I’d like to welcome you to these lectures on Western civilization.
This is part one.
I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about the title of this course, to look a
little deeper into what Western means, what civilization means, and then why it’s divided
into two parts.
West or Western is a term tossed around by historians and other scholars and sometimes
politicians and we toss it around without giving it much thought, especially with regards
to how our students might interpret it.
What does the West mean?
Does it mean the wild, wild West with cowboys and Indians?
Obviously not.
So let’s explore this term for a few minutes.
Originally you could look at the West as being that European appendage to the Eurasian continent,
China to the East and Europe to the West, but it goes much deeper and much further than
that.
The West also denotes an affiliation with Christianity.
We think of the Western/Roman empire, an empire that had adapted Christianity, and then of
course, the Catholic church becomes an institution of the Western/Roman empire, and once the
empire dissolves in the 5th-6th centuries as it moves slowly into what we today call
feudalism.
We describe that portion of the old Western/Roman Empire, and now a good deal of the European
land mass, as the West.
So you can think of the West as being geographically centered in Europe.
You can think of the West as having at its foundation, Christianity.
You can also think of the West – as we move further and further in time as we get closer
to the modern age – you can think of the West as having an affiliation with the market
economy or with capitalism.
Let’s face it – quite often Japan and South Korea are thought of – and even Taiwan
– are thought of as being part of the West.
Not obviously because of Christianity, which they do not practice for the most part, but
because they are part of the world capitalist system led by the United States.
So the West has just a number of meanings, and we at least should have some understanding
of these meanings before we start the course.
So geographically the West, if you try to pin it to Europe or restrict it to Europe,
that’s a very artificial limitation.
Europe, obviously, from the time of Columbus on, spread across the world.
The imperial project for the Europeans lasted centuries and little Europes sprang up in
the Western hemisphere and both North and South America and Australia, South Africa,
and other places.
So it’s an artificial limitation to say the West is simply Europe because the Europeans
expanded their civilization and their culture and religion dramatically around the rest
of the world.
So we’re not going to confine ourselves to Europe.
In other words, when we talk about Columbus we’re going to start with the Mongol empire.
When we talk about World War II, we obviously have to go far outside the boundaries of Europe.
When we talk about imperialism, we’re going to talk about New France and North America.
So when you think of the West, think of the market economy, think of Christianity, think
of those places that the Europeans went to and settled and created little Europes around
the world.
Now how about civilization?
This is a word that we toss around very casually as well without really thinking about what
it means.
Civilization is – we think of cities when we think of civilization, you think of urbanization,
large groups of people living in a relatively small area.
This is a dramatic break from how humans had traditionally lived.
In the Paleolithic Era, humans were confined to very small bands of people, 30; 40; 50
people, moving about in search of food and water, in search of shelter.
This will change of course, when we enter the Neolithic or the New Stone Age, the Neolithic
Era; paleo meaning old, Stone Age, Paleolithic.
So this dramatic shift is going to give rise to cities and it’s going to give rise to
specialization among people.
These earliest cities, we have discovered in Mesopotamia, in what today we would call
Iraq and Kuwait, and the Tigress and Euphrates River valleys are Mesopotamia, the land between
the rivers.
Cities are going to emerge here.
After about ten thousand – before the Common Era – you’re going to find that people
will discover that they can grow plants, that they can domesticate grains and that they
can domesticate wild animals – whether they’re chickens or cattle or horses or pigs.
Once this process begins, again, in Mesopotamia and Southern Turkey – the Nile River valley
– once this process begins, people will begin to settle down and the human population
numbers will boom.
This of course, will necessitate a certain infrastructure where there are city walls
to protect the population and it will promote specialization.
Let’s face it, if we have domesticated plants and animals and we have a way of storing this
food, then that frees a lot of people up to do something else besides simply look for
food.
So specialization is going to arise here.
People working in leather; people working in metal; you have engineers determining how
to control the waterways; you have people wrangling – that is bringing in wild animals
and training them and domesticating them.
You have the rise of the rise of the priesthood and you have the rise of politicians.
You need military forces to protect these settlements.
So you can see that there’s just a wide variety of specializations emerging here.
So civilization points to an urban, city life with specialization and with stored food.
We’re going to start the course essentially in Mesopotamia with the ancient city states
of Sumer and then we’ll expand from there, and again, you can already see the confusion.
Modern Mesopotamia is located in what we today call the Middle East and yet historians look
at it as the foundation of the West, or Western civilization.
So these titles are very slippery and I want you to be aware of just how useful on the
one hand and on the other hand vague enough to allow us to do pretty much what we want.
Now the last part of this introduction, we call this part one of Western civilization.
It’s divided – as many history surveys are – into two parts, and generally speaking
these divisions come with Columbus, around the 15th century.
The key question here is why.
Well Columbus is generally viewed as the decisive turning point in world history, not just Western
civilization but world history as well.
Columbus initiates what we call the Columbian Exchange, which we’ll talk about in this
course.
The Columbian Exchange is going to launch us into the pre-modern and then modern eras.
It begins what today we call globalization.
The world is going to be more and more connected.
Goods and services are going to be able to move across the oceans.
Markets are going to be created.
The Columbian Exchange is going to create a vast economic circuit in the Atlantic.
The Atlantic Basin is now going to be tied together – South America, North America,
Africa, and Europe all tied in a vast circuit of commerce.
This obviously is going to dramatically impact peoples’ lives, not only in the West, but
in the Far East as well.
Now Columbus is the breaking point generally when we talk about both Western civilization
and quite often if we talk about world history, Columbus is that decisive breaking point because
of the remarkable series of changes that will come after Columbus brings the Old World and
the New World together.
So Western civilization part one, we – like I said – we will not be limited to Europe.
We’ll go beyond Columbus.
We’ll talk about some of the major impacts of the Columbian Exchange, which will take
us into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, specifically Atlantic slavery and imperialism.
So we can do, we can do what we want in this course as long as we keep in mind that the
main focus of the course lies on Western/European/Christian civilization that will later expand dramatically
throughout the world and create European civilizations in places where you would least expect to
find them, and also remember the last thing, about the market economy.
Today, when we think of the West, we think of the market economy.
This, of course, goes back to divisions that are much more recent – from the Cold War
with capitalist NATO, Communist Warsaw Pact.
So slippery titles, slippery designation, but useful nevertheless.
So that’s our introductory lecture on how the course is conceptualized, and thanks for
your attention.