Lou:
I just read the archive of pen-l from Sept 15 through today. I didn't find
any arguments that really need to be answered . . . I appreciate your
throwing in gobs of my book. The folks should be advised to look at
Gunder's ReORIENT, Jack Goody's THE EAST IN THE WEST, There's a huge new
literature on China's progressiveness, especially stuff by Ken Pomeranz,
Bin Wong, Dennis Flynn, and Arturo Giraldez -- the arguments about Europe's
superriority to China in politcal, cultural, technical etc. matters BOTH
for the Middle Ages and modern times down to about 1800 -- have simply been
refuted with facts. A non-issue.
Several of the folks mentioned my argument about Europe's location
vis-a-vis America, but they got it all muddled up. I didn't say its due to
the Atlantic being narrower than the Pacific. (Its on pp. 180-183 of The
Colonizer's Model.) I've written a short informal paper on these matters
that I'm going to read next month at a conference on the rise of europe
that might be relevant. I've put it below this message. If you want to
repost it to pen-l, be my guest. . .
Abrazos
Jim
A NULL HYPOTHESIS
J. M. Blaut
Europe did not rise until modern times. To be precise,
Europe in 1500 AD was not more developed than several other
civilizations; was not more progressive than these other
civilizations; and had no inner developmental potential --
mental, social, or environmental -- that these other
civilizations lacked. I have advanced and defended this (so
to speak) null hypothesis in several publications, and I
will sum up the argument here, very briefly, as a
discussion piece for our conference.*
If one denies that Europe had actual or potential
advantages over other civilizations before 1500, one
must of course produce an alternative theory for the rise
of Europe after 1500. My general theory includes three
propositions:
(1) In 1500, a number of mercantile or protocapitalist
centers, mostly maritime-oriented, in all three
Eastern Hemisphere continents, had rough parity in all
of the traits that we consider to have been crucial in
the process of economic and technological development.
(2) The reason why (part of) Europe began to rise
after 1492 (or 1500) was the immense wealth obtained from
America, first in the form of precious metals, later
in the form of agricultural commodities produced by
coerced labor of slaves and peasants. The wealth that
was extracted from America was a "windfall" (as Walter
Prescott Webb described it in _The Great Frontier_)
that was wholly unprecedented in history: the
acquisition by Europeans of most of the world's gold
and silver resources and of a territory six times the
size of Europe itself.
(3) The wealth from colonialism came to Europe, and
not to other protocapitalist regions, for two reasons,
neither of which implies any superiority or priority
of Europe over the other regions. First: America was
vastly more accessible to Western Europe than to all
non-European centers. And second: the regions within
America that were potentially the most valuable to
Europeans were quickly and easily conquered (because
of America's historically recent settlement by humans
and its isolation from Old World populations), and
Europeans therefore quickly acquired the power needed
to guarantee their monopoly over the hemisphere's
wealth.
My argument that the rise of Europe resulted from
colonialism, not from internal forces or factors unique to
pre-modern Europe, is made in two quite different ways. One
of these is a critique of each of the reasons that
historians commonly put forward at present to assert and
explain Europe's superiority or priority over other
civilizations in ancient and medieval times. (A convenient
checklist of these reasons is provided in Appendix I.) The
other is a rethinking of the historical geography of the
world between 1492 and, roughly, 1700. This latter consists
of, first, a survey of the characteristics of late-medieval
civilizations across the Eastern Hemisphere, showing (as I
maintain) that levels and rates of development were
relatively even among these civilizations; second, a
demonstration that factors of accessibility made it very
unlikely that non-Europeans would reach and exploit the New
World before the Europeans did so; and third, a re-telling
of the process by which Europe rose during the 16th and
17th centuries, incorporating colonial accumulation as the
basic external cause of this process. In the following
paragraphs I will summarize the three arguments. Since this
is a short paper, I can only lay out the arguments as a set
of bare propositions. The reader may consult my other
writings for the reasoning, evidence, and citations
required to support these propositions./1 (No citations will
be given here.)
We need to segregate out from the overall process of
cultural evolution those facets of culture (mental, social,
and ecological) that are closely related to economic and
technological development. Many arguments for the
superiority or priority of Europe in ancient and medieval
times are grounded in the belief that these facets of
culture were "blocked" in non-European regions by other
facets, such as religion, values, and some aspects of
social structure. I (and many others) reject this view,
along with the view that Europeans were peculiarly
"rational." Pre-1500 Europe certainly was unique in many
ways --- but not in ways that would indicate an actual or
potential rise above other civilizations with other
religions, other value systems, and the like.
I maintain that, in 1492, European, Asian, and African
civilizations were broadly comparable in terms of the
qualities of the natural environment and the facets of
culture that are crucial for development. Tropical regions
were not inferior in environmental qualities to midlatitude
regions, nor were those parts of arid regions in which
productive irrigated agriculture was practiced inferior to
regions with rainfall sufficient for cropping./2 Over vast
landscapes in all three continents, the prevailing
ecological-economic-technological mode of production was family farming
(peasant agriculture) within a landlord-
peasant class society. European variants of this system
were neither unique nor more advanced than other variants:
European forms of serfdom and other types of coerced
peasantry, forms of estates or manors, landownership
principles, commercialization, and technology, had counter-
parts in various other regions of landlord-peasant society,
and the European forms did not possess any trait or quality
that would suggest superiority or priority over the other
societies and regions./3 Rural people in Europe had social
institutions and attitudes, relating to demographic
behavior, family, and the like, that were not uniquely
progressive.
Forms of urbanization, in terms of spatial structure,
scale, economy, technology, and society, were relatively
comparable in developed regions of Europe, Africa, and Asia
in 1492. This was true most of all in port cities, large
and small, which tended to be dominated by something like
protocapitalism in terms of the class structure, the
economy, and more. In all continents, most such places
(cities and hinterlands), which I call mercantile-maritime
centers, were undergoing some development during the later
Middle Ages. Innovations in technology, business practices,
and the like, tended to diffuse rapidly in a criss-cross
pattern among these mercantile-maritime centers, large and
small. Many of them, in the later medieval centuries, were
expanding their radii of trade and at the same time
engaging in various sorts of exploration. European
mercantile-maritime centers were not uniquely advanced in
any of the traits underlying long-distance oceanic trade
and explorations: traits of mentality, technology, economy,
and the rest.
Mercantile-maritime centers dotted the coasts of
Western and Southern Europe, North and East Africa, and
Southwest, South, Southeast, and East Asia. If non-European
centers had, themselves, obtained the great windfall in the
the Americas, they would (probably) have initiated a
process roughly like the one undertaken by Europeans: many
of them had the entire set of social, economic,
technological, and indeed psychological qualities that
would have allowed them to do so, and the urge for overseas
profit was probably equally strong among merchants and
other elites in all of these regions, large and small. Nor
were the Europeans unusually aggressive, acquisitive,
avaricious, piratical, etc.
The European centers had one advantage only: location
or, broadly, accessibility. They were vastly closer to
America and, more concretely, to the parts of America where
gold and silver were widely used. For instance, the distance from China to
Acapulco was about three times the
distance from the Canary Islands to the West Indies
(Columbus's route), and the Atlantic wind circulation was
much more favorable for mariners than was the Pacific
circulation. This wind system was already known from travel
between Iberia and the Azores and Canaries: one sailed
westward in the low-latitude Trade Winds and, returning,
turned into the midlatitude Westerlies which carried one
back toward Europe. (Hence the idea of reaching Japan by
sailing westward seemed eminently reasonable.) In a word:
given the common technology, common motivation, and the
rest in the protocapitalist network in the 15th century, it
is most unlikely that communities on the coasts of the
Indian Ocean or the Pacific would have reached the Western
Hemisphere at the time the Europeans did so.
The Conquest itself was largely a result of the
devastating epidemics of Old World diseases that decimated
the Native American populations. Therefore Europeans very
quickly got hold of immense quantities of gold and silver.
(From 1500 to 1800 85% of the world's silver and 70% of its
gold came from America.) Europeans acquired abundant
fertile land, as a result mainly of depopulation, and by
the end of the 16th century Europeans had already begun to
reap great profits from plantations. (In 1600 the value of
Brazilian sugar was double the value of all of England's
exports to all of the world.) The Europeans, one might say,
got rich quick.
The third of my general propositions argues that
Europe's enrichment from colonial activities, initially in
the Americas, provides an adequate explanation for the
early rise of Europe relative to other Old World
civilizations and for the "transition" to preindustrial
capitalism. The rise of Europe from 1500 to 1800 was mainly
fueled by a process external to Europe itself: by
colonialism. Great progress occurred in Europe during the
latter part of this period, and the immediate causes are
mostly to be found within Europe itself. But the underlying
cause was colonialism: the constant flow of wealth that was
yielded by formal and informal colonialism, the life-
opportunities created by colonialism, the new ways of
thinking and new inventions that were stimulated by
colonialism, along with the receipt by diffusion of ideas
and techniques from other continents; all of this, in my
view, is the basic underlying dynamic of the rise of Europe
and the political rise of preindustrial capitalism in
Europe. I believe also that the later industrial revolution
can be explained as primarily an effect of the constantly
inflowing profits from overseas and secondarily the
evolving internal changes within Europe itself, but I have
not published on this matter as yet.
Most present-day historians, I am certain, are opposed
to Eurocentrism. Many are engaged in the task of disproving
the old Eurocentric arguments (see Appendix I) about the
superiority of pre-modern Europe. But most historians seem
to believe that, at the end of the day, when all the
fallacies have been rooted out and discarded, *something*
will be left: some one incontestable argument that proves
the superiority or priority of pre-modern Europe over non-
Europe, or some essential historical force for change
toward modernity that was present in Europe and nowhere
else, or was more effective in Europe than elsewhere. I
suggest that *nothing* will be left: that is my null
hypothesis.
NOTES
1/J. M. Blaut, "Where Was Capitalism Born?" Antipode: A
Radical Journal of Geography 8,2(1976):1-11; ibid.,
"Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique," Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 77(1987):30-47; J.
Blaut, principal author, and A. G. Frank, S. Amin, R.
Dodgshon, R. Palan, and P. Taylor, Fourteen Ninety-Two: The
Debate About Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History,
Trenton: Africa World Press, 1992; J. Blaut, The
Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism
and Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Press, 1993;
ibid., "Environmentalism and Eurocentrism," forthcoming
1999 in The Geographical Review; ibid., The Colonizer's
Model of the World, Volume 2, New York: Guilford Press,
forthcoming late 1999 or 2000.
2/For the arguments, see in The Colonizer's Model of
the World, the sections entitled "Nasty Tropical Africa,"
"Arid, Despotic Asia," and "Temperate Europe." Also see
"Environmentalism and Eurocentrism."
3/In The Colonizer's Model of the World see pp. 108-119
("Technology") and 152-165 ("Medieval Landscapes"). Also
see "Where Was Capitalism born?"
APPENDIX I.
Twenty-Eight Arguments for the Superiority of
Europeans in History (A Checklist)
1. The climate of Europe, or northwest Europe, is
uniquely favorable for agriculture. Or: Europe, along with
China, possesses a climate that is more favorable for
agriculture than are the climates of all other regions,
especially the humid tropics.
2. The climate of Europe is better for human comfort and productivity
than are the climates of all other
regions.
3. The soils of Europe are uniquely fertile.
4. Europe suffers less from natural disasters than do
all the other regions.
5. The landforms of Europe differentiate the continent
into separate ecological cores and this explains in large
part the fact that Europe has many moderate-sized states
instead of an empire.
6. The indented coastline of Europe partly explains
the linguistic, ethnic, and political differentiation of
Europe.
7. The forest vegetation of Europe historically
contributed to the development of individualistic people
and small families, hence led Europe toward private
property and capitalism and helped uniquely to avoid
overpopulation and Malthusian disasters.
8. Europe was, historically, less disease-ridden than
all other places.
9. Europeans, historically, were better nourished than
other people.
10. Europeans were uniquely inventive.
11. Europeans were uniquely rational in the practice
of sexual self-restraint and so avoided overpopulation and
Malthusian disasters.
12. Europeans were uniquely innovative and
progressive.
13. Europeans were uniquely capable of creative and
scientific thought.
14. Europeans held uniquely democratic, ethical
values.
15. The development of classes and/or class struggle
was most fully developed in Europe.
16. The Christian religion, as doctrine, led to unique
European development.
17. The Christian church, as institution, led to
unique European development.
18. The European family was uniquely suited to
development. (Also see nos. 8, 11, 25.)
19. Europeans uniquely, in ancient and/or medieval
times, developed the concept and institution of private
property.
20. Europeans uniquely, in ancient and/or medieval
times, developed the institution of the market.
21. Urbanization, in Europe, was more favorable for
development than was the case elsewhere; European cities
were more progressive and more free than cities elsewhere.
22. The state, in Europe, developed toward modern
politics more rapidly and effectively than elsewhere. (Also
see nos. 23, 24.)
23. The empire as a political form hobbled development
in non-European regions.
24. Oriental despotism
hobbled social and technological development in non-
European regions. (Also see nos. 23, 26.)
25. Europe was uniquely capable of avoiding Malthusian
disasters for many reasons. (Also see nos. 11, 18.)
26. The practice of, and dependence on, irrigation
slowed or stopped development in hydraulic or irrigating
societies. (Also see no. 24.)
27. The development of feudalism in Europe uniquely
favored the rise of democracy and private property. (Also
see nos. 14, 19.)
28. Europeans were uniquely venturesome, uniquely
given to exploration/expansion.
Note: All but three of these arguments (nos. 4, 6, and 16)
are advanced by David Landes in his book The Wealth and
Poverty of Nations (New York: Norton, 1998).
*Prrepared for reading at CONFERENCE ON THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN WORLD:
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES FROM THE EDGE OF THE MILLENIUM, University of
California at Davis October 15-17, 1999.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
