Eight Eurocentric Historians [Paperback]

J.M. Blaut (Author), James M. Blaut (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 10, 2000 | ISBN-10: 1572305916 | ISBN-13: 978-1572305915 | Edition: 1

This volume examines and critiques the work of a diverse group of Eurocentric historians who have strongly shaped our understanding of world history. Building upon the foundations laid in his previous book, The Colonizer's Model of the World, which provided a systematic overview of the nature and evolution of Eurocentrism, Blaut focuses in depth on Max Weber, Lynn White, Jr., Robert Brenner, Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, John A. Hall, Jared Diamond, and David Landes. The role of each of these thinkers in generating colonialist understandings of history is described, and the fallacious assumptions at the roots of their arguments are revealed. Working toward an alternative understanding of the origins of modernity, this clearly written book provides invaluable insights and tools for students and scholars of history, geography, sociology, anthropology, and postcolonialism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a hard-hitting but infinitely justified skewering of the standard line on the 'miracle' of the West's rise to hegemony. Blaut begins with the Eurocentric racism of Max Weber vis-à-vis Islam and the Far East, and proceeds methodically down to Weber's most recent heirs, including Eric Jones and David Landes. He demonstrates his points through a close, albeit critical, reading of the works of these eight historians who have attributed Western superiority to ideology, values, capitalism, geopolitics, climate, and technological inventiveness. Blaut sets forth a powerful alternative explanation, one he promises to expand in a forthcoming third volume." --Janet Abu-Lughod, Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research

"This book is a sequel and complement to Blaut's earlier work, The Colonizer's Model of the World, in which he examined and rejected alleged European exeptionalism' and superiority based on religion, race, environment, and culture. Blaut returns to this same battlefield now. One after another, as in a shooting gallery, he not only hits but dissects and completely demolishes the ideology-dressed-up-as-theory of the eight most prominent exponents of Eurocentrism, from the now classic statement of Max Weber to its contemporary best selling versions by Jared Diamond and David Landes. A 'must' for macro sociologists and historians." --Andre Gunder Frank, Visiting Professor of International Relations, University of Miami and Florida International University

"This book dissects and completely demolishes the ideology-dressed-up-as-theory of the eight most prominent exponents of Eurocentrism in world history, from the now classic statement of Max Weber to its contemporary bestselling versions by Jared Diamond and David Landes. A 'must' for macro sociologists and historians." --Andre Gunder Frank, Visiting Professor of International Relations, University of Miami and Florida International University

"This is a significant work, one that is sure to be both widely read and controversial. Blaut contends with some major thinkers whose work has been relatively unchallenged. He takes strong critical positions and backs them up thoroughly." --Ronald H. Chilcote, Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside; editor of Latin American Perspectives

"This book is original...timely, well-written, and accessible. I would recommend it for capstone undergraduate history courses and for introductory graduate-level courses in world history." --Peter Gran, Department of History, Temple University, author of Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History

From the Back Cover

"This book is a sequel and complement to Blaut's earlier work, The Colonizer's Model of the World, in which he examined and rejected alleged European 'exeptionalism' and superiority based on religion, race, environment, and culture. Blaut returns to this same battlefield now. One after another, as in a shooting gallery, he not only hits but dissects and completely demolishes the ideology-dressed-up-as-theory of the eight most prominent exponents of Eurocentrism, from the now classic statement of Max Weber to its contemporary best selling versions by Jared Diamond and David Landes. A 'must' for macro sociologists and historians." Andre Gunder Frank, Visiting Professor of International Relations, University of Miami and Florida International University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 228 pages
• Publisher: The Guilford Press; 1 edition (August 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1572305916
• ISBN-13: 978-1572305915
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,292,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven critique of (unevenly) Eurocentric historians, December 1, 2006

By 

Walt Byars (Tampa, Fl) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eight Eurocentric Historians (Paperback)

In this stimulating book,the late radical geographer J.M. Blaut criticizes the theories advanced by Max Weber, Lynn White, Robert Brenner, Eric Jones, Michael Mann, John Hall, Jared Diamond, and David Landes to explain Europe's higher level of economic development than the rest of the world in the past few centuries. The book is very well organized, with the historians who employ an incredibly eclectic mixture of the theories of the other historians discussed being covered in the later chapters. Thus, alot of "we already refuted this" and "see the discussion in chapter x" is found in the later chapters, adding to the concision and coherence of this book.

Most of the theories advanced by the "eurocentric" historians range from fairly eclectic to extremely eclectic, with David Landes (the last writer discussed in the book) simply picking from a grab bag of different theories of European [...] with no eye for coherence. Thus, in this book (around 200 pages) Blaut has to criticize a huge number of arguments. The biggest problem is that while he successfully casts doubt on almost all the specific arguments he considers, almost none of them are refuted beyond a reasonable doubt. One exception is Karl Wittfogel's theory of oriental despotism, relating systems of government to systems of irrigation (and by extension, differences in systems of government between regions being a result of the natural environment), among other things. This argument gets used in various different forms by almost all of the writers discussed, and Blaut utterly destroys it.

One of Blaut's essays deserves, particular mention, the one on Robert Brenner. This chapter is probably Blaut's greatest effort, but Robert Brenner is nowhere near as much of an easy target as the other historians discussed. Most of the people criticized in the book are RAH RAH CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM types with no real understanding of how social systems work. Brenner on the other hand is a Marxist, and thus has a good understanding of social transformation and reproduction. And while alot of the arguments of the other historians relate to showing that Europe had lots of meaningless transhistorical "good stuff" (FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY!) and the other regions had "bad stuff," Brenner relates the development of capitalism in Western Europe to historically specific forms of class conflict. Blaut mainly focuses on some early essays by Brenner, yet Brenner has since wrote thousands and thousands of pages in a meticulous defense of his thesis. Blaut certainly scores some points against Brenner, but I was a cautious supporter of Brenner's theory when I began the chapter and remained one when I finished it.

Also, next to the chapter on Brenner, Blaut's weakest criticism is of Jared Diamond. Blaut makes a number of significant points, but given the fact that Diamond is incredibly influential at the moment, he should have gone further.

17 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars missing the essential points, May 28, 2008

By 

Hubertus Fremerey (Germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eight Eurocentric Historians (Paperback)

Some weeks ago, I uttered strong scepticism re. this book of Blaut against the praising review of reader Krul ("Useful and inspiring criticism of Eurocentrism in history", November 14, 2007), on which see my responses to Krul. Reader Krul then suspected (correctly) that I could not have read the book by Blaut, because Blaut - in Krul's evaluation - had refuted all my arguments already. Now I have done my homework and read the book carefully and found all my scepticism justified. While Blaut refutes the more silly arguments of Eurocentrism, he skips or evades or misses all the more important ones. While Blaut pays lip service to Max Weber in the first chapter of his book, he simply did not understand what Weber was trying to do. The late Blaut was a geographer by training and experience. So all those arguments of the "eurocentric" historians that display unfounded theses on climate and geography are more or less convincingly refuted. But those are not the really important ones.

We should keep to the facts first. It is a simple fact, that all great civilizations of China and India etc. have been stagnant or declining at the advent of the "western imperialists". But even this could not prove that those old civilization were unable to become "modernized from within". Only one has to prove, or at least to make probable, the claim that this could have happened. But nowhere is Blaut even near to such a proof.

Blaut rightly ridicules the idea that the Chinese, having invented the bookprinting, should not have books. In fact they had a vast amount of books. But apparently they never had "a culture of the book" as Europe had from around 1500. To have "a culture of the book" is much more than just to have many books. It means to have a public debate on political and scientific issues in the way the West had such a culture during all the years from around 1500 on. If Blaut was able to refute the claim that the Occident was special on this, he did not tell me. The same with science. Once more with a scornful aside he states that of course every great culture - and surely those of India and China - has had science. I never thought otherwise. But once more he is evading or missing the essential point : What do we call science ? To know about plants and animals and dieseases this and that by observations, and to have astrology and alchemy and magics, was everywhere - and surely so in the Occident up to around 1700 - accepted as "science". But from the times of around 1550 CE with Paracelsus and Vesalius and then with Galilei and Kepler and Descartes this concept of science changed in the West. Astrology was left behind eventually by astronomy, and alchemy was left behind by chemistry, and the mathematical sciences made a great upstart with Descartes and Pascal and Fermat and the Bernoullis and Euler and many others. Nothing on this is to be found in the book of Blaut. He simply seems to have missed it.

Even as a geographer Blaut could have been knowledgeable on the philosophical roots of Occidental science. But apparently he wasn't or didn't let us know. This is a common trait of all those "revisionist anti-eurocentrics" : They compare what is common to all advanced civilizations and by this miss important differences. Blaut compares irrigation systems and agriculture and means of transport and housing etc., but ignores differences of philosophy and sciences and the cooperation of "men of letters" and "men of crafts". What I wanted to know is : Where in any place of Asia or Africa was somebody like Galilei or Kepler or Newton ? Where are the likes of Huyghens or James Watt ? Those are the difficult and important questions - and Blaut did not address any of them.

Again and again I am stressing the fact that you can improve the plowshare or the harness or the windmill or the watermill or the irrigation system etc. by "smart and ingenious engineering", but that in this way you never will arrive at a car or an airplane or a radio or a computer. To build such devices, you have to understand nature in depth and to apply math to describe "the laws of nature". Electrodynamics and Quantummechanics are not invented by "engineers", but by mathematicians and experimenters. There is not the slightest hint that anywhere outside of the Western world this has been achieved or was even in preparation before the advent of Western "imperialism". Since Blaut does not even address this problem, I am about sure that he did not even see it. The same applies with modern "Western" forms of administrative law or of scientific economics. And so, after reading the book carefully, I can say with confidence that Blaut did not refute any eurocentric claim of real importance and reader Krul too is plain wrong on this. Sorry.

Once more we should keep to the facts : Only the "western" scientific standards have enabled us to support billions of humans on a level of economic comfort that was unthinkable even in the West only 200 years ago. This - and not "imperialism" - is causing every other civilization in all of Africa and Asia to copy western science and government and economics and medicine etc.. There is no other proven way to prosperity. If you call this "eurocentrism" then you are denying the facts. If any leader in all of the Orient of today needs a difficult medical treatment, he will ask for a western doctor to be flown in from the leading medical schools of the West. See my comments to reader Nathaniel Woods !

And one more point : It is true - as we are told again and again - that the work of Aristotle has been brought to the philosophers of the Occident by the Arabs and Jews from Spain during the 12th and 13th century. But once more we should see two other facts here : The works of Aristotle and Plato and other important Greek philosophers and scientists have been preserved not only in the Arabic world, but in the Byzantine world too, where the Arabs got this stuff first. And then : If the Arabs have been that smart - they knew of the printing press and papermaking from China many years before the West - Why didn't they modernize way ahead of the West ? Because they lacked a dynamical culture ! They simply were not interested in having an "open society" in the sense of Popper. For a short time the door to modernity may have been open in the Islamic world, but then it was shut close again by rulers fearing liberty. And this was more or less the fate of all of the Orient. This too is not addressed in the book of Blaut.

I give the book two stars, because it is well written and stimulating in part and so no complete waste of time. But overall Blaut was not up to his task, and most of the other "anti-eurocentrics" very probably are not either. I would like to be disproved on this and see some really good arguments supported by facts.

18 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Silly and Sophmoric, August 14, 2004

By 

Nathaniel Woods (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eight Eurocentric Historians (Hardcover)

This book caught my eye because of his criticism of Jared Diamond as a Eurocentrist, which seemed odd to me. At first, I found the irony inherent in labelling a historian who wrote a book about how people around the world have equal capabilities and equal intelligence astounding. After reading Blaut's criticism, I came to realise that I agree with one of his assessments; Diamond is a Eurocentrist... in the same sense that a study of the rise of the rich is Plutocentrist.

Having not been familiar with the other works Blaut criticised, I really cannot comment on them directly. But his criticism of Diamond was riddled with mischaracterizations worthy that of politicians, strawmen building and outright falsehoods. For example, he refutes the concept of Eurasia's east west axis vs the north south axis in Africa and the Americas, by pointing out that mobility did exist, and that Eurasia was almost as wide north and south as it was east and west. These statements are true in the literal sense, but conveniently ignore the facts that Diamond wished to illustrate. In another place, Blaut states that most of the domesticated species that are used by todays societies did originate in Eurasia but that it only pays attention to those that were actually domesticated, branding that as circular logic. This is circular logic in the same sense that saying "The Sun shines" is circular logic.

To be fair, I did find myself in agreement that Diamond did not accurately explain why Western society in particular won as opposed to Eurasian society; on this subject Blaut's criticisms were very similar to my review of Jared Diamond's book.

There is nothing wrong with history with a non-Western focus, provided that one holds the truth of paramount importance and does not attempt willfully to distort other peoples views. The truth is, that at some level Eurocentrism must be embraced to properly understand why western society turned out to be the winner. To ignore the factors that resulted in western society winning in the world is to portray western supremacy as a mere accident or random happenstance, regardless of Blaut's true intentions. That is the true irony of Blaut's thesis.