After Tamerlane (3 page)

For much of the twentieth century, this pessimistic view of the motives and meaning of globalization (though the term was not used),
sometimes combined with remarkable faith in its revolutionary outcome, was more than a match for the claims of the optimists who saw the result of a fully global economy as being ‘modernization' (i.e. the replication of the West's social structure). Both attitudes had in common the unquestioned assumption that Europe (or the West) was the only real source of historical change. Both sides made use of the astonishing insights (and even more astonishing industry) of the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). Weber was fascinated by the peculiar trajectory that Europe had followed compared with India or China. While Marx had laid stress on the social revolution that replaced Europe's feudal society with bourgeois-ruled capitalism, Weber searched for the pattern of institutions and beliefs that had made Europe ‘different'. Capitalism had developed in other parts of Eurasia, but Europe alone had made the transition to modern industrial capitalism, and the world pre-eminence that this had brought with it. At the heart of Weber's explanation was the idea that modern capitalism required above all an activist, rationalizing mentality. Chinese Confucianism (rational but inactive), Islam (active but irrational) and Hinduism (inactive and irrational) all discouraged the vital combination. ‘No path led from the magical religiosity of the non-intellectual classes of Asia to a rational, methodical control of life.'
⁷
But European Protestantism had created (accidentally) the crucial psychology (and the institutional trappings) that allowed the breakthrough.

Weber's insistence that Europe's peculiarity must be explained in terms of a distinct socio-cultural complex inspired an enormous literature once his work became widely known (and translated) in the 1920s and after. It had a special appeal to those who rejected the crude Marxian argument that Europe's wealth and success had been gained by the plunder and pillage of the rest of the world. It encouraged the search for the critical factor(s) that had tipped the balance in Europe towards productive investment and continuous technical change. It seemed to confirm the belief (much older than Weber) that European society was uniquely dynamic, and that other great cultures, however magnificent, lacked the vital ingredients for material progress. Indeed, on this central issue, there was no real difference between the Weberian view and that taken for granted by the champions
of the Marxian ‘world system'. For good or ill, from bad motives or none, Europe had energized a stationary world.

It is easy to see why in more recent years this Europe-centred account of modern world history has come under fire. The rapid dissolution of Europe's colonial empires after 1945 created a mass of new nations. Each needed a history that placed its own progress at the heart of the story. Each had its own heroes whose national struggle had been waged in the face of Europe's cultural arrogance. New ‘nationalist' histories portrayed European rule (or influence) as unjust and repressive. Far from bringing progress to stationary parts of the world, European interference had blocked the social and cultural advances that were already in train. In the 1970s and '80s, ‘subaltern' history dug into the fabric of many ex-colonial societies. It revealed complex peasant communities, fiercely resistant to control by outsiders, whose lives were disrupted by the clumsy if not brutal attempt to impose colonial ‘order'.
⁸
‘Decolonized history' encouraged many different social, ethnic, religious or cultural groups to emerge from the shadows. The old colonial narratives in which Europeans stood out against the dark local backcloth now seemed like cartoons: crude and incomplete sketches of a crowded reality. The ambitions and projects of colonized peoples – teachers, writers, merchants, peasants, migrants and minorities – were described and documented. The ‘stationary worlds' in which Europeans had posed as the sole ‘dynamic' force were now to be seen as teeming with life. And, far from exerting a confident mastery, Europeans (in this new perspective) were often outwitted, exploited or simply ignored by locals busy with their own affairs.

This was not the first time that historians had argued that even colonized peoples had an autonomous history worthy of serious study. Before the Second World War, the young Dutch historian J. C. van Leur (1908–42) had denounced the writing of Indonesian history through European eyes – ‘from the deck of the ship, the ramparts of the fortress, the high gallery of the trading house', as if nothing could happen without a European being present, or at his instigation.
⁹
Van Leur was killed in the war, and his ideas reached a wider international audience only in the late 1950s. But his work added a key new dimension to the historical attack on a Europe-centred world history.
It dismissed the idea that the arrival of Europeans by sea in the sixteenth century had transformed Asia's trading economy. Instead, Europeans were latecomers in a huge maritime commerce, pioneered by Asians, linking China, Japan, South East Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and East Africa. Far from awaiting the Promethean touch of merchants from Europe, a ‘global' economy already existed.
¹⁰
If global economic convergence was a dominant theme in modern world history, the part played by Asians (and other non-Europeans) could not be ignored. Indeed, ‘globalization' – in the wider sense of the term – could no longer be seen as just a European project.

In the last twenty years, van Leur's original insight has been widened much further. The scale of global mobility, the growth of diasporas, the porous nature of frontiers, the limited power of most states, and the new distribution of industrial power (especially in Asia) have radically altered our sense of the past and what we want to know from it. For the moment at least, writing the history of nations and states seems much less important than tracing the origins of our world of movement, with its frenetic exchange of goods and ideas, its hybrid cultures and its fluid identities. A new global history has grown up in response. Its units of study are regions or oceans, long-distance trades, networks of merchants, the tracks of wandering scholars, the traffic of cults and beliefs between cultures and continents. Viewed from this level, the radical difference between Europe and Asia, the central assumption of older world histories, looks much less impressive. Instead, a chain of ‘connectedness', both commercial and cultural, linked much of early modern Eurasia just at the time when (in older accounts) Europe's divergence from Asia was becoming decisive. Notions of universal empire, a new ‘culture of travel', and millenarian rumours and fantasies circulated around the huge land mass between Spain and the Bay of Bengal.
¹¹
Geographical location in Asia or Europe begins to look much less important for social and cultural change than a position astride Eurasia's trunk lines of trade, or in the arid belt where long-distance travellers did not have to toil through forest, jungle or marsh.
¹²

A similar change of emphasis can be seen among historians writing the new ‘global history of material progress'. As van Leur had suggested, the facile conclusion that Europeans had galvanized a somnolent
Asia after Vasco da Gama's arrival in India in 1498 was a travesty of the facts. A dense mercantile network already linked ports and producers between the coast of East Africa and the South China Sea. Asian merchants were not passive victims of a European takeover. Whatever their shortcomings, Asian governments were more than the predatory despots of European mythology who crushed trade and agriculture by penal taxation and arbitrary seizure. In different parts of Asia, there were market economies where the division of labour, specialized trades and urban development (the hallmarks of growth as Adam Smith had described it) looked very similar to those found in Europe. In China, especially, the scale of commercial exchange, the sophistication of credit, the use of technology, and the volume of production (in textiles particularly) revealed a pre-industrial economy at least as dynamic as contemporary Europe's. Indeed, before 1800 what really stood out was not the sharp economic contrast between Europe and Asia, but, on the contrary, a Eurasian world of ‘surprising resemblances' in which a number of regions, European and Asian, were at least theoretically capable of the great leap forward into the industrial age.
¹³

Meanwhile, Europe's assumed centrality in accounts of world history had come under attack from a quite different quarter. From the late 1970s, an intellectual movement inspired by the Palestinian-American Edward Said denounced the classics of European writing on the history, ethnography and culture of Asia (and by extension elsewhere) as ‘orientalist' fantasy. According to Said, European description was fatally flawed by the crude attribution of stereotyped qualities, almost always demeaning, and the persistent attempt to portray Asian societies as the slothful, corrupt or degenerate antitheses of an energetic, masterful and progressive Europe.
¹⁴
A huge literary industry sprang up to pick over the language and content of the various genres that transmitted the image of the non-Western world to an audience in Europe. The implication was clear. If the Europeans' reportage (whether fact or fiction) was intended to serve the ulterior aim of extending Europe's hegemony, or even if it did so unconsciously, it had no historical value except as a reflection of Europeans' own fears and obsessions. The comparative study of Europe and non-Europe was hopelessly compromised. It could even be argued
(and some writers did so) that history itself was an alien enterprise that forced knowledge of the past into the concepts and categories invented in (and for) Europe.

Few intelligent people accepted the logical conclusion of this post-modern extremism – that nothing could be known and that all inquiry was hopeless. But the broader point held good: that European depictions of other parts of the world needed very careful decoding. The Saidian critique was part of a great sea change, a conscious attempt to ‘decentre' Europe or even to ‘provincialize' it. European accounts of other cultures and peoples should no longer be treated as the ‘authorized version', however full or persuasive. Europe should no longer be seen as the pivot of change, or as the agent acting on the passive civilizations of the non-Western world. Above all, perhaps, the European path to the modern world should no longer be treated as natural or ‘normal', the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world should always be measured. Europeans had forged their own kind of modernity, but there were other modernities – indeed, many modernities.
¹⁵

‘Decolonized history' has cut Europe down to size. It has made it much harder to assume unthinkingly that European societies were inherently progressive, or that they were necessarily more efficient than other peoples in Eurasia – or on other continents. European definitions of ‘progress', like European observations on the rest of the world, have lost their once unchallenged authority. Indeed, some modern writers reject the validity of any comparison between different cultures (because no one can be an insider in more than one culture), in the curious belief that a much-jumbled world is really composed of distinct and original cultures. Post-colonial history takes a generally sceptical view of the European impact and an even more sceptical view of the ‘improvements' once claimed for colonial rule. It treats ‘colonial' history as myopic and biased, perhaps even delusory, and its claims as so much propaganda aimed at opinion at home. Indeed,
closer inspection has suggested an ironic reversal of the colonialist case. Far from dragging backward peoples towards European-style modernity, colonial rule was more likely to impose a form of ‘antimodernity'. Caste in India symbolized Indian backwardness. Yet British rulers, for their own convenience, struck a bargain with Brahmins to harden caste status into an administrative system (formalized in the census).
¹⁶
In colonial Africa a parallel process took place as clans and followings were reinvented as ‘tribes', with chiefly rulers as their ancestral leaders.
¹⁷
Here, as in India, a political gambit was carefully packaged as an act of respect to local tradition. In the colonial version of history, caste and tribe were inscribed as immemorial features of the Indian and African past. In imperial propaganda, they became the genetic flaws that made self-rule for Indians and Africans impossible. But in ‘decolonized history' the expansion of Europe appears as a vast conspiracy to reorder the non-Western world along pseudo-traditional lines, the better to hold it in check and exploit its resources – indefinitely.

On these and other grounds, Europe's place in world history now looks rather different from that in conventional accounts written a few decades ago. But histories that aim to ‘provincialize' Europe still leave a lot to explain. The European states were the main force that created the ‘globalized' world of the late nineteenth century. They were the chief authors of the two great transformations that were locked together in the ‘modern world' of the 1870s to the 1940s. The first was the making of a world economy not just of long-distance trade in high-value luxuries but of the global exchange of manufactures, raw materials and foodstuffs, in huge volumes and values, with the accompanying flows of people and money. This was an economic revolution that was chiefly managed (not always well) from Europe or by Europeans, and fashioned to suit their particular interests. The second transformation was closely connected. This was the extension of European rule, overt and covert, across huge swathes of the non-European world – a process under way before 1800, but accelerating sharply in the nineteenth century. It was strikingly visible in the colonial partitions of Africa, South East Asia, the South Pacific and (later) the Middle East; in the great ventures of empire-building in North Asia (by Russia) and South Asia (by Britain); in the subjection of
much of maritime China to foreign controls; and in the European occupation (by demographic imperialism) of the Americas, Australasia and parts of South Central Africa. In Africa, the Middle East, much of South East Asia, the Pacific, Australasia and even the Americas, it created the territorial units that provide the state structure of the contemporary world.