Customer Reviews

Eight Eurocentric Historians

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

In this brilliantly illuminating book, the late James Blaut, who was Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examined and criticised books by eight influential historians who presented the standard model of Eurocentric world history - Max Weber, Lynn White, Robert Brenner, Eric Jones, Michael Mann, John Hall, Jared Diamond and David Landes.

Eurocentrism falsely ascribed historical superiority to Europeans over all other peoples. It saw progress as permanent and natural in Europe, but elsewhere as only produced by European rule. Europeans modestly saw themselves as uniquely progressive and rational, with the best ideology, family structure, markets and cities. Eurocentrism grew and gained its validation from Europe's colonialism (and later from the EU). There were four kinds of Eurocentric theory - religious (the notion of Christendom, dominant in the 19th century), racial (popular until the 1940s), environmental and cultural.

For German sociologist Max Weber, the keys to Europe's superiority were race, `Oriental despotism', `the Protestant ethic', and the European mind. Lynn White, the American medieval historian, thought that Europe's inventions, particularly the heavy plough, the horse collar and the three-field system of crop rotation, gave Europe the lead. But these were all invented elsewhere as well.

Robert Brenner sited capitalist development uniquely in late-medieval English rural society, but all its key attributes have been found elsewhere too. Jared Diamond claimed that Europe's environment was uniquely favourable to progress.

White, Brenner, Jones, Mann and Hall all repeated Adam Smith's notion that capitalism developed naturally from (European) feudalism because capitalists removed political blocks to economic progress. They all propounded the colonial myths that Asia and Africa's despotic states and backward religions blocked progress. Yet Europe also had despotic states and a backward religion.

Some saw imperialism as `the expression of a deep human drive' (Landes). They saw colonialism as natural and progressive: Europe's ideas would modernise the east, removing the cause of its poverty - irrational traditions (not exploitation or colonialism). Some thought that Europe gave civilisation, development, modernisation, globalisation and aid; in return the rest gave their wealth.

Blaut contended that Europe's rise began in 1492, because Europe was best placed to grab the New World's riches. But this smacks of geographical determinism. Spain grabbed much of the New World's riches, but didn't industrialise. Britain pioneered the industrial revolution, but Blaut doesn't explain why. The British working class made the industrial revolution; in its struggle for survival, our class made industry, made itself and made history.

James Blaut's "Eight Eurocentric Historians" is part 2 in his three-part series on what he calls the 'colonizer's model of the world', that is, the Eurocentrism of many historians, anthropologists and social scientists when discussing the sources of Europe's rise to power and its influence on the rest of the world. Too often, Blaut emphasizes, do people see Europe as some sort of natural center of the world, from which all innovation and all values flow, and to which others can only respond (by acceptance or resistance); too often also is Europe perceived as somehow perpetually more advanced, free, innovative etc. than any other society, even when the facts are emphatically otherwise. It is very hard for people to shed the view that sometimes people who aren't white European males can defeat them in battle, invent things before they do, create more wealthy and egalitarian societies and discover new lands.

This, then, is the topic of Blaut's critiques of eight Eurocentric historians, many of them popularly acclaimed. The historians are, in sequence: Max Weber, Lynn White, Robert Brenner, Eric Jones, Michael Mann, John Hall, Jared Diamond, and David Landes. Each of them is guilty of an array of Eurocentric errors, and in some cases even fallacies, ignorant reasonings and outright pseudo-racism. Most of Blaut's critiques are forceful and excellent and he totally demolishes the conservative, pro-imperialist nonsense of people like Landes and Jones. Less convincing is his case against Robert Brenner, which relies strongly on issues disputed very much among specialists, and which can be judged very poorly by any outsider. One wonders if Blaut was wise to include Brenner in a list like this, all the more since Brenner is not at all as obviously racist and silly as people like Landes, and hardly deserves to be named in one list with him. On the other hand, useful compensation for this is the all too lenient critique of Jared Diamond, whose works have re-popularized totally discredited environmental determinist theories of European superiority under the guise of anti-racism, and whose influence on 'sophisticated' intellectuals is quite strong.

Sometimes Blaut himself also goes overboard, as when he approvingly cites the discredited Martin Bernal, and he seems to me somewhat knee-jerkingly unwilling to countenance the importance of the spread of the heavy plow in the early Middle Ages. But these are minor issues. Overall, this work is a much needed corrective, and the 'checklist' of 30 fallacious arguments used in favor of Eurocentrist theories is very useful. This book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone who desires to be a critical thinker on history and politics.

After reading Mr. Byars' review, I will only add that, instead of this book, on the vexing question of why Western countries have dominated the world during the last few centuries [the very way the question is posed is controversial!], I would suggest reading the following books: 1) "Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium" by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke; 2)"The Great Divergence", by Kennetz Pomeranz; 3 - 4): "The world economy. A millennial perspective" (2001) plus "The world economy: Historical Statistics" (2003) by Angus Maddison (a combined edition of these two volumes appeared on December 2007); 5) The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation by John M. Hobson, and 6) it also seems interesting the brief book to be published this June "Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500-1850" by Jack A. Goldstone.

And for those looking for a broad framework to understand the past, I would add the following works, whose scope is amazingly global: 1. Agrarian cultures: "Pre-industrial societies" by Patricia Crone; 2. Government: "The History of Government" by S.E. Finer; 3. Ideas: "Ideas, a History from Fire to Freud", by Peter Watson; 4. Religion: "The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach" by Moojan Momen; and 5. War: "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat.

Don't believe the hype about "revisionist" historians; anyone who criticizes the essential goodness of European civilization will undoubtedly be marginalized (e.g., put in the same category as Holocaust deniers). By critically evaluating eight influential historians, Blaut outlines the main historical models of Europe's rise in world history: racial, cultural, and climatological/geographical.

The main shortcoming is that this book is polemical, primarily serving to expose the hidden assumptions and methodological flaws of the eurocentric historians; Blaut died before he had time to finish his third book on a Marxist interpretation of the rise of the West. That being said, this book is an great way to develop a critical view of contemporary views on history.

I found this small political tract helpful in identifying several pre-revisionist, non-propagandist historians. For one, David Landes turns out to be very good, and I had never heard of him even. I had always understood that Max Weber is to be considered a master among writers of history, but the fact that he was the primary target of this tract makes me appreciate that fact all the more. I have yet to read Weber, but he has now been bumped up a few spaces on my list. Also, I had always liked Jered Diamond, but after reading the treatment of him by this author, I have a new appreciation of him.

There is always the danger, when reading history, that your author will have a revisionist, political agenda. Sometimes this agenda becomes apparent, seeping through unexpectedly, perhaps in the form of a single politically-charged word. Sometimes, as with Howard Zinn, the author is honest enough to come out right away and tell you what he is up to. Since most authors are not so honest, it is difficult to know which authors are attempting to be objective, and which have a political agenda they want to push on you. Insofar as history is supposed to be the objective presentation of facts, good history is objective history.

This small book is good to pick up and glance through--or even just look on the back cover and jot down the names of the 8 historians targeted, if you're in a hurry--in order to get turned on to some good historians. But no need to buy the book. Buying the book would just encourage Mr. Blaut to write more of the same, and that would be very naughty.

Having read a number of the works that Blaut criticizes, I find Blauts criticisms spot on. Having the guts to challenge some of the most prominent scholars is no doubt going to make people criticize him, but his criticism seems consistent with a number of authors and third world scholars (as well as other scholars from the first world).

Despite the problems with Jim Blaut's own methodology, his critical expose of the genre of 'rise of the modern' theory is actually indispensable reading for anyone exploring the field, and for theorists in this area, who probably wouldn't condescend to bother with him. One needs to figure out the secret of Blaut's success behind his own questionable alternative thesis which isn't actually the reason for the acute insights of his eight successful critiques, one after another.
It seems to me that Blaut succeeds for a reason evident in his other book, on the 'European Miracle', where he skewers Eric Jones, but with a cryptic sense that he is dealing with a problem in evolutionary discontinuity. That insight, and not only the exploitation thesis of World System theory, is what leads him so remarkably to spot the flaws in so many 'sophisticated' tracts from different scholarly viewpoints. This statement would require more elaboration than is possible here, but the issue is to consider the rightness of Blaut's criticisms without necessarily agreeing to all the other premises of his perspective. This is, for the 'pros' in this field, a 'no kidding' mongoose in action. Blaut's mentor, A. Frank, hit on another aspect of the problem, in his book on world history and systems theory applied to the last five thousand years. Minus the economic materialism, we can see that the 'rise of the West' requires a radically altered viewpoint, that of universal history. But that's another story, and Blaut's book is a significant, if also flawed, way station on the way to some new way of thinking about history.