Back sometime in 1998, the year that I created the Marxism mailing list,
a University of Illinois at Chicago geography professor named Jim Blaut
showed up touting a new book titled “The Colonizer’s Model of the World:
Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History” that I read with
great interest since it dovetailed with my own research on American
Indians at the time. Blaut maintained that Eurocentrist historians had
given Asian, African and New World civilizations short shrift, an
analysis I had read before in Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s “Before European
hegemony: the world system A.D. 1250-1350”.
Abu-Lughod’s book was filled with fascinating details, such as the fact
that all three of Columbus’s ships could have fit on the deck of the
largest ship in a Ming Dynasty armada that made frequent trips to the
coast of East Africa in the 1400s. Since Abu-Lughod had blurbed Blaut’s
book as “absolutely spellbinding”, that was recommendation enough for me.
Soon after Jim made his initial appearance, his attention turned to
Robert Brenner, a UCLA professor I had never heard of and who was
targeted as a Eurocentrist in his new book. While most of the historians
discussed there were non-Marxists, Brenner apparently had the reputation
of being a big-time Marxist. I scratched my head trying to figure that
out. Marxism and Eurocentrism seemed to be diametrically opposed (this
was before I had been exposed to post-colonial scholarship.)
Not long after “The Colonizer’s Model of the World” came out, Jim
followed up with “Eight Eurocentric Historians”, the second in a trilogy
of books that would have concluded with one on writing non-Eurocentric
history. Unfortunately, Jim died of cancer of the pancreas in November
2000 and was not able to complete that book.
One of the eight historians Jim took up was Robert Brenner who he had
described as follows in an Antipode article (available online) that was
later adapted for the new book:
Robert Brenner is one of the most widely known of Euro-Marxist
historians. His influence stems from the fact that he supplied a crucial
piece of doctrine at a crucial time. Just after the end of the Vietnam
War, radical thought was strongly oriented toward the Third World and
its struggles, strongly influenced by Third-World theorists like Cabral,
Fanon, Guevara, James, Mao, and Nkrumah, and thus very much attracted to
theories of social development which tend to displace Europe from its
pivotal position as the center of social causation and social progress,
past and present. Euro-Marxism of course disputed this, and
Euro-Marxists, while strong in their support of present-day liberation
struggles, nonetheless insisted as they always had done that the
struggles and changes taking place in the center of the system, the
European world, are the true determinants of world historical changes;
socialism will rise in the heartlands of advanced European capitalism,
or perhaps everywhere all at once; but socialism will certainly not
arrive first in the backward, laggard, late-maturing Third World.
I would say that of all the people I grew to respect and admire through
the Marxism list, Jim Blaut stood at the top along with Mark Jones, a
self-professed Stalinist who died of cancer three years after Blaut’s
passing. The passion that Jim directed toward his project has sustained
me ever since. I only wish that he had been around to see the
publication of Henry Heller’s “The Birth of Capitalism: a Twenty-First
Century Perspective”, a book put out by the leftwing British Pluto
Press, whose chief editor Roger van Zwanenberg was an old friend of Mark
Jones. It’s a small world, after all.
Heller’s book is an amazing accomplishment. It serves as a very useful
introduction to the “Brenner thesis” debates as well as weighing in with
his own perspectives—including a critique of Jim Blaut’s own analysis
that I find persuasive. I only regret that Jim had not lived to read
this book since his response to Heller would have been something to
behold, I am sure. If there was one thing that Jim loved more than
bird-watching, it was debate.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/10/08/the-birth-of-capitalism/
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