[PEN-L:11600] Clarification

["James M. Blaut" <70671.2032@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've tried my best to make my position clear but a number of people on this
list either didn't read ANYTHING that I posted or they're so outraged at my
attack on their cherished European cultural heritage and mother and apple
pie that they don't bother to understand the message and instead try to
take pot shots at the messenger (e.g., Wojtek: Jim Blaut's a cultist; he's
not an empirical scientist like me, etc., etc.).

Here, now, in simple, easy to understand language, is my basic argument.

1. Economic and technological development was going on during the Middle
Ages in a number of civilizations (examples: Europe and China). Europe was
neither ahead of the other civilizations nor was it uniquely pregnant with
qualities that would lead Europe, later, to "rise" above these other
civilizations.

2. But Europe did "rise," in economic and technological terms, relative to
these other civilizations, later -- AFTER 1500. Capitalism took power in
part of Europe (the bourgeois revolutions) and in no other large polity, in
the 17th century. An industrial revolution began in Europe after the
mid-18th century and nowhere else. How do you explain this? I, and several
others (both Marxists and non-Marxists), explain it in terms of the wealth
which Europeans garnered from colonialism in the 16th-18th centuries. This
was the fact [sic] that DISTINGUISHED European development after  1500 from
development in other civilizations (example: China).

So we have two theoretical positions. (1) a theory [sic] that Europe had no
priority or superiority in matters relating to technological and economic
development prior to 1500; (2) a theory that tries to explain how and why
Europe DID gain priority and economic/technmological superiority -- after
1500.

All this bullshit -- yes, I'm a bit upset , and how could I not be? --
about me neglecting "internal" factors, not having a "binary" position,
etc., etc., is just an elegantly academic way of saying: Europe WAS
superior to or ahead of those other civilization in 1500 and the rise of
Europe is explainable ONLY by adding its immanent medieval supeiority (the
"internal facctors") to the effects of post-1500 events in the wider world
(the "external" factors").

Right or wrong, these are two perfectly proper scientific theories. For
complex historical events there is no simple disconfirmation, but data
[sic] can be gathered that either tend to support them or tend not to
support them, and there is always the problem of determnining whether any
given piece of empirical [sic] data that appears to oppose these theories
is validated by Eurocentric bias and not evidence.

Fifty years ago European scholars, including Marxists, were comfortable
with a belief in Europe's premodern precocity that nobody had ever really
questioned, and they knew almost nothing about the history of the
non-Western world. Today we have tons of evidcence about non-Western
history. Concerning China alone you have the early work of Duyvendak, then
Needham, then a host of sinologists, among them Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Bob
Marks, Wang Gung Wu, and Dennis Flynn (mentioning only some  of the
anglophone workers), and many, many Chinese and Japanese scholars (in the
old days who would bother to learn to read  Chinese  and find out what
Chinese scholars were saying?). My point here is that the weight of
evidence has shifted. Earlier you could complacently say, Europeans did or
had X and nobody else did or had X. Now you find, or at least have to
consider the possibility, that for every X in Europe there is one or more
examples of its occurrence in non-Europe at the relevant time.

If anyone wants to disagree with either or both of the above theories, or
some key segment of them, it has to be done at the level of historical
evidence. Don't bullshit us with rhetoric about methodologies and factor
analyses (when the supposed factors didn't exist: garbage in, garbage out)
and empiricism and postmnodernism, etc.

One final point. Nobody on this list is prejudiced, much less racist.
But some of the contributors to this thread seem not to realize that many
of the propositions they consider to be true were really validated by
racism or prejudice; today, mostly, it is what I sometimes call cultural
racism: the belief that some superior cultural (not genetic) trait, usually
a mental quality, has been present in Europeans for millennia. I made this
argument in The Colonizer's Mopdel of the World, Vol. 1, and will continue
it in vol. 2, forthcoming.

So there.

Jim Blaut