Welcome back.
Today I want to talk about Eurocentrism, a nice ten-dollar word for you; it simply means
sort of seeing the world from a European point of view, and we’ll go into some detail and
characterize it.
Eurocentrism and the Great Divergence, divergence – taking separate paths – so what we’re
talking about here is East versus the West, and they appear to have taken diverging paths
in the 19th and 20th centuries.
So we want to look at this and see if we can figure out why.
Context here – In the 19th and 20th century, the European powers clearly dominated the
world system.
There has to be some historical explanation for this.
You have sort of this modern West and this non-modern East, sort of big context for this
discussion.
Increasingly it appears that Western conventions are the norm and Eastern conventions are deviant,
an aberration.
Again, these things require explanation.
Another context – The old axis of the world tended to run east and west, from China through
India; Persia; and then into the Middle East, this is going to change now as we enter the
19th and 20th centuries.
A new axis is going to form and it runs through the, sort of along the Atlantic rim of Europe
and then of course, in the 20th century, we’ll shift even further west, to the United States.
So these are some big contexts that we can use here to give it, to sort of frame this
discussion.
Significances – Well we have European colonization over much of Africa, Asia, and other places.
We have little Europes sort of planted around the world; we’ve talked about that.
The East will be dominated by European powers.
Now, let’s characterize Eurocentrism a bit.
The West – according the Eurocentrism, the West has unique historical advantages, some
special quality of race or culture or environment or mind or spirit, which gives the West a
sense of superiority over all others.
I mentioned earlier that Eurocentrism entails conveying history from a distinctly European
point of view.
I think we may have talked about this earlier when we discussed Columbus.
We tend to discuss Columbus as a story of triumph, a decisive turning point in history,
the beginning of globalization, this massive exchange of domesticated plants and animals
and diseases and culture and technology; that’s a Eurocentric point of view.
You tell the story of Columbus’ arrival in the New World from the point of view of
the Caribbean Indians, you’ll get something entirely different, of course, you get the
end of the world.
That population is destroyed by European diseases within a couple of generations – so again,
a Eurocentric point of view depicting history from that distinct vantage point.
Eurocentrism tries to explain the different paths taken by Europeans on the one hand,
and Eastern civilizations on the other; paths to modernity.
Eurocentrism tries to explain the industrial success of the West, and this can be tricky,
this comparison, this comparing one state to another.
For instance, quite often England’s industrialization in the late 18th century will be compared
to China, and that’s not really a fair comparison, is it?
Often a European state might be compared to China or to India, for instance, when in fact,
a better comparison would be the European continent with China or India.
China and India are both very large and they have huge populations.
So it would be more accurate to draw a comparison between China and Europe, India and Europe,
as opposed to England against China or India.
We can look at what we call the Mercator Projection of the world map, and you can see Eurocentrism
in action here.
If you look at this map, you’ll see that Greenland – in the northern hemisphere – is
much, much larger than Africa, which is nonsense.
We can cram a lot of Greenlands into Africa.
The Mercator Projection emphasizes, or accentuates, the northern hemisphere over the southern,
and so it’s not so much geography that you look at when you look at this particular map
and this was a widely used map throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What you’re seeing is not geography; you’re seeing politics; you’re seeing power; you’re
seeing a projection of the world that accentuates the West.
Think about this again, we were just talking about this comparison between say England
and China and how wrongheaded that is.
If you look at the map of Eurasia, you can see that Europe is simply the Western sort
of appendage, or peninsula, to this massive continent, and you should probably ask yourself
something that you haven’t thought of before – Why is Europe given continental status
while China, India are not?
China is as big as Europe and has a lot more people.
India is probably, it may not be larger than Europe, but it’s bigger than most European
countries combined and it has a lot bigger population.
So why is Europe given continental status and these other, larger countries are not?
Eurocentrism - a distinct cultural difference, at least in the minds of the Europeans.
There’s another aspect here that’s worth mentioning and that’s this notion that world
history is flowing westward, flowing from the holy sites in the Jordan River valley
westward into the eastern Mediterranean, to Greece – the sort of foundation of western
civilization, and then moving further westward into the European countries, and then of course,
from there Christianity will be disseminated across the globe by European explorers.
There is the sense that Eurocentrism depicts non-Westerners as people without history.
The Chinese and the Indians, they lie outside the cosmology, the Christian cosmology of
which the West is a part, these other peoples, and Africans, and you can go on and on and
on with examples.
I’m just using these as common examples.
These people tend to lie outside of this larger cosmology that explains the world.
Europe is a part of this; Africans and Asians are not.
Now to understand Eurocentrism, we really need to look at Edward Said’s concept of
orientalism.
The orient refers to the East.
The occident refers to the West.
This word – the orient – as a term or as a concept has been closely analyzed and
scrutinized since Edward Said’s book, I think it came out in the late 70s, and what
orientalism does, it distinguishes the West from the rest of the world in order to demonstrate
Western superiority.
Islamic society, Indian society, Chinese society – they’re defined in a reference to those
things that they don’t have, things that we take for granted in the West – sort of
a rising middle class; sophisticated urban areas, although this is obviously quite wrongheaded;
the idea that Westerners have certain inalienable political rights and Easterners do not – they
do not enjoy the rule of law, the dignity of the individual, that type of thing.
There’s an absence of revolutions in the East.
We see revolutions in the West as people demand more and more individual freedom.
All these things tend to account for the absence of capitalism.
The West looks at the East and says – well, they’re mired in feudalism; they’re mired
in some primitive economic system.
For Marx – who wrote of course, Das Kapital and more popularly, the Communist Manifesto
– what’s missing in the East is the mode of capitalist production.
From Max Weber – who we talked about the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism
earlier when we talked about the wars of religion – what’s missing in the East is sort of
this Calvinist combination of Protestantism and signs of worldly success.
For Adam Smith – The Wealth of Nations – what’s missing is a proper perspective; Smith wrote
in 1776 that quote – The discovery of America and that of the passage to the East by the
Cape of Good Hope are the two greatest events recorded in the history of mankind.
Look what’s left out – Persia; India; China; the Pacific.
Let me see, yeah, I’m going to give us a little break here then we’ll finish this
when we get back.
In our next lecture we’ll talk about European advantages, so we’ll try to account for
this great divergence.