Over the centuries – even in the present – how have the people living in Europe developed a separate “European” identity by contrasting themselves with an external (and/or internal) “other”, defined religiously, culturally, racially, or any other way?
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FarmerCivilizationasaUnitofWorldHistoryEU.docxCivilization as a Unit of World History: The Place of Eurasia and Europe
Edward Farmer
The History Teacher, 18 (3), May, 1985
As the title suggests, this paper will attempt to put Europe, so to speak, in its place. The problem is how to think about world history without taking on a Europocentric perspective. I have no wish to deny or minimize the important role of Europe and European innovations in the modern period. I do, however, wish to avoid understanding the history of the whole world in terms of European categories. If one is to see world history properly it is crucial to operate with categories that transcend the cultural peculiarities of one region and provide a balanced view of the whole human community. Four main points will be developed: the need to counter Europocentrism; considering European history in a comparative Eurasian context; the importance of Central Asian domination in early modern history; and some general themes to explain the transformation of Europe in modern times.
Problem of Europocentrism
European history needs to be placed in some kind of global context if we are to be able to think clearly about the history of the non-Western or non-European world. Europocentrism is most serious as an intellectual problem. Older colleagues in my department have informed me that as recently as 1960 our survey course on modern Europe was known as world history. An even worse example is art historian Kenneth Clark’s famous television series named “Civilization” – despite the fact it was restricted to Europe. As the discipline of history has become more cosmopolitan in recent decades such casual use of Europocentric terminology has become dated. Even North Americans still have to contend with Europocentric geographical usages that make no sense from North America: the Near East is not close by and the Far East is to our west across the Pacific. Even in the journal of the American Historical Association one finds a category of book reviews entitled “Asia and the East.” Where is this “East,” I wonder, if not in Asia? But more is at stake than mere terminology.
When one approaches world history one has to decide upon a standpoint from which to begin. Here again we confront the problem of Europocentrism. We are all familiar with the world history textbook that is simply a survey of Western Europe with chapters or short sections added to cover the other continents, implying that the core of world history is European history. European expansion is another popular way of organizing world history: here the rest of the world is seen interacting with the dynamic Europeans as mere peripheral elements – an approach that does violence to the integrity of the history of non-European peoples.
Eurasian History: Culture Zones and Civilizations
The way to put European history in its place is to consider it from the perspective of Eurasian history as a whole. Asia is not a meaningful unit – it has no single tradition, culture or civilization; rather, the term “Asia” simply designates the non-European portions of the Eurasian landmass. There are at least three civilizations in Asia that are comparable to Europe in age, scope and cultural complexity. Including European history in this comparative approach to reduces Europe to the status of one case among a class of comparable entities.
If we consider the Eurasian landmass (and perhaps Africa north of the Sahara) to constitute a physical whole of human interaction in the pre-modern period, then we can see Europe as one of a number of comparable subdivisions of that world. These subdivisions, which I will call culture zones, are areas of human habitation in which distinctive cultural constellations evolved. Eurasia contains six principal culture zones: Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. Four of these culture zones – Europe, West Asia, South Asia and East Asia – were the seats of great civilizations. In this context Europe is reduced to the status of one case in a group of six zones, and European civilization is reduced to the status of one case in a group of four comparable civilizations. In each of those four cases we may trace the parallel evolution of distinct high cultures that may be compared in ways that underscore similarities and differences. A word about each of the culture zones /great civilizations is in order.
At the eastern end of the Eurasian landmass, the East Asian culture zone includes the area now occupied by China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, which are the main constituents of East Asian civilization. Physical barriers such as the mountains surrounding Tibet and the deserts and steppe of Mongolia inhibited overland contact with the other civilizations of Eurasia, while the shoreline facing the Pacific and the great distance around peninsular Southeast Asia discouraged easy contact by sea. China was the oldest and largest civilized society in East Asia and the influence of the Chinese writing system can be given credit for much of the shared high culture of the region. South Asian civilization developed on the Indian subcontinent now occupied by Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and the island of Sri Lanka. Formidable physical barriers cut South Asia off from East Asia, but land links in the northwest facilitated interaction with both Central Asia and West Asia, while an extensive coastline encouraged contact with Arabia, eastern Africa and Southeast Asia. Sanskrit was the classical Indian language that transmitted the core of the great tradition and influenced writing systems throughout the subcontinent.
The West Asian culture zone has more physical links to other culture zones than does any other part of Eurasia. To the west it is connected by land and by the Mediterranean to both Europe and northern Africa. On the north and east it is directly attached to Central Asia and South Asia, while the southern coastline facilitated historical contacts with the east coast of Africa, the Indian peninsula and Southeast Asia. Socially and culturally, West Asian civilization had been influenced by the contributions of three dominant peoples from three corners of the region: the Persians in the east, the Arabs in the southwest, and the Turks who came from central Asia to settle in the north. The Arabic and Persian languages have been the most important mediums for the classical learning of West Asia. Located on the westernmost projection of the Eurasian landmass, the European culture zone is connected by land to Central Asia and West Asia and by the Mediterranean to West Asia and North Africa. The western coastline of Europe faced the northern Atlantic which, until modern times, was more of a barrier than a link to other civilizations. Greek and Latin were the classical languages that transmitted the high culture of “western” civilization and influenced the modern languages of the region.
Central Asia and Southeast Asia are two culture zones that were not the seats of major civilizations. For this reason I suggest that we regard them as zones of interaction that evolved culturally through interaction with the great civilizations. Central Asia, the vast inland expanse from Poland to Siberia, consisted of grass-lands, forests and deserts at latitudes often inhospitable to agriculture. Consequently populations were small, cities few, and animal husbandry in the form of pastoral nomadism became a prominent economic activity. Taking advantage of overland lines of communication, Central Asians interacted intensively with the populations of the major civilizations and has also at times extended power over them. Southeast Asia is a culture zone characterized by extreme fragmentation of the land surface. Peninsular Southeast Asia, consisting of Indochina, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula and Burma, is divided internally by mountain chains, jungle and parallel river courses and externally by coastlines that face in opposite directions. Insular Southeast Asia – the island clusters of Indonesia and the Philippines – consists of thousands of islands separated by an enormous area of ocean. This physical fragmentation accounts in large part for the absence of a strong unifying culture in Southeast Asia and for the extensive cultural interaction with the four major civilizations on the Eurasian landmass.
Civilizations are the largest culture-bearing units of human society. The essence of a civilization is the sharing of perceptions, values, habits and institutions by large numbers of peoples over a wide area and a long time. This cultural sharing typically transcends whole societies, states and language groups and endures for millennia. Central to the shared cultural forms are classical formulations of values and world views articulated and perpetuated by literate elites who are the bearers and communicators of an enduring translocal great tradition.
We may note two major stages in the maturation of each of the civilizations: the experience of political unification under a universal empire, which generally brought the whole culture zone under a single political authority, and the conversion of the whole area to a universal religion. The imprints left by these two events defined the culture zones as civilizational units down to modern times. In East Asia, the Qin-Han Empire (221 B.C. - 220 A.D.) first unified China, linked up the Great Wall, imposed uniform administrative standards, and served as a model and an inspiration of subsequent unifications, such as the T’ang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties. The Mauryan Empire (321-183 B.C.) was the greatest early political unification of most of the Indian subcontinent, followed by the Gupta Empire (c. 320-543), while the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-330 B.C.) and the Sassanid Empire (224-661) provided West Asia with its most impressive experiences of unification. For western civilization in Europe, it was the Roman Empire that left the most indelible mark, mostly in the Mediterranean region. The Latin alphabet, Roman law, and Roman architecture are among the obvious imprints left upon Western civilization.
The adoption of a universal religion profoundly colored the core values and beliefs of a civilization and marked the second major stage in the civilization's maturation. Unlike universal empires, which had definite geographical limits, universal religions could and did spread from one culture zone to another. Buddhism, which became the universal religion in East Asia, originated in South Asia and was transmitted overland through Central Asia, first to China and then on to Korea and Japan. Hinduism, too, spread beyond the confines of the Indian subcontinent and found acceptance in Southeast Asia. Islam, the universal religion of the West Asian culture zone, arose centuries later than the other universal religions and had the most spectacular history of acceptance in other areas. From origins in the Arabian peninsula Islam quickly came to dominate all of West Asia and North Africa. For Western civilization the corresponding universal religion is Christianity (in its western Catholic and eastern Orthodox variants), which originated in West Asia but found its fullest acceptance in Europe.
Eras of Central Asian & (Western) European Domination
In addition to comparing civilizations one can also talk about their interaction. Religions, in particular, were important agents of cultural diffusion, carrying elements from one culture zone to another. Trade and warfare also facilitated cultural diffusion throughout history. These forces can be seen at work most clearly in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, the two culture zones that are not characterized by indigenous civilizations. My suggested framework for considering European history in comparison to that of three other civilizations stressed that the experience of universal empires and universal religions solidified the identity of the four cultural units. Before I can extend the framework to encompass the modern period, it is necessary to turn to the consideration of regional interaction within Eurasia. Two eras are relevant: Eurasian integration under Central Asian domination and maritime integration under Western European domination. Let me deal first with the second era.
Before 1500, the civilizations of Eurasia interacted on a more or less equal footing. There was considerable coastal navigation around the periphery of the great landmass, notably by the Arabs and the Chinese, but little in the way of imbalance. After 1500, thanks to voyages of “discovery” and expanded geographical understanding, the Europeans became aware of new continents and new civilizations. Gradually, over a period of two or three centuries, Europeans extended their contacts and influence around the globe until by the nineteenth century the European culture zone had extended its domination over every continent. Just when did maritime contact among Eurasian civilizations become an imbalance of power and why?
For much of human history the Eurasian culture areas coexisted in a state of rough equality. Upon two occasions, however, the balance of power was drastically altered and one culture zone was able to exert its power over others. This first happened in the pre-1500 period when the Central Asian peoples, the Turks and the Mongols, infiltrated and conquered the agricultural societies of the other culture zones. Various Turkic peoples infiltrated the Abbasid Caliphate in West Asia and T’ang China in East Asia in the latter half of the first millennium A.D. The common result of such processes was the fragmentation of those two empires and the formation of smaller regional states dominated by Central Asians. In the thirteenth century nomadic conquests culminated in the formation of a Mongol world empire that extended Central Asian control over much of East Asia and West Asia and made inroads into the other three culture zones. During this unique period of Central Asian domination, unification was achieved on a level that spanned more than three culture zones and brought two civilizations (and later a third – India) under a single political authority. Only northern Africa, western Europe, the Byzantine Empire and Southeast Asia were spared the Mongol onslaught. Mongol domination over most of Eurasia greatly facilitated interregional contact in trade, the transfer of technology, the spread of religions, the development of written languages, and considerable mixing of diverse ethnic groups. Travel, diplomacy and geographical knowledge were enhanced dramatically.
When we turn to the western end of the Eurasian landmass, it is obvious that western Europe escaped the Mongol conquest and so evolved without that model as an influential factor. What then was the European experience in the same period of time? First of all, whereas political unification by long-lived empires was the rule elsewhere, Europe, composed of small competing units that were socially unstable, was characterized by extreme political fragmentation and instability. Second, the initiative was seized by the poor and peripheral states facing the north Atlantic. Lacking in both power and resources, the western European states expanded by sea. Third, when they did form empires the result was fundamentally different from the post-Mongol states elsewhere in Eurasia. What the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the English formed were maritime empires, quite distinct in type from the land-based early modern empires. Because western European maritime empires were not composed of contiguous territory, the role of cavalry was less central in the imperial structure, and commerce and navigation were relatively more important. The Asian empires were for the most part more concerned with the security of their continental holdings than with the promotion of sea trade. The growth of maritime trade eventually altered the dominant mode of inter-civilizational contact. Thanks to these changes, which worked to the comparative advantage of the Europeans, the balance of power within Eurasia began to shift.
But if European power paralleled that of the other Eurasian civilizations (or was even less) up to the point of Mongol domination in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, and became paramount only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how are we to account for Europe's rise to dominance in the intervening 3-4 centuries? The notion that the Europeans somehow had the “right stuff” that enabled them to overwhelm the globe is a familiar proposal. The key to European supremacy can be sought variously in the ancient heritage of Greece and Rome or in the more-recent emancipation of the mind associated with the Renaissance and Reformation. Science, capitalism, individualism and the Protestant “work ethic” are all candidates in such theories. The problem with a theory that emphasizes particular cultural attributes of ancient origin is that one has to account for the fact that these attributes were dormant for many centuries and then somehow got switched on in modern times.
Or what of the example of Max Weber, who undertook a painstaking analysis of the intellectual traditions of India and China in comparison to Protestantism to account for the emergence of capitalism in Europe and its absence elsewhere? Here again there are difficulties: how can one be sure that religious beliefs were the key elements in Western capitalism, how can one be sure that similar ideas did not exist elsewhere, and how is one to understand entrepreneurial achievements in a place like Japan [and Indian and China since this article was written!] in the absence of the values specified? Or there is the notion that European “inventiveness” and innovation led to Western civilization’s global ascendancy that achieved by the nineteenth century. Here the list includes the development of new institutions such as corporations and joint stock companies to manage enterprises on a global scale, and advances in legal institutions, banking and government regulation that gave the Europeans an enormous edge in trade. The problem (as John Hobson and others have shown) is that many of these innovations and inventions the Europeans eventually used against their Asian rivals emerged first in Asia.
