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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HobsonEasternOriginsofEuropeanCivilization.docxThe Eastern Origins of European Civilisation
John Hobson
In Gerard Delanty (ed.), Europe and Asia beyond East and West (2012)
Rather than the manufactured clash of civilisations we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together.
Edward Said
It was with these cosmopolitan words that Edward Said closed the preface to Orientalism. And it is these poignant words that provide my point of departure. Nevertheless an obvious paradox immediately confronts us here. For as Said’s argument has been received, the possibility of cosmopolitan interaction between the West and East becomes seemingly impossible given that the West’s identity has been defined negatively against the East through the construction of Orientalism. Moreover, it is clear that most of us naturally think that European history has long been defined by recurring confrontations or clashes with the East. In our popular imagination these began with the crusades between 1095 and 1291, progressed forwards through the “voyages of discovery” after 1492 before culminating in the age of European colonialism ending only in the 1970s. But focusing mainly, let alone solely, on this side of Europe’s identity or history obscures the cosmopolitan side that has played an extremely important role in the development of Europe after the eighth century.
To pursue this further it helps to disaggregate two core aspects of Europe’s cosmopolitanism. First, while medieval European perceptions of the Eastern peoples were often characterised by bizarre images (of barbarians and monster races), nevertheless the Europeans were cognisant of – and sometimes awestruck by – the richness if not the economic and cultural superiority of many Eastern societies between about 800 and 1780. This was certainly true of Egypt and China, both of which Europeans long held as positive examples of higher and finer civilisations. Both were seen to have had massive material achievements, profound philosophies and superior writing systems. And paradoxically, even during the Age of Crusades the Europeans found much to admire and envy in the civilisation of Islamic West Asia.
The second aspect of cosmopolitanism flows on from the first: that respect for other civilisations was crucial in leading the Europeans to emulate and borrow the superior aspects of their economies and cultures in order to promote Europe’s own development. And here we return to one of the paradoxes that emerges from viewing European identity only within racially or religiously antagonistic terms. For as we shall see below, at the very time when the Europeans were engaged in military confrontation with Islam, they not only continued trading with the Muslims but were avidly borrowing a wealth of Islamic ideas, technologies and institutions that propelled Europe forward. Notable too is that at the very time when Dante was consigning Muhammad to the eighth circle of hell in his Inferno, he was simultaneously borrowing many of his ideas from Islamic philosophers (which was why he consigned them to purgatory rather than hell in his book). In other words, focusing only on the European clash with Islam serves to obscure the many peaceful and beneficial interactions that have occurred between the two.
Thus while I do not seek to dismiss the existence of Europe’s clashes with various civilisations, nevertheless to a certain extent I call for a deconstruction of the manufactured idea of the “clash of civilisations”. For this enables us to reveal the many forms of beneficial, if not harmonious, cosmopolitan inter-civilisational interactions that Europe has for so long participated in but that have been obscured by the headline idea of a clash of civilisations. The major theories of the rise of Europe also suffer from a Eurocentric bias, which has served to obscure Europe’s cosmopolitan inter-civilisational relations. Eurocentrism or Orientalism emerged fully in the nineteenth century. This entailed two critical assumptions: first, that what had previously been thought of as interlinked, if not symbiotic, regions were suddenly relocated along either side of a constructed “civilisational line of apartheid”. And second, Europe was pronounced as qualitatively superior to the East because it allegedly had uniquely progressive and exceptional characteristics, while the East supposedly had only regressive properties.
The key point is that this Orientalist discourse was at its height precisely at the time when the major theories of the rise of Europe were constructed – most notably those of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Thus having endogenised Eurocentrism, these theorists – as do their successors – explain Europe’s rise by looking only to causal variables that exist squarely within Europe. This was thought to be appropriate given that they accepted uncritically the twin Eurocentric notions of Europe’s separation from the East on the one hand and Europe’s uniqueness / exceptionalism on the other. And for these theorists, it was this that ensured the inevitability of Europe’s breakthrough to modern capitalism and its impossibility in the East.
Redefining Europe
It is necessary to begin by noting that Europe has never been defined by rigid geographical boundaries that definitively demarcate it from the “non-European” world. Rather it has always been a moral idea and its geographical boundaries have waxed and waned in response to the shifting idea of what constitutes Europe at a particular point in time. Yet more importantly, the dominant idea of what constitutes a “pure Europe” obscures the many “non-European” influences that have resided within it and which have, no less, given much impetus to defining Europe. I shall deal briefly with two major issues to illustrate the point.
The first issue concerns the Greek heritage of Europe. Today we take it as axiomatic that Greece was the birthplace of Europe. For it was there where science and rational thinking were allegedly first established, only to be reclaimed after the Dark Age interlude during the so-called Italian Renaissance. But this notion of Greece is a fabrication – an idea that was constructed by European thinkers only as late as the end of the eighteenth century. Prior to then, the dominant view of a pure European Greece did not exist – and it was certainly one that the ancient Greeks did not share; indeed Greece was linked spiritually and culturally to the East; and owes much to ancient Egypt, as the Greeks readily acknowledged. That Europe has always been an idea as opposed to a geographical reality is reflected by the fact that “Europa” herself was in Greek mythology the daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre, situated on the coast of Lebanon. And note that Troy, too, was in fact east of the Dardanelles. In short, tracing the European heritage back to ancient Greece would only acknowledge the significant Eastern roots of Europe.
Second, if a “pure European Greece” was not the birthplace of Europe, so the notion of Europe-as-Christendom was equally a fabrication that obscures its west Asian foundations. Christianity was an oriental religion, and one that shared many things in common with Islam. But more importantly, the definition of Europe-as-Christendom obscures the many Islamic impulses that came to provide such a profound and positive influence on the subsequent shape and course of European development and thinking. By 711 CE Islam had entered Spain and was consolidated in 756 when Abd al-Rahman set up the Ummayad polity. Islam also took root in Portugal and later in Sicily in 902 and, yet later on, in Eastern Europe via the Ottoman Empire. These formed the final ramparts of the Islamic bridge of the world, across which flowed not just Eastern trade but, above all, many Eastern “resource portfolios” (ideas, institutions and technologies) that were assimilated by the Europeans. And to return to the paradox mentioned above, it was precisely during the time of the crusades that Europe’s assimilation of Islamic ideas escalated. Moreover, behind the headlines of the “crusading clash with Islam” lay a less dramatic picture wherein Christians and Muslims as well as Jews peacefully co-existed for many centuries in cosmopolitan Islamic Spain and elsewhere in Europe. And it was principally from these sites whence many Jewish and especially Islamic ideas seeped out to redefine the very idea of Europe.
Oriental Globalisation c. 500-1800
My aim here is to provide a very quick sketch of the Afro-Asian-led global economy between 500 and 1800 for three principal reasons. This reveals the considerable inter-connectedness of Europe with Afro-Asia; second it reveals some of the channels or diffusion paths along which the more advanced Eastern resource portfolios traversed to fuel the rise of Europe; and third it reveals Europe’s dependence upon the more advanced Eastern global agents. It bears noting at the outset that Eurocentric analyses of globalisation deny its very existence prior to 1500. This date is highly significant because it connotes in traditional historiography the point at which Europe emerged in capitalist form at the top of the world’s economic hierarchy. This in turn justifies the claim that the period between 1492 and 1800 constituted one of Western-led proto-globalisation, as the superior Europeans expanded outwards into the world. In the process they supposedly “battered down the walls” that had hitherto isolated the regressive East from the progressive West, thereby creating for the first time the outlines of an emergent world economy.
This was supposedly initiated through the so-called “voyages of discovery”. But these might better be labelled the voyages of rediscovery (or even voyages of conquest), given that the Europeans were directly entering an established inter-linked Afro-Eurasian economy that had been forged by Eastern capitalists since the sixth century. Particularly important to the emergence of the global economy after the sixth century was the formation of a series of inter-linked regions or empires. These comprised T’ang China (618-907), the Islamic Ummayad/Abbasid Empire in West Asia (661-1258), the Ummayad polity in Spain (756-1031) and the Fatimids in North Africa (909-1171). Moreover the Kingdom of Srıvijaya in Sumatra was important in that it constituted the vital entrepôt that connected China to the Indian Ocean between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. These inter-linked regions were vital in promoting an extensively pacified space that fostered considerable trade and enabled the transmission of Eastern resource portfolios. The global economy was comprised of a land route that linked the Eastern Mediterranean with China and India, and a sea route that passed through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and beyond to Southeast Asia, China and Japan. These routes ensured that Europe was fundamentally connected to the Afro-Asian-led global economy after about the eighth century. And contra Eurocentrism, this situation continued throughout the period between 1000 and 1800.
With the fall of the last crusader-state, Acre, in 1291, the Venetians came to rely on the dominant sea route, presided over by the Egyptians. As Abu-Lughod claims, “whoever controlled the sea-route to Asia could set the terms of trade for a Europe now in retreat. From the thirteenth century and up to the sixteenth that power was Egypt”. Venetian trade did not dry up after 1291 but continued, especially given that the Venetians managed to circumvent the papal ban and secured new treaties with the sultan in 1355 and 1361. Right down to 1517, Venice survived because Egypt played such an important role within the global economy. When the Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt in 1517, Venice continued its trading connection through the Ottomans. Nevertheless, Eurocentrism claims that after 1492 it was the Portuguese and Spanish who initiated the process of proto-globalisation, before the global baton of power was passed on to the Dutch and then the English. But in fact European trading connections intensified thanks largely to the role played by the Muslims and Indians and, above all, the Chinese who sat at the centre of the global economy between c.1450 and 1800. The conversion of the Chinese economy onto a silver standard in the mid-fifteenth century was the seminal moment, for as a result of the huge demand that the Chinese economy had for foreign silver owing to its large trade surplus, global trade rapidly intensified. Simultaneously it led to the opening up of a new trade route that went from South America across to the Philippines and thence into China. Above all, it was this Chinese input that ultimately sucked Europe directly into the trading and financial global system (rather than vice versa as Eurocentrism preaches), given that the Europeans had been only indirectly linked in previously. It was the plundered Spanish bullion of Latin America that not only enabled the Europeans to finance their trade deficit with Asia in general and China in particular, but also to finance their activities within the Indian Ocean in the first place.
To sum up, then, the arrival of the Europeans in the Indian Ocean in 1498 did not mark a key turning point in world history. For all they were really doing was directly joining the global economy that had been created during the previous 1,000 years and that remained dominated by the Afro-Asians right down into the nineteenth century. It is clear, then, that from the eighth century onward Europe was embedded within a gradually intensifying Eastern-led global economy. Moreover, while oriental globalisation began during Europe’s “Dark Age”, its ultimate significance lay in the fact that it was the midwife, if not the mother, of modern Europe. For it was along the sinews of the Eastern-led global economy that Eastern resource portfolios diffused across to enable European development, as we shall now see.
The Transmission of the Eastern Idea in Europe’s Rise
Italy is famous for the Renaissance, which in turn set Europe off into the post-feudal era. This intellectual revolution is traditionally thought to have been in effect a recalling of the scientific and rational ideas that had been pioneered by the ancient Greeks (hence the importance of fabricating Greece as purely European). Many of the ideas that were “invented” in Greece were actually derived from ancient Egypt, but perhaps more important is the point that the Renaissance owes a huge debt to the contemporary Muslims, as did the Scientific Revolution. This claim, of course, immediately stands at odds with the traditional interpretation, not least because the Renaissance thinkers themselves were in part anxious to forge a new European identity that was independent of the Islamic world. So we come to the paradox of the Renaissance: it was in part created to differentiate Europe from the Islamic world and yet it was from the Islamic world that the Renaissance scholars drew so many of their new ideas. How then did Islamic thinkers help shape the Renaissance and the subsequent Scientific Revolution?
Islamic breakthroughs in mathematics including algebra and trigonometry were vital. The former term was taken from the title of one of al-Khwarizmi’s mathematical texts as a result of the translation made by the Englishman, Robert of Ketton, in 1145. And by the beginning of the tenth century all six of the classical trigonometric functions had been defined and tabulated by Muslim mathematicians. Developments in public health, hygiene and medicine were also notable. Al-Razi’s medical works were translated and reprinted in Europe some forty times between 1498 and 1866. And Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine became the founding text for European medical schools between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries (having been translated in the twelfth century). The Muslims developed numerous medicines and anaesthetics and pioneered the study of anatomy. Notable here is that the Egyptian physician, Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288), whose work on the human body that contradicted the traditional position of the Greek physician, Galen, fully pre-empted the much heralded work of William Harvey by 350 years. The Muslims were also keen astrologers and astronomers and their ideas were avidly borrowed by the Europeans. Ibn al-Shatir’s mathematical models bore an uncanny resemblance to those used by Copernicus 150 years later. And as early as the ninth century, al-Khwarizmi calculated the circumference of the Earth to within 41 metres. Last but by no means least, the Baconian idea that science should be based on the experimental method had already been pioneered by the Muslims (not the Greeks).
Nevertheless, the standard Eurocentric reply asserts that all these ideas were in fact derived from ancient Greece (given that the Muslims had held and translated much of their work). It is certainly true that the Muslims had learnt much from the ancient Greeks, but they were not mere “librarians” who held the original Greek texts in custody before passing them back once the Europeans were ready to receive them. For the fact is that they not only built on the original “Greek ideas” and took them much further, but at times they were highly critical of them and provided novel departures (the insistence on the experimental method being a case in point). To answer the possible Eurocentric retort that this could all have been mere coincidence, it is necessary to reveal the transmission paths of these ideas. Increasingly, after about 900, Europeans began translating Islamic texts into Latin. Islamic scholarship developed not only in West Asia but also in Spain. The fall of Spanish Toledo was especially important for it was from its vast library where the Europeans managed to get hold of many of the relevant books to translate. Learning from the Islamic world was actively continued by the Spanish King, Alfonso X (1252-84), largely through Jewish intermediaries. Much the same was true of the situation in Portugal and Sicily. Moreover, ancient Egyptian hermetic texts also featured in the Italian Renaissance, given that they were translated after 1460 at the Court of Cosimo de Medici. Finally, Islamic ideas entered Venice through the trade route from West Asia and North Africa and after that via the Ottoman Empire, which was heavily embroiled in Eastern Europe.
The transmission of Eastern Technologies in Europe’s Rise
In the interests of space I shall omit discussion of the many Eastern technologies that diffused into Europe after about 800 that were crucial in enabling an energy revolution, and the rise of agricultural production, commerce, proto-manufacturing and finance. Instead, I shall concentrate on those technologies that enabled the voyages of rediscovery, the military revolution and the British industrial revolution. I shall take each in turn.
Before the voyages of rediscovery could begin, numerous challenges to extant European shipping design and navigational techniques had to be solved. It was to the Muslims (often via the Jews) as well as the Chinese that the Iberians turned. The first challenge was the need to tack into the strong head-winds that blew up south of Cape Bojador off the coast of the western Sahara. This was solved in the 1440s by the construction of highly maneuverable caravels that had a stern-post rudder attached to a square hull, and were rigged with three masts, one of which bore a lateen sail. The origins of the caravel date back to the Islamic qarib, and the square hull and stern-post rudder were invented by the Chinese around 400 CE, with the design subsequently diffusing westward to enter Europe around 1180. The new triple-mast system was almost certainly borrowed from the Chinese who had long had multiple-mast systems. And the lateen sail was almost certainly an Islamic invention that was also passed on to the Europeans.
Critical navigational techniques were also borrowed, mainly from the Muslims. Because the lateen sail led to a zigzagging (or triangular) sailing path, this necessarily made it much harder to calculate the linear distance travelled. This was solved by the use of geometry and trigonometry, which had been developed by Muslim mathematicians. Moreover the strong tides south of Cape Bojador that could beach or simply destroy a ship required knowledge of the lunar cycles (since the moon governs the tides). This had been supplied at the end of the fourteenth century by the Jewish cartographer resident in Portugal, Jacob ben Abraham Cresques. Oceanic sailing also required a wealth of more accurate navigational charts and techniques. Here Islamic astronomy enabled the Europeans to calculate the size of the earth and thereby calculate the distance travelled by using degrees. Longitude and latitude tables as well as solar calendars were also supplied by the Muslims (as well as the Jews). Finally the importation of the astrolabe was especially important, and though sporadic mentions are made of this technology in a few ancient Greek texts, it was certainly the Muslim astronomers who perfected it before it was transmitted into Europe via Islamic Spain in the mid-tenth century.
As for the “European” military revolution (1550-1660), all the major technologies that formed the core of this revolution were in fact invented during the world’s first modern military revolution (850-1290) that occurred in China. These comprised the Chinese invention of gunpowder (850), the metal barreled gun firing a metal bullet (1275) and the cannon (1288). Conventionally it is thought that the first cannon was invented in England (1327), as revealed in picture form in the famous manuscript by Walter de Millemete, but this picture is an exact replica of the earlier Chinese cannon. It might be replied that this could have been an entirely coincidental event, but claims for an independent European invention are rendered problematic by the fact that no military expert has ever been able to produce any evidence for the necessary military developments that must have preceded the 1327 English cannon. For such an invention presupposes a long line of prior developments. But such a lineage is readily available in the Chinese context stemming back to c. 850. Moreover, strong circumstantial evidence exists to suggest that the cannon, as well as the gun and the recipe for gunpowder, diffused across to Europe where they were subsequently assimilated.
While the British are conventionally thought to have been the first to use coal in producing iron ore, this in fact began in eleventh-century Song China. The Chinese also led the way in steel production, beginning in the fifth century CE. Not surprisingly, therefore, British iron and steel producers undertook detailed studies of Chinese production methods in the eighteenth century in order to develop their manufacturing techniques. The other great pillar of the British industrial revolution was cotton-manufacturing. John Lombe’s machines that he used in the silk industry were subsequently used in the Derbyshire cotton mills. But while it has been acknowledged that he copied the Italian silk machines, it is not generally recognised that the Italian machines replicated the earlier Chinese invention right down to the last detail (having diffused to Italy in the thirteenth century).
Conclusion
None of this is to say that the Europeans did not succeed in eventually taking the transmitted Eastern resource portfolios further. But it is to say that without them, there would have been little or nothing to have taken further. And without them we might be debating today why Europe remains on the periphery of the Afro-Asian-led global economy. Nevertheless, it is clear that deconstructing Eurocentrism as well as the idea of the clash of civilizations reveals the Europeans as having consistently engaged in cosmopolitan inter-civilisational relations since the eighth century. By no means is this to deny the point that Europe has clashed with “non-European” civilisations, most notably through imperialism. But it is to say that this idea has obscured Europe’s cosmopolitan inter-civilisational relations with the East that have not only significantly shaped and fuelled the course and direction that European history has taken, but have even entered into defining and redefining the very idea of Europe.
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