aspects of Tropical Soils” (1 9 3 6 ) and various of his articles in Tropical Agriculture, and the work of Robert Pendleton (especially Pendleton, “Land Use in North-Eastern Thailand,” 1943, and Prescott and Pendleton, Latentes and Lateritic Soils, 1952), and G. Milne “A Soil Reconnaissance Journey Through Parts of Tanganyika Territory” (1 9 4 7 ). The first comprehensive textbook on tropical soils embodying modern knowledge is Mohr and van Baren, Tropical Soils (1 9 5 4 ).

47. See Nye and Greenland, T h e Soil U nder Shifting Cultivation (1 9 6 0 ); Blaut, “T he Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture” (1 9 6 2 ); Ahn, West African Soils (1 9 7 0 ).

48. See Miller, Way o f Death (1 9 8 8 ); Curtin, T h e Rise and Fall o f the Plantation Com plex (1 9 9 0 ). T he view is echoed in many world history textbooks, for example, Roberts, T h e Hutchinson History o f T h e World (1 9 8 7 ), pp. 54 —56; McNeill, A World History (1 9 6 7 ), pp. 2 7 3 -2 7 8 .

49. See Wilken, Good Farm ers: Traditional Agricultural Resource M anagement in M exico and C entral Am erica (1 9 8 7 ); also Nye and Greenland, T h e Soil U nder Shifting Agriculture (1 9 6 0 ); Blaut, “The Ecology of Tropical Farming Systems” (1 9 6 3 ).

50. Denevan, T h e Native Population o f the Americas in 1 4 9 2 (1 9 7 6 ). 51. See Cockburn and Hecht, T h e Fate o f the Forest (1 9 8 9 ). 52. These marginal areas often are regions in which agriculture is practiced, in

preference to some less intensive system of land use, because human communities have been pushed off better land by historical forces, notably colonialism.

53. For a typical instance, the Oxford historian J. M. Roberts, in his popular world history textbook, The Hutchinson History o f the World (1 9 8 7 ), makes the following quite ignorant statement: “Probably the greatest importance of [the] spread of iron-working [in tropical Africa] was the difference it made to agriculture. It made possible a new penetration o f the forests, new tilling o f the soil (which may be

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connected with the arrival of new food-crops from Asia This suggests once again the important limiting factor of the African environment. Most of the continent’s history is the story of response to influences from the outside [including iron-working and new crops]” (pp. 5 1 1 - 5 1 2 ) . African farmers, like farmers in Europe and many other regions, practiced agriculture with stone tools before iron arrived, and continued to do so afterward whenever and wherever iron was hard to obtain. O n the age of ironworking in tropical Africa, see, for example, W ai-Andah, “West Africa Before the Seventh Century” (1 9 8 1 ) and Sinclair, “Archeology in Eastern Africa” (1 9 9 1 ).

54. See, for example, Roberts (note 53 above); also Irwin, “Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Garraty and Gay, eds. T h e Columbia History o f the W orld (1 9 8 1 ), p. 299.

55. See for instance Irvine’s classical work, A Textbook o f West African Agriculture (1 9 3 4 ); Coursey, Yams (1 9 6 7 ).

56. According to Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), “the Negroid peoples . . . . were still pushing east and south into the territories of the pygmies and the bushmen when the Boers undertook the Great Trek north from the Cape in the 1830s,” (p. 155). Also see Roberts T h e Hutchinson History o f the World (1 9 8 7 ), p. 178.

57. Curtin, Economic Change in Pre-Colonial A frica (1 9 7 5 ); Curtin, T h e Rise and Fall of the Plantation Com plex (1 9 9 0 ); Miller, Way o f Death (1 9 8 8 ).

58. See Wisner and Mbithi, “Drought in Eastern Kenya” (1 9 7 4 ); Wisner, Power and N eed in Africa (1 9 8 9 ); O ’Keefe and Wisner, “African Drought: T he State of the Game” (1 9 7 5 ).

59. The same arguments apply, with no need for qualification, in Western Hemisphere agriculture. In relatively limited parts of the South Am erican rain forest the ecosystem is so fragile, as a result of local geological conditions (rocks forming infertile kaolinitic clay soils in some areas, almost pure sands in other areas), that cropping systems must employ shifting agriculture (or tree crops). But such areas are the exception within the present-day distribution of rain forest environments. In general, the great sweep of Amazonian and Guianan rain forest is a zone of nonsedentary agriculture because of cultural-historical factors, notably depopulation and the massive increase in cattle ranching. It is in fact cattle ranching, and not shifting agriculture, that leads to agriculturally caused long-term environmental degradation in the rainforest region, because (1 ) ranchers burn forest to the maximum extent possible and without control, in order to expand the area of pasture, and (2 ) the resulting pasture leads to steady soil degradation because coarse pasture grasses do not maintain the soil ecosystem as does the original forest. Shifting cultivators, by contrast, burn only under controlled conditions, burn small areas only, and carefully encourage the regrowth of forest. If the forest disappears, their livelihood disappears. Shifting agriculturists should not be blamed for deforestation anywhere in the humid tropics. See H echt and Cockburn, T h e Fate o f the Forest (1 9 8 9 ); Blaut, “T he Nature and Effects of Shifting Agriculture” (1 9 6 3 ).

60. Buckle, T he History o f Civilization in England, 2nd ed., (1 9 1 3 ), chap. 2. Also see Bowler, T h e Invention o f Progress (1 9 8 9 ), pp. 2 8 -2 9 .

61. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1 9 7 6 ), p. 5 13n. 62. Jones in fact manages to use both of the opposing theories toward the same

end. In wetter regions of Africa “living was easy.” In drier areas “agriculture was not productive.” Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 154. Also see Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (1 9 8 8 ).

63. “In Africa the bountifulness and extent of the land makes for a mobile peasantry, necessarily therefore poor material on which to build states. Something like

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this is probably true of all slash-and-burn agriculture,” John Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 27. ( “Slash-and-burn agriculture” is shifting agriculture.)

64. Laibman, “Modes of Production and Theories of Transition” (1 9 8 4 ), p. 284. However, Laibman’s overall argument is not at all Eurocentric.

65. Buckle, History o f Civilization in England, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (1 9 1 3 ), p. 93: “[The] great plagues by which Europe has at different periods been scourged, have, for the most part, proceeded from the East, which is their natural birthplace, and where they are most fatal. Indeed, of those cruel diseases now existing in Europe, scarcely one is indigenous; and the worst of them were imported from tropical countries in and after the first century of the Christian era.”

66. T he theory that the HIV virus which causes AIDS in humans is another one of these African plagues descending upon the Western World may very well be just the newest myth in this old diffusionist tradition. W hether or not this virus originated in Africa, which has not been proven, the myth has already taken on ugly overtones, as in the completely unfounded (yet classical) belief that AIDS was transmitted from monkeys to humans because of some strange sexual practices in some obscure African tribes. (This myth is naively reported in Shannon and Pyle, “The Origin and Diffusion of A ID S,” 1989. See the critique of this paper by Watts and Okello, “Medical Geography and A ID S,” 1990. Also see R. C. and R. J. Chirimuuta, A ID S , A frica and racism, 2nd ed., 1989.)

67. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1 9 7 6 ), p. 43. 68. See, for instance, Giblin, “Trypanosomiasis Control in African History: A n

Evaded Issue?” (1 9 9 0 ); Turshen, “Population Growth and the Deterioration of Health: Mainland Tanzania, 1 9 2 0 -1 9 6 0 ” (1 9 8 7 ).

69. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (1 9 5 7 ). 70. See Venturi “T he History of the Concept of ‘Oriental Despotism’ in

Europe” (1 9 6 3 ); P. Anderson, Lineages o f the Absolute State (1 9 7 4 ); B. Chandra, “Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule” (1 9 8 1 ).

71. Similar judgments are still commonly made by theoreticians of the European miracle. For instance, John Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 12: “Chinese society was stuck in the same stage for over two thousand years, while Europe, in comparison, progressed like a champion hurdler.”

72. And also earlier. It is discussed for instance by Montesquieu, Bernier, Adam Smith, and Hegel (see, for instance, “Introduction,” and “The Oriental World” in Hegel’s Philosophy o f History, 1956). Also see the historical reviews in Venturi, “The History of the Concept of ‘Oriental Despotism’ in Europe” (1 9 6 3 ); P. Anderson, Lineages o f the Absolute State (1 9 7 4 ); and B. Chandra, “Karl Marx, his Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Review” (1 9 8 1 ).

73. This idea, too, had its forerunners. Possibly Marx got the idea from Karl Ritter, his professor of geography at Berlin.

74. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (1 9 7 5 ). 75. Marx and Engels considered other factors as well, and it is fair to say that

their analysis remained speculative. I believe that Engels withdrew from the idea of “Oriental despotism” in late life. See the discussion of this topic in P. Anderson, Lineages o f the Absolute State (1 9 7 4 ); Blaut, “Colonialism and the Rise of Capitalism” (1 9 8 9 ); and B. Chandra, “Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies, and Colonial Rule” (1 9 8 1 ).

76. See Laibman, “Modes of Production and Theories of Transition” (1 9 8 4 ), and Bailey and Llobera, T h e Asiatic M ode o f Production (1 9 8 1 ).

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77. Weber, T h e Agrarian Sociology o f A n cient Civilizations (1 9 7 6 ), pp. 84, 131, 157, T h e Religion o f China (1 9 5 1 ), pp. 16, 21, 25, and “T he Origin of Seigneurial Proprietorship,” part 1, chap. 3, esp. pp. 5 6 - 5 7 in G eneral Economic History (1 9 8 1 ). Also see McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1 9 7 6 ), pp. 93, 207, 259.

78. Weber, T h e Agrarian Sociology o f A n cient Civilizations (1 9 7 6 ), pp. 1 5 7 -1 5 8 . Also, on p. 84: “The basis of the economy [in Egypt] was irrigation, for this was the crucial factor in all exploitation of land resources. Every new settlement demanded construction of a canal . . . Now canal construction is necessarily a large-scale operation, demanding some sort of collective social organization; it is very different from the relatively individualistic activity of clearing virgin forest. Here then is the fundamental economic cause for the overwhelmingly dominant position of the monarchy in Mesopotamia [and] Egypt.

79. See, for instance, Denevan, T h e Aboriginal Cultural Geography o f the Llanos de Mojos o f Bolivia (1 9 6 6 ), and “Hydraulic Agriculture in the Am erican Tropics” (1 9 8 2 ), on ancient drained-field or raised-field agriculture in the tropics; Golson, “No Room at the Top: Agricultural Intensification in the New Guinea Highlands” (1 9 7 7 ), on ancient drainage in highland New Guinea; Doolittle, Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric M exico (1 9 9 0 ), on drainage and early agriculture in M exico; Harrison and Turner Pre-Hispanic M aya Agriculture (1 9 7 8 ), on early drainage in the Maya lowlands.

80. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), pp. 8 - 9 . 81. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), pp. 1 2 -1 3 , 2 7 -2 8 , 36, 4 2 - 3 , 53, 59, 99,

102, 137. 82. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 11. Also see pp. 41, 123, 132. 83. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ). Also see his essay, “European

Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation” (1 9 8 8 ). 84. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 94. 85. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 179. 86. The fact that Mann attributes the ancient European takeoff mainly to

chariot warfare and iron-plow rainfall-farming, yet concedes that both innovations were- initiated by Middle Easterners themselves, suggests to me that M ann’s fundamental causal reasoning centers on the notion of European rationality: regardless of who invented these things, the Europeans put the things to work. T hat this Weberian notion is indeed basic for Mann will be demonstrated later in this chapter.

87. Bray, Agriculture, vol. 6, part 2, of Needham and collaborators, Science and Civilization in China (1 9 8 4 ).

88. Blaut, “Two Views of Diffusion” (1 9 7 7 ). 89. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), pp. 2 4 7 ,4 0 6 ,4 0 8 , 4 1 2 , 5 0 4 -5 1 0 ,

520, 530, 5 3 9 -5 4 0 . 90. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 509. 91. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 99. 92. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 110. 93. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 10. 94. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 47. 95. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 8. Jones makes the common error of

assuming that productivity per worker is low in irrigated agriculture in comparison with unirrigated agriculture. This is not the case. Even with draft animals, medieval peasant production per worker was not high. And draft animals are used in irrigated farming, abundantly so in some Asian wet-rice farming systems.

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96. Mann, “European Development” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 10, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 406; Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), pp. 90, 227; Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (1 9 8 9 ), p. 150; McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1 9 7 6 ), p. 295.

97. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 , chap. 5 ). Mann in fact builds a theory of ancient warfare upon the basis of this sort of calculation, here also ignoring the fact that armies then as now provision themselves and their animals on the route of march.

98. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), chap. 2 and elsewhere. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 132, makes the same claim, citing Jones.

99. Hall, Powers andLiberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. I l l ; Jones T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), pp. 9 0 ,1 0 5 ,1 0 7 , 2 2 6 -2 2 7 ; Mann, “European Development: Approaching a Historical Explanation” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 10; Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 406.

100. Occasionally “the criminal mind” was seen to reflect another dimension of contrast.

101. Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (1 9 6 6 ). 102. See, for instance, Boas, T h e M ind o f Primitive M an (1 9 3 8 ); Radin, Primitive

M a n as Philosopher (1 9 2 7 ); M. Mead, Growing Up in N ew G uinea (1 9 3 0 ). 103. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (1 9 8 7 ), p. 59; Bowler, T h e Invention of

Progress (1 9 8 9 ), p. 66; W hitm an “From Philology to Anthropology in Mid- Nineteenth-Century Germany” (1 9 8 4 ); Bernal, Black A thena, vol. 1 (1 9 8 7 ); Said, Orientalism (1 9 7 8 ). A recent expression of this theory came in a Soviet debate about “Oriental despotism” (Lelekov, “Round-Table: State and Law in the Ancient O rient,” 1978). L. Lelekov, a historian, claimed that words meaning “freedom” and “right” were basic in the original Indo-European language or languages but not in Near Eastern languages, and asserted that this must have affected “social thinking” (p. 190). This contention was refuted by the philologist V. Ivanov (p. 193).

104. See Dalai, “T he Racism of Jung” (1 9 8 8 ). In Jung’s work, see in particular Psychological Types (1 9 7 1 ) (for instance: “[If] we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of the individual,” p. 10); M emories, D ream s, Reflections (1 9 6 3 ), and “The Dreamlike World of India,” in Civilization in Transition (1 9 2 7 ). See also the 1954 work by Jung’s disciple Erich Neumann, T he Origins and History o f Consciousness (for instance: “The evolution of consciousness as a form of creative evolution is the peculiar achievement of Western man . . . The creative character of consciousness is a central feature of the cultural canon of the W e s t. . . In stationary cultures, or in primitive societies where the original features of human culture are still preserved, the earliest stages of man’s psychology predominate,” pp. x v iii-xix).

105. Piaget, Psychology and Epistemology (1 9 7 1 ), p. 61. 106. See, for example, Werner and Kaplan, Symbol Formation (1 9 6 4 ). 107. See the first 16 volumes (through 1985) o f T he Journal o f Cross-Cultural

Psychology for a great many examples of this phenomenon. For this period something like one-tenth of all the empirical articles in this U . S. journal were studies by white Southern Africans purporting to show the cognitive inferiority of black Africans.

108. Rogers, T h e Diffusion o f Innovations (1 9 6 2 ); Rogers and Shoemaker, Communication o f Innovations (1 9 7 1 ), pp. 1 8 7 -1 9 1 ; McClelland, T h e Achieving Society (1 9 6 1 ); Hagen, On the Theory o f Social Change (1 9 6 2 ) and “A Framework for Analyzing Economic and Political Change,” in Brookings Institution, ed., Develop-

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ment of the Emerging Countries: A n A genda for Research (1 9 6 2 ), pp. 1 - 3 9 . 1 have cited only the initial statements: much literature emerged from these works.

109. S. Marglin, “Losing Touch: The Cultural Conditions of Worker Accommodation and Resistance,” in R and S. Marglin, eds., Dominating knowledge: Development, C ulture, and Resistance (1 9 9 0 ).

110. Sack, Conceptions o f Space in Social Thought (1 9 8 0 ). Geographers prominent in the diffusion paradigm discussed here are L. Brown (T h e Diffusion o f Innovations, 1981) and R Gould (Spatial Diffusion, 1969 ). On peasant traditionalism in relation to natural hazards, see G. W hite, ed., Natural Hazards (1 9 7 4 ), as an example of the abundant literature. I criticize these and other arguments about non-Western nonrationality in Blaut, “Two Views of Diffusion” (1 9 7 7 ), “Diffusion- ism: A Unitarian Critique” (1 9 8 7 a ), and “Natural Mapping” (1 9 9 1 ).

111. In the field of education in the United States the dominant standardized college entrance tests (SA T and A C T ) are skewed by culture-specific and sex-specific internal (as well as situational) characteristics, such that women do more poorly than men although they actually perform at higher levels in terms of university grades, while the A C T and SAT test scores of Latinos (African-Americans have not yet been studied in this way), which are very low, have no correlation whatever with their performance in college. Thus the tests effectively minimize female and minority college attendance. W hy the tests are almost universally used, even so, is a fascinating question. The same biases are so prominent in IQ testing that such tests have been barred as diagnostic instruments in California schools. T he “primitive mind” and “primitive languages” biases sometimes combine, as in U .S . debates about the so-called “English-only” issue and about the question whether non-European literature deserves to be included in the college curriculum along with European literature. In Boston not long ago, 30% of Hispanic children aged six to eight were not attending elementary school because their inability to speak English had been judged to be evidence of mental retardation, and Boston claimed not to have sufficient resources to educate these children in “special schools.” Testing in general in U . S. education remains very racist.

112. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror o f N ature (1 9 8 0 ), and earlier works by Dewey (for instance T h e Quest fo r Certainty, 1929), W hitehead (for instance, Modes o f Thought, 1938), and G. H. Mead (for instance, Philosophy o f the A ct, 1938).

113. This is a general assessment. Some anthropologists continue to maintain either the “primitive mind” doctrine or the closely related “traditional mind” doctrine. A n example of the latter is George Foster’s well-known and influential book Traditional Cultures (1 9 6 2 ), of the former, Hallpike’s T he Foundations o f Primitive Thought (1 9 7 9 ). For a critique, see Schweder, “Cultural Psychology: W h at Is It?” (1 9 9 0 ).

114. On the question of Weber’s use of “rationality,” its basal status in his theorizing, and yet its uncertain definition and provenance, see, for instance: C ohen’s introduction to the 1981 ed. of Weber’s General Economic History ( 1981), pp. xxv -xxv ii; Lowith, Max W eber and Karl M arx (1 9 8 2 ), pp. 40 —42, 53 —54, n. 49; Freund, T h e Sociology o f M ax W eber (1 9 6 8 ), pp. 1 4 0 -1 4 9 . In Weber, see General Economic History (1 9 8 1 ), chaps. 29, 30, T h e Protestant Ethic and the Spirit o f Capitalism (1 9 5 8 ), pp. 1 3 -3 1 , 5 9 -6 0 , 79, 1 1 8 -1 2 0 , 191, n. 19, 265, n. 31, T h e Religion o f China (1 9 5 1 ), chap. 8, T h e Religion of India (1 9 6 7 ), p. 387, and other works':

115. Weber, General Economic History (1 9 8 1 ), p. 161. Also see pp. 339, 3 5 5 -3 6 8 . Weber makes a large number of comments about the irrationality of Asians.

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116. Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 2 (1 9 6 8 ), pp. 1 2 1 2 -1 3 7 4 . 117. Numbers in parentheses are page numbers in T h e European Miracle. 118. T he ecologists’ term “commensalism” refers to a form of tight interspecific

cooperation between animal species, but hardly ever is it applied to humans. 119. Typical of Jones’s method is to find some objectionable feature of very early

Asian society, compare it with some pleasing feature of modern, post-industrial- revolution European society, and then treat both features as though they were permanent characteristics of the respective societies, giving a picture of awful primitiveness to Asians and marvelous modernity to Europeans thereby.

120. “Frankish feudalism, in many ways proto-typical of later feudalism, was . . . a mixture of the very, very old, deep-rooted drift of ‘European’ peasant society and of the brand new the opportunistic, the ‘un-European,’ ” Mann, “European Develop­ m ent” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 16.

121. Mann, “European Development” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 17. Also see his The Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), for instance pp. 190, 195, 213, 377, 404, 41 2 , 510. ( “A t the end of all these processes stood one organic, medium-sized, wet-soil island state, perfectly situated for take-off: Great Britain,” p. 5 1 0 .)

122. Mann, “European Development” (1 9 8 8 ), pp. 8 - 9 , 1 1 -1 2 , 1 5 -1 8 and T he Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), pp. 3 7 7 -3 7 8 , 3 9 7 -3 9 8 , 4 0 2 -4 0 8 , 4 1 2 , 5 0 0 -5 1 0 . Also, on Europe’s rationality and its historical significance, see McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1 9 7 6 ), pp. 4 1 , 97, 1 0 6 -1 0 7 , 236, 238, 249, 256, 259, 264.

123. See P. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1 9 7 4 ), p art3; Finley, T h e Use and A buse o f History (1 9 7 5 ), chap. 6; Aston and Philpin, T h e Brenner Debate (1 9 8 5 ), pp. 3 2 - 3 3 , 4 2 - 5 1 , 59, 63n, 2 1 4 -2 1 5 , 2 3 4 -2 3 6 , 3 0 6 -3 1 6 .

124. W hite, Medieval Technology and Social C hange (1 9 6 2 ), p. 3 8 ); also McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1 9 7 6 ), p. 234.

125. W hite, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 54. 126. Kosambi, Ancient India (1 9 6 9 ), p. 89; R. S. Sharma, Light on Early Indian

Society and Economy (1 9 6 6 ), p. 57. 127. W hite, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 44. 128. W hite, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 56; McNeill,

Plagues and Peoples (1 9 7 6 ), p. 237. 129. See C. T. Smith, An Historical Geography o f Western Europe ( 1967), p. 203;

Darby, T h e Domesday Geography o f Eastern England (1 9 5 2 ). 130. Orwin and Orwin, T he O pen Fields (1 9 6 7 ), chap. 3; C. T. Smith, An

Historical Geography o f Western Europe (1 9 6 7 ), chap. 4. 131. W hite, Medieval Technobgy and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 57. 132. W hite, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 67. 133. W hite, Medieval Technobgy and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 68. 134. Bray, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 6 , part 2 , Agriculture (1 9 8 4 ), pp.

3 0 4 -3 2 8 . 135. W hite, Medieval T echnobgy and Social Change (1 9 6 2 ), p. 76. 136. W hite, Machina E x Deo (1 9 6 8 ). See in particular the essay— quite a famous

one— called “T he Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (chap. 5 ). 137. W hite, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” In W hite, Machina

Ex Deo (1 9 6 7 ), p. 85. 138. W hite, Machina E x D eo (1 9 6 7 ), p. 90. 139. Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China (1 9 5 4 - 1 9 8 4 ). 140. Some historians today simply ignore this evidence and repeat the old

notions about C hina’s lack of technological prowess. See, for example, Roberts, T he Hutchinson History o f the World (1 9 8 7 ), pp. 4 9 3 -4 9 5 , 502.

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141. The terms “Middle Ages” and “medieval” are conventionally used for most or all parts of the Eastern Hemisphere.

142. Needham et al., Science and Civilization in Chin a, vol. 4, part 2 (1 9 6 5 ), chap. 27.

143. Needham et al., Science and Civilization in China vol. 4, part 2 (1 9 6 5 ), p. 3 3 ). Arnold Pacey places the innovation in Korea. See Pacey’s Technology in World History (1 9 9 0 ), p. 56.

144. See, for example, Lopez, “Hard Times and Investment in Culture” (1 9 5 3 ), Thomdyke, “Renaissance or Prenaissance?” (1 9 4 3 ).

145. Cipolla, G u n s, Sails, Empires (1 9 6 5 ), p. 106. 146. Cipolla, G u n s, Sails, Empires (1 9 6 5 ), pp. 1 0 8 -1 0 9 . 147. Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), p. 124. 148. Among the modem states that do not surround such simple ecological core

areas: Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, Sweden, Russia, etc. Prior to the 20th century, perhaps only parts of Great Britain (southern England) and France (the Paris Basin) came close to fitting this highly abstract model, a model that is useful for some purposes but not for the purpose of explaining the political history of the continent. Some of these core areas are nuclei of states; others are not. In modem Southeast Asia, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia fit the model as well as any European case.

149. In this connection, see Dirks, T h e H o lb w C row n (1 9 8 7 ). 150. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), “States and Societies: T he Miracle in

Historical Perspective” (1 9 8 8 ). 151. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), “European Development”

(1 9 8 8 ). 152. This is not the only example of the way arguments centering on the

European state have a way of contradicting one another. T he Roman state is said, on the one hand, by Hall among others, to have been a crucial innovation, the source of many political features characteristic of, and only of, Europe. On the other hand, the Roman state is dismissed by others (including Mann) as just another “imperial state,” like the despotic Oriental states; Europe supposedly innovated politically by avoiding the imperial form of state and developing instead a kind of smaller and somehow more democratic state.

153. Baechler, “The Origins of Modernity: Caste and Feudality (India, Europe and Japan)” (1 9 8 8 ).

154. See, for instance, W hite, M achina E x Deo (1 9 6 8 ); Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), “European Development” (1 9 8 8 ); Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ); Baechler, “The Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ); K. F. Werner, “Political and Social Structures of the W est” (1 9 8 8 ); and Hallam, “The Medieval Social Picture” (1 9 7 5 ).

155. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), p. 135. 156. Mann, “European Development” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 12. 157. Hallam, “The Medieval Social Picture” (1 9 7 5 ), p. 49. 158. K. F. Werner. “Political and Social Structures of the W est” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 172.

This German medievalist argues that the central force underlying the “miracle” was Christianity. He refers here to the Catholic church, to the body of doctrine (C atholic and later also Protestant), to the social and political institutions that were influenced both by church and by doctrine, and to the faith of European people, which, in Werner’s opinion, had much to do with their innovativeness, their sense of “restlessness,” their rationality. Werner acknowledges that many causal factors were at work in bringing about the rise of Europe, and he does not hesitate to claim a role for the natural environment. But it is clear that his theory is primarily based on

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religion. A nd beyond this, one senses th at this scholar himself may see the hand of a Christian god in the rise of Christian Europe.

W erner first of all makes a strong case to the effect that European history maintained a continuity of institutions, and of progress, from the time of the Roman Empire down through the Middle Ages, and that the late Empire established both ecclesiastical and lay institutions which continued down through the Middle Ages and gave that era its character. C hief among the institutions is the Catholic church. W erner wishes to depict the church as having a determining influence on history from the time of its founding. He sees the rise of Europe as a process that was guided throughout by the Christian religion, as institution and doctrine. If Werner were simply presenting a theory of history that accords religion a dominant role, I would not be discussing his views in this book. I would agree that its role has been underemphasized by historians, conservative no less than Marxist. The reason I deal with W erner’s views is that he makes clear his belief that it is not religion in general but the Christian religion which played the historically efficacious role in the European “miracle.” W erner’s views are distinctly Eurocentric. Perhaps the key comm ent is the following:

[If] we had to choose one word that, by itself alone, were capable of expressing an essential factor in what we understand by the “European miracle,” we would choose the philosophical term . . . “unrest” . . . “restlessness” . . . Ruhelosigkeit . . . W hilst Asia and its wisdom and, in its train, the great religions and philosophies, strive toward the art o f . . . seeking out the centre of the soul and of the world, and of resting in God, of having arrived, the European of the European miracle is a man who is always ready to take off once more, once he has arrived . . . But where must be sought the causa causans of this mentality? The spur to anxiety is to be seen in the pangs of sin . . . in the search for pardon and grace. T he importance of the deliverance of the soul gave an hitherto unheard-of prominence to the individual, independent of his social rank, the individual who . . . [does not abandon himself] to destiny . . . [The] sense of responsibility seems to me to be one of the strengths of the Europeans that are to accomplish the “miracle” (p. 185).

Thus: Europe’s religion, Christianity, instills a kind of mentality in “European man” which explains the basic source of the “European miracle.” .

The objection to this is the same one we put forward to all of the notions about Europe’s supposedly unique “rationality.” W hether that putative trait comes from religion (W erner) or from the post-Neolithic European tribes (M ann) or from any other source, the basic objection is: how can you really justify a statement that makes Europeans brighter, better, bolder than non-Europeans, if you accept the fundamental axiom that all human communities have the same ration of mind as all others? It is one thing, and indeed an unexceptionable thing, to credit the human mind with prime causality in culture change, through the innovation of social, technical, and purely intellectual things. But it is something quite different, and quite suspect, to credit the minds of human beings from some communities— and not others— with all of these qualities of innovativeness, restlessness, sense of responsibility, intellectual eagerness, respect for others, and so on, qualities usually summed up in the word “rationality.” Europeans are rational but so too are non-Europeans.

159. See, for example, Palmer, Atlas o f M odem History (1 9 5 7 ); Bj^rklund, H^lmhoe, R$hr, and Lie, Historical Atlas o f the World (1 9 7 0 ); and Kinder and Hilgemann, T h e A n ch or Atlas o f World History, vol. 1 (1 9 7 4 ).

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1 6 0 . 1 discuss this in T h e National Question (1987b ). 161. Padgug, “T he Problem of the Theory of Slavery and Slave Society” (1 9 7 6 ). 162. Baechler, “The Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ). 163. Baechler, in “The Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 39, suggests that we

should “juxtapose the barbarous Europe of the Halstatt period [about 6 0 0 B .C .]. . . and Africa on the verge of colonization in the nineteenth century [ a .d .] .”

164. Baechler finds a true aristocracy also in Japan but believes that Japan failed to emulate Europe for various other reasons.

165. Baechler considers it quite unremarkable that the political chaos of the Dark Ages gave way smoothly to strong states in Europe. “Inevitably” there will be the “reconstitution of larger polities” (Baechler, “T he Origins of Modernity” 1988, p. 5 0). But it is equally inevitable fo r India that the political chaos of 1000 years ago will not be cured and permanently, thereafter, the “polity . . . is not a reality in India” (p. 4 5 ).

166. Baechler, “The Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 59. 167. Baechler, “The Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 53. 168. Baechler, “T he Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 56. 169. Baechler, “T he Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 45. 170. Baechler, “T he Origins of Modernity” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 53. 171. Godelier, Sobre el M odo de Producción Asiático (1 9 6 9 ), p. 58. 172. Brenner, “T he Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of

Neo-Smithian Marxism” (1 9 7 7 ); “Agrarian Class Structure and Econom ic Develop­ ment in Pre-Industrial Europe” (1 9 8 5 , originally published 1 9 76), and “T he Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism” (1 9 8 5 ). After the 1976 article first appeared in the journal, Past and Present, a series of critiques was published in that journal, and Brenner replied in 1982 with the article, “T he Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism.” A volume, T h e B renn er Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial E urope, containing the two Past and Present articles and several critiques, and edited by Aston and Philpin, appeared in 1985.

173. In my opinion the popularity of this thin theory is due principally to two things. First, put forward as a Marxist view, grounded in class struggle, it proves to be, on inspection, a theory that is fairly conventional, if somewhat rural in bias. It seems to follows that class-struggle theories lead to conventional conclusions. And secondly, Brenner uses his theory ( “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” 1977, pp. 7 7 - 9 2 ) to attack the unpopular “Third-Worldist” perspectives of dependency theory, underdevelopment theory, and in particular three other neo-Marxists— Sweezy, Frank, and Wallerstein— who argue that European colonialism had much to do with the later rise of capitalism. Brenner is a thoroughgoing Eurocentric tunnel historian: non-Europe had no important role in social evolution at any historical period. Unaware that colonialism involves capitalist relations of production— see Chapter 4 below— he claims that the extra-European world merely had commercial effects on Europe, whereas the rise of capitalism was in no way a product of commerce: it took place in the countryside of England and reflected class struggle, not trade. See critiques of Brenner collected in Aston and Philpin (1 9 8 5 ) by Hilton, C root and Parker, Wunder, Leroy, Ladurie, Bois, Cooper, and others. Also see Torras, “Class struggle in Catalonia” (1 9 8 0 ) and Hoyle, “Tenure and the land market in early modern England: Or a late contribution to the Brenner debate.” (1 9 9 0 ).

174. Taeuber, in Freedman, Family and Kinship in Chinese Society (1 9 7 0 ). 175. (1) If only one family member is a wageworker, loss of employment is a

disaster. If several are wageworkers, normally some will be earning an income when

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others are laid off. (2 ) If we assume an ability to save a certain percentage of income, multiple income earners will provide a larger absolute amount of savings, that is, capital; and the absolute amount of capital can be critical in entrepreneurship. (3) Having kin to borrow from is useful for small-scale entrepreneurship. (4) Kinfolk can supply unpaid labor. These principles are well known in Third World communities.

176. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective” (1 9 6 5 ), pp. 1 0 1 -1 4 6 . This paper is one of the most widely cited publications on the subject of demography in the European miracle literature.

177. See note 37 above. 178. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective” (1 9 6 5 ), p. 101. 179. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective” (1 9 6 5 ), p. 134. 180. Hajnal concedes that he has only contemporary data for non-Europe, but

merely suggests that historical data would prove his point even more clearly because modern non-European family patterns, in his view, are changing in the direction of European patterns: are being Europeanized. And when “all the qualifications about the data have been made, there can be no doubt that our original generalization remains” ( “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” 1965, p. 106).

181. Stone, T h e Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1 5 0 0 - 1 8 0 0 (1 9 7 7 ), p. 509. 182. Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 408; Crone, Pre-Industrial

Societies (1 9 8 9 ), p. 152; Jones, T h e European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), pp. 1 5 -1 6 ; Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes o f Reproduction 1 3 0 0 - 1 8 4 0 (1 9 8 6 ).

183. Laslett, “T he European Family and Early Industrialization” (1 9 8 9 ). 184. Taeuber, “The Families of Chinese Farmers” (1 9 7 0 ), pp. 6 3 -8 6 . 185. See Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society (1 9 6 6 ), p. 49. 186. See, for example, Handler “Review of Macfarlane, A ., Marriage and love in

England” (1 9 8 9 ); Hilton, “Individualism and the English Peasantry” (1 9 8 0 ); Kertzer, “T he Joint Family Household Revisited: Demographic Constraints and Household Complexity in the European Past” (1 9 8 9 ); and Berkner, “T he Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structures” (1 9 7 5 ), and “T he Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household” (1 9 8 9 ).

187. For instance, G. Lee, “Comparative Perspectives” (1 9 8 7 ), p. 65, points out that “[Many] scholars contend that the majority of families in any society are and always have been nuclear, regardless of the cultural elements favoring extended families.”

188. Macfarlane, T he Origins o f English Individualism (1 9 7 8 ), chap. 1 and “The Cradle of Capitalism” (1 9 8 8 ), p. 344.

189. See, for example, Hilton, “Individualism and the English Peasantry” (1 9 8 0 ) and Handler, “Review of Mcfarlane, A ., Marriage and Love in England” (1 9 8 9 ).

190. “[It] seems likely that [primitive peoples’] patterns of behavior in . . . respect [to fertility and mortality] bore a strong resemblance to those which can be observed in many animals,” Wrigley, Popubtion and History (1 9 6 9 ), p. 37. Wrigley is writing about present-day hunting-gathering-fishing peoples. A “description of the relationship between animal social conventions and the regulation of animal population numbers” is “a convenient point of departure for the study of primitive man” (p. 3 7 ).

191. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies (1 9 8 9 ), p. 153; Hall, Powers and Liberties: T he Causes and Consequences o f the Rise o f the West (1 9 8 5 ), pp. 1 3 0 -1 3 2 ; Jones, T he European Miracle (1 9 8 1 ), pp. 3 , 1 3 - 1 5 , 217—19, 2 2 6 -2 2 7 , 231, and elsewhere; Laslett, “The European Family and Early Industrialization” (1 9 8 9 ), pp. 2 3 5 -2 4 0 ; Macfarlane, “T he Cradle of Capitalism” (1 9 8 8 ), chap. 14; Mann, T h e Sources o f Social Power (1 9 8 6 ), p. 408.

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192. Hall, Powers and Liberties (1 9 8 5 ), pp. 1 3 0 -1 3 1 . 193. Laslett, “The European Family and Early Industrialization” (1 9 8 9 ), p. 237. 194. See C root and Parker, “Agrarian Class Structure and the Development of

Capitalism: France and England Compared” (1 9 8 5 ). This essay, and others in the Aston and Philpin book, T h e B renn er Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in PreAndustrial Europe (1 9 8 5 ), discuss in detail the low level of landownership in medieval Europe.

195. Stone, T h e Family, Sex and Marriage in E ngland, 1 5 0 0 - 1 8 0 0 (1 9 7 7 ), pp. 5 3 -5 4 .

196. Stone, T h e Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1 5 0 0 - 1 8 0 0 (1 9 7 7 ), p. 652.