Is Eurocentrism Unique?

It would be hard for someone who comes to European historiography from another perspective -- Greek, Romanor Islamic -- not to notice an obsession, especially pronounced since the eighteenth century, with Europeansuperiority.

One runs into this obsession amongst all kinds of writers. It is already visible during the eighteenthcentury in Montesquieu, Hume and Kant. During the nineteenth century it was elaborated into historical systemsby Hegel and Marx, erected into racial hierarchies by Blumenbach and Cuvier, and shaped into a pseudo-scienceof race by Agassiz and Morton. In recent times, this obsession may be observed in full bloom in severalleading historians, including White, Brenner, Jones and Landes. When one stumbles into an exception, such asNeedham or Hodgson, it is refreshing.

This obsession takes a variety of forms. It is claimed that Europeans possess qualities that no one elsepossesses, or they possess them in greater abundance. At various times, these claims have been asserted withrespect to rationality, freedom, individuality, inventiveness, daring, curiosity and tolerance; not anexhaustive list. In addition, these qualities have always been translated into superior achievements. TheEuropeans have always excelled in governance, wars, technology, management, sciences, humanities, philosophy,historiography, romance, pornography, shipping, banking, capitalism and industrialization. Again, the list isnot exhaustive.

The claims of superiority take two forms. First, there is the method of assertion; we control theproduction of knowledge, and we can say what we like about ourselves and others. A recent example of this isDavid Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations. There are others who hit upon the strategy of startingthe wagon train of Western civilization in Babylon, and moving it generally westward, through Egypt,Phoenicia, Israel, Greece and Rome, until it arrives at its final destination in Western Europe. A clever wayto overcome a skimpy history, by extend it backwards some five thousand years in order to appropriate thegreatest achievements of the ancient Near East.

These superior qualities and attainments were of course not accidental: they were produced by additional,deeper layers of superiority. Europeans excelled because they were descendants of Japheth, who had been chosenfor divine preferment. Alternatively, they derived their superiority from their location, their favoredcontinent, whose temperate climate, diverse environment, rivers, and abundant coastline, produced greatervigor and economic opportunities. There were many more who put it down simply to race: the whites werebiologically superior.

What is it that drives this European obsession? In his essay, Eurocentrism, Samir Amin argues thatEurocentrism is historically specific to capitalism; it constructs an ideology of racial superiority tosupport capitalist Europe’s project of global domination. In the same way that orthodox economics obscuresclass divisions, Eurocentrism obfuscates imperialism and global inequalities.

Amin’s thesis contains important insights, but it also raises some questions. Why has this ideology beencast primarily in terms of racial-as opposed to cultural-differences? Have stronger groups involved inasymmetric relationships always mobilized ideologies of differences to perpetuate their superiority? And havethey always employed the language of race, blood, or lineage? In order to begin to answer these questions, Iturn to history to examine how different civilizations have articulated autocentrism.

A Variety of Autocentrisms

As I review autocentrisms across space and time, there is no pretense that these assessments are definitiveor always rooted in exhaustive evidence.

Ascertaining the extent of autocentrism in any group can be problematic. A group’s autocentrism maychange over time, and it may vary across different classes even at any point in time. Moreover, too often werely on literary sources as our primary sources for evaluating autocentrism. This has pitfalls. The literarysources may reflect factional or elitist viewpoints. In the event, we need to look out for discriminatorypractices, whether sanctioned by laws or custom, that may be rooted in autocentric ideologies. I take these tobe more reliable indicators of autocentrism.

Ancient Greece. It appears that the Greeks first acquired a consciousness of theirdistinctiveness-separate from the barbarians-in the eight century BCE. However, this was not accompanied by asense of superiority; this emerged much later, during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, in the course oftheir rivalry with the Persians.

Aristotle’s Politics represents Greek autocentrism at its most rigorous. He argues that barbariansare deficient in reasoning and lack the ability to govern-and hence, they are ‘by nature’ fit to beslaves, whereas the Greeks are born to be free and to govern others. Aristotle argued that the Greeks combinethe virtues of Asiatics and Europeans while avoiding their defects. If only "they were united they wouldrule over everyone."

It appears, however, that Aristotle represented a minority position. Further, even Aristotle’s argumentsshould not be equated with modern racism; the barbarians he excluded are not a racial category. Mostremarkably, when Alexander went out and conquered the world, he disregarded the advice of Aristotle, histeacher. He refused to treat the defeated Persians as "natural slaves." Instead his policies suggest thathe wanted to create a joint Macedonian-Persian world empire.

Medieval Islam

There are two organizing principles that medieval Islam employed to classify societies: one based on faith,another on climatic zones.

Islamic society was a community of faith, whose membership depended only on the acceptance of Islam-not oncolor, class, lineage, or ethnicity. In theory, at least during the early period of Islam, this community offaith, Dar al-Islam (the House of Peace), was set apart from Dar al-Harb (the House of War).Islamic rulers were required to wage constant war against Dar al-Harb, though periods of respite werepermitted. The wars could cease only when the Dar al-Harb was incorporated into Dar al-Islam.

Once the non-Muslims entered into Dar al-Islam they were granted rights as dhimmis, orprotected subjects. The dhimmis did not serve in the military, and enjoyed varying degrees of autonomyover their civil affairs. On the other hand, they paid the jizya, a poll tax, but this did not apply toslaves, old or sick men, women, children and monks. Initially, the dhimmi status was accorded only toChristians and Jews, but it was eventually extended to nearly all non-Muslim groups.

In their climatic ethnology, the Islamic societies followed Greek precedents. They divided the northernhemisphere into seven latitudinal zones. It is the central zones-the third and fourth, neither too hot nor toocold-that possessed the greatest potential for supporting civilized societies. These zones contained thecentral Arab lands, North Africa, Iran, the northern Mediterranean, and parts of China. The first and secondzones-because of their extreme heat-and the sixth and seventh zones-because of their extreme cold-did notsupport advanced civilizations. This climatic principle was not applied too rigidly. Although much of Indiaand Arabia fell within the first and second zones, both were peninsulas, which allowed for cooling and broughtthem closer to the temperate climate of the central zones.

It should be noted that the essential thrust of this climatic ethnology-that civilizational achievementswere correlated with climatic zones-had some basis in facts at the time. Nearly every one of the advancedcivilizations and the great empires, both ancient and contemporary, were located in the central zones. On theother hand, the achievements of the peoples inhabiting the cold and hot zones-the Slavs, Turks, Bulgars,Franks, Sudanese and Ethiopians-were not comparable to those of the central zones.

There are other reasons for thinking that ideology may not have been the principal motivation behind thisclimatic construct. First, the cold and hot zones were far removed from the Islamic heartlands, allowing afreer play to the imagination in the description of these remote regions. Second, the denigration of peoplesin the north and south was never complete. Thus, while the Franks are seen as coarse, filthy, sexually lax,and lacking in the sciences, they are also described as courageous, enterprising, disciplined andwell-governed. Third, these regions did not constitute serious threats to the Islamic empire, at least duringthe early phase of Islamic conquests, when these constructs were developed. Finally, the central zones werenot wholly Arab or Islamic; they included, both in the past and present, a variety of non-Islamic societies.The Muslim sources were nearly always very generous in recognizing the achievements of ancient andcontemporary civilizations.

The West, Medieval and Early Modern

In defining their self-image, the West has not only drawn upon differences in religion, culture andclimate, but from an early date their claims of superiority have been framed in biological metaphors, whichgained greater salience over time. We also observe a tendency, again quite early on, to translate theideologies of differences into systems of legal discrimination and worse.

Although Christianity was initially a Mediterranean religion-spanning three continents-it would acquire aEuropean identity starting in the seventh century. This was the result of two parallel processes. While theydestroyed the Roman empire, the Germanic invaders soon embraced Latin Christianity and carried it to thenorthern regions of Europe. As a result, the political unity of the defunct Roman Empire was replaced by adeeper cultural unity based in Christianity, a common language (Latin), and a hierarchy of priests centered inRome. At the same time, as the Islamic empire conquered Christian domains outside Europe, a politicallyfragmented Europe increasingly emphasized its Christian identity. This identity found early expression in thewars against heretics, persecution of Jews, and the demonization of Islam.

The three remaining components of Western autocentrism-a superior geography, race and divinepreferment-were derived from ancient Greece and Israel. Although, the Greeks had two systems of ordering theworld, the division into three continents and the division into seven latitudinal climes, it is perhaps nottoo difficult to understand why medieval Europe opted for the former. The climatic scheme placed northernEurope in the less desirable fifth and sixth zones, whose frigid climate did not support intellectual vigor orhigh civilization. On the other hand, the continental system allowed Europeans to appropriate one of threeequal continents, and endow it with a temperate climate.

The continental system had another advantage in constructing a European autocentrism: it allocated onecontinent to each of the sons of Noah. Denys Hay has shown-in Europe: The Emergence of An Idea-that aracial and continental construction of the Noachian legend began with Josephus, a Jewish scholar of the firstcentury BCE, and it was firmly established by fifth century CE. Christian Europe was identified with Japheth,who had been promised dominion over the children of Shem and Ham, now identified with Asia and Africa. At thesame time, the Africans, identified with the Hamites, would serve both Europe and Asia.

There is some disagreement about whether ethnicity in early medieval Europe was a social or racialconstruct. It is clear that the discourse about ethnicity, even in this early period, was framed in terms ofracial concepts-including blood, stock, gens, natio-but Robert Bartlett, in The Making of Europe,believes that "its medieval reality was almost entirely cultural." Richard Hoffman, in Studies inMedieval and Renaissance History, disagrees. He maintains that the use of such terms by medieval writersshow "a fundamentally biological explanation of how the groups came into being." In any case, evenBartlett speaks of an "intensification of racial feeling in the later Middle Ages" that was accompanied bya "new biological racism."

The later middle ages are also marked by legal discrimination against native populations in Europe’speriphery-Ireland, Wales and Eastern Europe-controlled by the Germans, Franks and Englishmen. Starting in thefourteenth century, the towns and guilds in these areas began to restrict membership by race, residentialareas were segregated by race, languages and cultural practices belonging to native populations were banned,and marriages between conquering and native populations were prohibited. Racism and discrimination intensifiedduring the later Middle Ages.

The class conflict, between lords and serfs, during the Middle Ages is also framed in the language ofracism, lineage in this case. According to Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, the medievalwriters commonly describe the serfs as stupid, malformed, grotesque, dwelling in filth and excrement, andcloser to beast than humans. In addition, this degradation of serfs is attributed to their lineage, theirconnection to the accursed line of Cain, Ham or both. In short, the serfs are savages who are fitted bynature, or their inherited sins, to the hard and humiliating conditions to which they are born.

The idiom of race enters into Europe’s autocentric discourse in a variety of contexts during the earlymodern period. While the persecution, expulsion and forced conversion of Jews and Muslims in Spain may havebeen motivated primarily by Christian bigotry, conversion did not win the Conversos and Moriscos-the convertedJews and Muslims-acceptance into Spanish society. Careers in the church and state were restricted to those whocould prove a Christian lineage before the Inquisition. The Moriscos were eventually expelled in the earlyseventeenth century.

In the Americas, the Spaniards quickly constructed a system of racial discrimination to justify theirexploitation of the indigenous Indians. According to Peggy Liss-in Mexico Under Spain-they lost no timein imposing a "rudimentary apartheid policy" under which a white Spanish elite extracted labor and goodsfrom the dark Indians. In 1550, Juan Sepúlveda, the royal chaplain and philosopher, produced an elaboratedefense of these policies.

Although some medieval writers identified Africans as descendents of Ham, their systematic denigration asan inferior, savage race began only after the mid-fifteenth century when their blackness became a "mastersymbol" of all negative racial characteristics. In Spanish Americas, the ban on enslavement of Indians,introduced in 1542, would not be extended to Africans. Alden Vaughan and Virginian Vaughan-in The WilliamAnd Mary Quarterly-attest to the "sheer accumulation of derogatory references [to blacks] in narratives,plays, poems, and other printed and visual material in the second half of the sixteenth century," inElizabethan England, and these denigrative images "transcended class, gender, age and levels of literacy."

China

The Chinese have always cultivated a sense of superiority, but this was based on cultural rather thanbiological distinctions. The Chinese texts rarely make any references to the physical appearance ofbarbarians. It is striking that a biological racism did not enter into the Chinese discourse even during thethree centuries of "endemic ethnic conflict" that began in the late third century CE.

The centrality of culture-rather than race-in the Chinese worldview had an important corollary. Nearlyalways, this translated into civilizing mission as state policy, not merely a propaganda tool. In theConfucian cannon, the chief instrument of this civilizing mission was always education. This policy producednot only an expansion of the boundaries of the Chinese state but the eventual absorption of the conqueredpeoples into the Chinese cultural sphere.

The one aberrant exception to this occurs towards the end of the nineteenth century when, defeated by theWest, China’s reformers adapted the racist ideology of the West. Sun Yatsen spoke of Chineseness "runningin the blood." And these ideas became a central part of the Guomindang ideology in Taiwan.

Concluding Remarks

The review of autocentrisms across four civilizations has yielded results which are more often at variancewith a priori expectations.

While theory would suggest that stronger groups, in asymmetric relationships, will seek to perpetuate theirdominance with autocentric constructs, this was not always the case. The ancient Greeks adopted an attitude ofsuperiority towards the Asiatics only briefly, during the fourth century BCE, when the Persians threatenedthem. In fact, Hellenic civilization moved east after Alexander’s conquest, and it was there, in partnershipwith the Asiatics, that it continued to flourish for several more centuries. Similarly, the power of Islamicsocieties was rarely founded, in theory or practice, on a racial stratification. The Islamic elites claimedcultural superiority not for particular races, but for peoples living in central climatic zones, whichincluded peoples other than themselves. While the Chinese empires claimed centrality, this too was based oncultural distinctions, not race. It was always their official policy to assimilate the barbarians, not toexclude them.